Page 98 - Culture Society and the Media

88 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
as his complete identification with the generality is unquestioned. Pseudo-
individuality is rife: from the standardized jazz improvisation to the
exceptional film star whose hair curls over her eye to demonstrate her
originality. What is individual is no more than the generality’s power to
stamp the the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as such.
(Adorno and Horkheimer, 1977, p. 374)

Adorno’s contention that the mass media provided the ideological counterpart to
the economic development of capitalist societies, although very different from
the propositions of researchers who concentrated on the ‘effects’ on audiences of
violent or sexual aspects of the media, led to a similar intellectual lacuna in the
concrete analysis of media messages.
The distinctive feature of production in the mass media as opposed to general
economic production, is that it is concerned with the production and articulation
of messages within specific signifying systems, the rules and meanings of which
we tend to take for granted. The messages in the media are both composed and
interpreted in accordance with certain rules or codes. When we see a news event
on television or film, we do not see that event ‘raw’ but we see a message about
that event. We can read the message and interpret it but we take for granted the
rules and codes through which we read and interpret. The analysis of mass media
messages and their discourses of meaning are clearly important for an
understanding of mass communications. As Hall has suggested: ‘we must
recognize that the symbolic form of the message has a privileged position in the
communication exchange: and that moments of “encoding” and “decoding”,
though only “relatively autonomous” in relation to the communication process as
a whole, are determinate moments’ (Hall, 1973, p. 2).
The last ten years have seen an increasing concern with the formal
semiological analysis of the mass media message, in news coverage advertising,
feature films and television fiction and this has gone hand in hand with
developments in theories of ideology. This article will seek to explore some of
the developments and problems of this theoretical alliance.
The traditional method for the analysis of the meaning of mass
communications messages was content analysis. Content analysts operated by
establishing certain conceptual categories in relation to media content and then
quantitatively assessing the presence or absence of these categories with varying
degrees of sophistication. Content analysis as a method was used by researchers
of quite different theoretical backgrounds and with varying degrees of success
but the method inevitably stresses the manifest content of the message as the
most important area for social scientific analysis. The manifest content of the
message was taken to provide ‘the common universe between the emission, the
reception and the researcher’ (Camargo, 1972, p. 124). While content analysis
was much used in research operating on an individualistic model, it has also been
successfully employed to support research on race and the area of news values
(Glasgow University Media Group, 1976). Content analysis clearly has