Page 32 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

BIAS

that, like the original bards in medieval Celtic societies, the media are
a distinct and identifiable social institution, whose role it is to mediate
between the rulers and patrons who license and pay them, and society
at large, whose doings and sayings they render into a specialised
rhetorical language which they then play back to the society. The
concept seemed necessary in order to overcome previous conceptua-
lisations of the media, which concentrated on the way they were/are
meant to reflect society. The notion of the bardic function goes
beyond this, first in its insistence on the media’s role as manipulators of
language, and then in its emphasis on the way the media take their
mediating role as an active one, not as simply to reproduce the
opinions of their owners, or the ‘experience’ of their viewers. Instead,
the ‘bardic’ media take up signifying ‘rawmaterials’ from the societies
they represent and rework them into characteristic forms which
appear as ‘authentic’ and ‘true to life’, not because they are but because
of the professional prestige of the bard and the familiarity and pleasure
we have learnt to associate with bardic offerings.
One implication of this notion is that, once established, bardic
television can play an important role in managing social conflict and
cultural change. Dealing as it does in signification – representations
and myths – the ideological work it performs is largely a matter of
rendering the unfamiliar into the already known, or into ‘common
sense’. It will strive to make sense of both conflict and change
according to these familiar strategies. Hence bardic television is a
conservative or socio-central force for its ‘home’ culture. It uses
metaphor to render newand unfamiliar occurrences into familiar
formsand meanings.Itusesbinary oppositionstorepresent
oppositional or marginal groups as deviant or ‘foreign’. As a result,
it strives to encompass all social and cultural action within a consensual
framework. Where it fails, as it must, to ‘claw back’ any group or
occurrence into a consensual and familiar form, its only option is to
represent them as literally outlandish and senseless. Bardic television,
then, not only makes sense of the world, but also marks out the limits
of sense, and presents everything beyond that limit as nonsense.

Further reading: Fiske and Hartley (1978); Hartley (1982, 1992a); Turner (1990);
Williams (1981)

BIAS

Bias is a concept used to account for perceived inaccuracies to be
found within media representations. The term is usually invoked in

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