Page 304 - Culture Society and the Media

294 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
THE DEVIANT IN THE MEDIA
The attribution of a reality-defining role to the media hinges on two propositions.
The first is that the news is a manufactured product, not necessarily in the sense
that it is contrived or invented but in the sense that it is the product of a culturally
encoded and socially determined process of making which displays, in its
content and form, the technical and ideological forces which bear on its
construction. The second is that the power which the media derive from their
reality-defining capability is attributable largely to the service they perform in
making us the indirect witnesses to events of which we have no first-hand
knowledge or experience.
Both of these propositions are central to the tradition of media theory
concerned with the definitions the media impose on the behaviour of various
groups of ‘outsiders’; that is, of those groups—drug-addicts, criminals, soccer
hooligans, homosexuals—whose behaviour is viewed as transgressing dominant
social norms, be these enshrined in law or in custom and convention (see Cohen
and Young, 1973). Briefly, it is contended that, by casting such groups in the role
of ‘folk-devils’, the media serve to strengthen our degree of commitment to
dominant social norms and, thereby, to create a climate of opinion supportive of
the operations of society’s law-enforcement agencies and of the extension of
their powers. Developments within this area of media theory, however, have
been greatly indebted to the more general theoretical realignments which have
characterized the recent history of the sociology of deviance in this country,
particularly as represented by those associated with the National Deviancy
Symposium (see Cohen, 1971).
In classical criminology, the concept of criminal behaviour was largely
regarded as an unproblematic given. Criminality or any other form of deviance,
that is, was viewed as a property inherent within certain types of acts themselves.
Given this, the primary analytical task was held to be that of explaining such
behaviour within reference to the, so it was felt, abnormal causes (social,
psychological or even biological) which must be responsible for it. The
contemporary focus within deviance theory, by contrast, is concerned more with
the social processes within which the attribution of deviance is made. Deviance,
that is, is no longer regarded as an attribute immanent within certain acts but as a
label which is attached, via a series of complex social processes, to those types
of behaviour which transgress either legally codified rules or normatively
enshrined codes of behaviour. It is thus, it is argued, a term whose use reflects
the relative power of certain social groups to impose the label—and, of course,
the punitive practices of the legal and penal systems—on those whose behaviour
is incompatible with the socially dominant concepts of legality and normality
which are ideologically buttressed and sustained by those groups. Although this
does not deny the cogency of inquiring why it is that the members of some social
groups are more likely to engage in such forms of behaviour than are the
members of other groups, it does entail a shift of interest away from the