Page 296 - Culture Society and the Media

286 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
relationship seems now often to have been reversed as the signifier is held to pre-
exist and have priority over the signified. Sign orders world.
An apparently similar perception backgrounds the contention that the media
should be viewed as ‘definers of social reality’. True, the phrase retains a certain
duality, a crucial ambiguity of formulation—first there is reality, the ‘real real’,
and then there are the media, its ‘definers’—which as we shall see, remains the
source of important theoretical difficulties. Given this qualification, the
contention is one that allow the media and the terms of signification they propose
something other than a secondary, reflective role in social life. For to suggest
that the media should be viewed as ‘definers of social reality’ is to suggest that what
‘events’ are ‘reported’ by the media and the way in which they are signified have
a bearing on the ways in which we perceive the world and thus, if action is at all
related to thought, on the ways in which we act within it. It is to affirm that the
media are agencies of mediation, that in reporting events they also propose
certain frameworks for the interpretation of those events, moulding or structuring
our consciousness in ways that are socially and politically consequential. Viewed
in these terms, the media are not apart from social reality, passively reflecting
and giving back to the world its self-image; they are a part of social reality,
contributing to its contours and to the logic and direction of its development via
the socially articulated way in which they shape our perceptions.
My aim in this essay is to illustrate the sorts of claims that have been made
within this tradition of media theory by commenting on three different levels of
media practice at which the reality-defining role of the media has been
approached and conceptualized. The first concerns the propaganda function of
the press. It is a matter of public knowledge that each newspaper treads a certain
party line and that, in seeking to recruit public support for the political
philosophy it favours, seeks to ‘sell’ a particular political definition of the events
it reports. This is reflected in its editorial columns, use of language and
photographs, headline layouts and so on. I will thus be concerned, at this level, with
media practices that deliberately report events in a manner which serves to
promote particular political views in the pursuit of particular political objectives,
be these implicit or explicit.
Next, I shall consider the role played by the way in which the popular press
signify the activities and behaviour of various groups of ‘outsiders’; that is,
groups whose behaviour is viewed as transgressing or threatening the
cohesiveness of dominant social norms—drug-users, criminals, soccer
hooligans, ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ and so on. My concern here will be with the part
that this area of media practice has played in the development of a law and order
ideology since the mid-1960s. Finally, consideration will be given to the extent
to which the culture of consensus politics can be said to provide the dominant
background against which the media project the events they report. Our interest
here will centre chiefly on the television news and on the extent to which,
although neutral in party-political terms —and obliged to be so by law—they
are, in the words of the last Director General of the BBC, Sir Charles Curran,