Page 9 - Culture Society and the Media

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whole, relay interpretive frameworks consonant with the interests of the
dominant classes, and media audiences, while sometimes negotiating and
contesting these frameworks, lack ready access to alternative meaning
systems that would enable them to reject the definitions offered by the media
in favour of consistently oppositional definitions. (Mass Communication
and Society, Block 3, Introduction, p. 5)

The articulation of this kind of meta-theoretical conflict had the positive
advantage of allowing students to construct and order quite disparate
contributions to the field of mass communications.
However, it was not the intention of the course team to produce a course
formed by the credo of news broadcasting of ‘balance, neutrality and objectivity’.
As reviews of the course have pointed out, the liberal pluralist/ Marxist divisions
make their present felt in an unequal manner.

The course is throughout an exercise in radical analysis with the liberal
pluralist view serving largely as a counter-point. It counterpoints by toning
the more extreme claims of the opposition and by allowing the introduction
of aspects of the subject that fit awkwardly if at all into a marxist
framework. By my estimate, the division of labour is about 80–20 between
these orientations but drinking the course as a whole is to imbibe pretty
strictly of certain versions of modern Marxism. (Carey, 1979, p. 314)

The ‘unequal’ weighting of Marxist and liberal pluralist views within the course
stemmed largely from the task undertaken. On the one hand, we attempted a
critical assessment of past developments in the field of mass communications
research. On the other hand, we also sought to indicate central and pertinent
contemporary theoretical developments. Increasingly, important issues and
conflicts in the analysis of the mass media have been generated within and in
relation to a Marxist framework.
In revising and changing the contents of the course for this reader, we have
attempted to maintain the contrast between pluralist and Marxist views of the
media because this contrast has been important to the history and development of
mass media studies and because it remains a source of distinctive differences in
the conceptualization of the media and of society generally. At the same time,
the reader also makes clear significant differences within the Marxist tradition of
media analysis, between, for example, those approaches which take as a starting
point the base/superstructure metaphor and emphasize, as a result, the economic
infra-structure of the media industries, and those approaches which are
concerned to re-think a Marxist theory of ideology outside the parameters of a
hierarchy of determinations, dependent always in the last analysis upon the
economic. The presence of structuralism, of a linguistic paradigm, in
contemporary mass communications research, with its consequent focus on the