Page 70 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CULTURE WARS

journalistic domains in the 1980s and 1990s, in the US and other
countries such as Australia and the UK. They were sometimes
conducted as coded forms of conflict about other things entirely, for
instance, influence over the curriculum for training journalists or
access to research funds and to policy-makers, or even circulation
boosters in opinion media. Sometimes the culture wars seemed little
more than ‘generation-gap’ squabbling between old high modernists
and not-so-old postmodernists (McKenzie Wark, 1994; Mark Davis,
1997; Catharine Lumby, 1997). The weekend newspaper version cast
the debate as a joust; hard to take seriously but fun to do, hurling well-
argued abuse at political opponents in the name not of self-interest but
of large philosophical concepts.
The theatrics masked real issues: reality, truth and reason were said
to be undermined by those who introduced ‘relativism’ into the study
of human activity. The latter included postmodernists, advocates of
political correctness, theorists, deconstructionists (i.e. followers of
continental rather than empirical philosophy), feminists, post-colonial
critics and anyone doing media or cultural studies. What was at stake
was a shift

from to
modern postmodern
universal relative
reason emotion (or else ‘irrealism’)
production consumption
imperial post-colonial
urban suburban
government identity
decision-maker celebrity
public life private life
men women
information entertainment
(or else art)
words pictures
literature media

and so on. These oppositions were often taken to be versions of
politics, with traditional leftists seeking to hold to the modernist line,
and therefore to the terms in the left-hand column against what they
sawas the politically disabling allure of at least some of the terms in the
right. But such a stance was itself cast as increasingly conservative, as

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