Page 309 - Culture Society and the Media

MEDIA, ‘REALITY’, SIGNIFICATION 299
such moral panics as that exemplified by the ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ scare tended
to be discrete and of short duration, it is contended that, particularly during the
1970s, there has operated a ‘signification spiral’ whereby hitherto discrete and
localized problems—rebellious youth cultures, student protest, industrial
militancy, flying pickets, mugging—have been pulled into a seamless web of
associations. Presented as manifestations of a common problem—the breakdown
of respect for the authority of the law—it has thereby been suggested that they
are susceptible to a common solution: an increase in the scope of the law and a
strengthening of the means of its enforcement.
There is not the space here to survey the details of this study. The most that
can be attempted is a brief adumbration of the more important theoretical and
methodological advances that are registered within it—or at least in those parts
of it which bear most directly on the study of the media—and of the problems
that remain. Perhaps the most important advance consists in the contention that
the signifying or reality-defining practices of the media should not be viewed in
isolation. In examining the axial, coordinating signifying role accorded to the
figure of the ‘mugger’ within the ideology of law and order between 1972 and
1976, Policing the Crisis stresses that this was produced not merely by the media
but by and within the context of the symbiotic relationships that exist between
the media and other reality-defining agencies—particularly, in this case, the
courts, senior police officers and leading political spokespersons. The media did
not ‘invent’ the law-and-order crisis ex nihilo. Nor were the policies they pursued
the effect, in any direct or obvious sense, of the structure of media ownership.
Nor was there a ruling-class conspiracy in which political leaders and media
magnates colluded in manufacturing a crisis of law and order. Rather, Hall and
his colleagues speak of a much more subtle process whereby the definitions of the
media and the discourse of the powerful—the framing definitions supplied by
prominent public figures—tend to sustain and reinforce one another owing to the
close ties of dependency that exist between them, the media depending on
prominent public figures as a primary source of newscopy just as the latter
depend on the media for placing their diagnoses and prescriptions before a wider
audience.
Although, in this way, the pitfalls of conspiracy theory are avoided, some
difficulties remain. The overall thesis of the book is that the law-andorder crisis
has been constituted via a specific ideological inflection of Britain’s economic
crisis and that the effect of this ideological inflection has been to deliver popular
support for the pursuit of specific political strategies in relation to the economic
crisis:

There is, of course, no simple consensus, even here, as to the nature,
causes and extent of the crisis. But the overall tendency is for the way the
crisis has been ideologically constructed by the dominant ideologies to win
consent in the media, and thus to constitute the substantive basis in
‘reality’ to which public opinion continually refers. In this way, by