Page 37 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 27
communicate? Between the élite and the masses, the few and many: the answer
is pre-given in the concept.
It is true that, in its contemporary use, such connotations are rarely present in
this inherited vocabulary. If the term ‘mass media’ still enjoys a widespread
currency, this is more by force of habit than anything else; a convenient way of
marking out an area of study rather than a means of stating how that area should
be studied or of outlining the assumptions from which research should proceed.
However, it is noteworthy that in recent research the media have tended to be
grouped under different headings. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, for
example, coined the phrase ‘the culture industry’ in referring to the collective
operations of the media (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972) whereas, more recently,
Louis Althusser has grouped the media with the family, the church and the
education system under the heading of ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (Althusser,
1971). Of course, there is more at stake here than the simple question of naming.
Such shifts in vocabulary have involved and been a part of the development of
new approaches to the study of the media within which the connection between
media processes and broader social and political relationships are construed in
terms which differ significantly from those embodied in the more traditional
sociology of mass communications approaches.
My purpose in this essay is to tease out some of the broader issues which lie
behind this apparently simple question of naming, by identifying the nature of
the expectations and presuppositions which have influenced the way in which the
study of the media has been approached from within different bodies of theory.
More particularly, my concern is to show how the sorts of assumptions made
about the broader structure of society within different bodies of theory have
determined both the sorts of questions that have been posed in relation to the
media and the way in which those questions have been pursued.
I will do so by commenting on four traditions of media theory. I shall deal,
firstly, with the mass society tradition which, having a pedigree reaching back
into the mid-nineteenth century, has viewed the development of the media
pessimistically as constituting a threat to either the integrity of élite cultural
values or the viability of the political institutions of democracy, or both. I shall
then examine the contrary assumptions of liberal-pluralist schools of thought.
According to these the media, functioning as the ‘fourth estate’, play an
important part in the democratic process in constituting a source of information
that is independent of the government. They are also viewed as adding to the
series of counterveiling sources of power which, in liberal democracies, are said
to prevent a disproportionate degree of power from being concentrated in any
one section of the population or organ of government. Next, I shall consider the
critical theory of the Frankfurt School as an instance of an attempt to incorporate
the mass society critique and put it to use from within a Marxist framework.
Finally, consideration will be given to more recent attempts to develop a Marxist
approach to the media as part of a more general theory of ideology concerned
with the role played by ideological institutions in the process whereby existing