Page 18 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

ACCESSING

and what you say is mediated through their professional codes and
production processes.
The professional mediation of accessed voices extends to the
message. Even when you have your say on television, you won’t speak
for yourself. What you say becomes what television says, and television
discourse has its own peculiarities. When a newsreader quotes or an
interviewer questions you, your utterance becomes a discursive
element which is subordinate to the narrative flow and visual codes
of the item as a whole. Its meaning is not self-contained, but depends
on what is said and seen before and afterwards. You become, in effect,
one actor in a drama, and even if you’re lucky enough to be playing
the lead, it is still the case that what you say is significant only in the
context of what all the others say, and of what the drama is about.
Further, one aspect of your role is entirely at odds with your own
purposes. For simply by accessing you, the institutional discourse is
able to claim authenticity and credibility for itself. You become the
means through which the legitimacy of media representations can be
established – irrespective of what you actually say.
There is, then, a conflict of interest between professional media
discourses and the demands for access that various groups express. The
way this has been handled in practice takes two forms. First, news and
current affairs subscribe to the principle of impartiality, thereby
ensuring that a (narrowand ‘balanced’) range of voices is accessed on
any one topic. Second, specialist ‘access programmes’ have been
established on many networks. In these off-peak slots media
professionals may relinquish control of the programme content, but
retain control of the production process. Unfortunately, both these
well-intentioned practices have negative consequences. Impartiality
legitimates the mainstream bipartisan form of politics at the expense of
the various single-issue groups (e.g. environmental campaigns), ethnic
‘minority’ groups, radical or feminist groups and community groups
that tend to end up having to make do with the marginal access slots.
For such groups, the very fact of winning access results in
representations that seem ‘naturally’ to confirm their marginal status.
This is why they’ve all migrated to the Internet.

Further reading: GlasgowMedia Group (1982); Hartley (1982, 1992a); Willis and
Wollen (1990)

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