Page 315 - Culture Society and the Media

MEDIA, ‘REALITY’, SIGNIFICATION 305
broadcasting agencies operating in a genuinely impartial way within such limited
terms of reference (limited because of what they exclude: the perspectives of all
political groups—the communist Left, ‘terrorists’—which fall outside the
framework of consensus politics) is that they contribute to the reproduction of
the unity of the parliamentary political system as a whole:

‘Panorama’, above all other Current Affairs programmes, routinely takes
the part of the guardian of unity in this second sense. It reproduces, on the
terrain of ideology, the political identification between Parliamentary
system and the Nation. As a consequence, the agenda of problems and
‘prescriptions’ which such a programme handles is limited to those which
have registered with, or are offered up by, the established Parliamentary
parties. It is these authoritative prescriptions, alone, which are probed to
discover which appears most appropriate to the task of maintaining the
system. (Hall, Connell and Curti, 1977, p. 91)

It is in this way, by actually fulfilling their statutory requirements, that the media
may be said to collude with the major established parties in limiting the very way
in which problems are defined and the horizons within which solutions may be
sought, but in a way that seems not to violate the liberaldemocratic requirement
that equal space be given to contending points of view. It is a ‘double-dupe’
system, an ideological form which effects a contraction of the sphere of public
debate whilst simultaneously engendering the illusion that that sphere is entirely
free and open. The response that this requires, as Connell quite rightly argues, is
not that the media should be required to become ‘genuinely impartial’ but rather
‘the formation and implementation of quite different editorial criteria’ (p. 32). It
requires a politics in which sign is opposed to sign, and not truth to falsehood.

CONCLUSION
My primary purpose in this essay has been to summarize and illustrate some of
the central areas of debate within the tradition of media theory concerned with
the reality-defining role of the media. Yet I have also sought, although in a much
lower key, to call into question the way in which the signifying role of the media
is conceived and represented within this tradition. For, although confirming the
activity and effectivity of the media as a critical area of signification, the notion
that the media are somehow ontologically secondary in relation to a more
primary, more basic ‘real’ is kept alive within the very terminology ‘definers of
social reality’. To raise this objection is not merely a semantic quibble. The validity
of positing a duality between the plane of signification and that of ‘reality’ has
long since been called into question in linguistics and literary and film criticism.
To suggest that media studies should be brought into line with these is not a
question of theoretical fashion, of being up-to-date for the sake of it. It is rather a
question of politics, a question of how to conceive the politics of the sign and