Page 47 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 37
governing élites could be pressurized and reminded of their dependency on
majority opinion. Further, in a decisive rejection of the mass culture critique, the
media’s role as the purveyors of culture was defended as it was pointed out that,
in addition to an admittedly slushy pulp culture, they were also responsible for
making the established classics of high culture available to a wider audience
whose cultural standards had been lifted with rising educational standards.
There can be little doubt but that, at the empirical level, the audience research
undertaken by American sociologists during the 1940s and 1950s forcibly
challenged the founding assumptions of the mass society outlook. The system of
concepts that they proposed in place of this, however, is not so convincing. The
modified version of democracy proposed by Schumpeter was only too clearly an
attempt to cut the concept down to size, to trim it so as to enable it to ‘fit’ the
observed workings of the American political system. More important, perhaps,
the revisions that were proposed in relation to the concept of democracy did not
entirely escape the criticisms that had been levelled against parliamentary forms
of democracy by both Marxist and élite theorists. Schumpeter’s definition, for
example, does not differ significantly from Marx’s castigation of bourgeois
democracy as a system in which the oppressed are allowed, every few years, to
decide which particular representatives of the ruling class shall be allowed to
represent and repress them in parliament.
More particular difficulties are posed by the structure of media ownership. It is
true, as Ralph Miliband has put it, that there is no field in which ‘the claims of
democratic diversity and free political competition which are made on behalf of
the “open societies” of advanced capitalism appear to be more valid than in the
field of communications’ (Miliband, 1969, p. 219). But, as Miliband goes on to
argue, to accept such appearances at face value would be to ignore both the
highly concentrated structure of media ownership and the fact that the range of
variation within the political perspectives of the dominant media is, in fact,
extraordinarily narrow. Such criticisms have induced a modification of the
liberal-pluralist thesis in the respect that it now tends to seek confirmation by
analyzing the relationships within rather than those between media organizations.
To put the point crudely, ownership of the media may be oligopolized but, it is
argued, the interests of democratic diversity are nevertheless secured by virtue of
the clash and discordancy of interests which exist between owners, managers,
editors and journalists. Having originated in the study of the complex
heterogeneity of media audiences, the liberal-pluralist perspective has since
complemented such audience studies by examining the complex heterogeneity of
the other, the production end of the communications process. It is noticeable,
however, that a concern with what happens in between—with the structure and
content of media messages—is an extremely poorly developed part of this
tradition which lacks anything approaching an adequate theory or method for the
analysis of signifying systems.