Media Worlds in the Postjournalism Era

David Altheide

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351328869
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The concept of media logic, a theoretical framework for explaining the relationship between mass media and culture, was first introduced in Altheide and Snow's influential work, Media Logic. In Media Worlds in the Postjournalism Era, the authors expand their analysis of how organizational considerations promote a distinctive media logic, which in turn is conductive to a media culture. They trace the ethnography of that media culture, including the knowledge, techniques, and assumptions that encourage media professionals to acquire particular cognitive and evaluative criteria and thereby present events primarily for the media's own ends.

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The Media as Culture

A TV Commercial: “General Motors … Official sponsor of America’s Dreams.”

The mass media are enigmatic for social scientists. As widespread and ingrained in daily living as any part of culture, the nature and impact of the mass media in social life are difficult to discern because they are so much a part of culture (De Fleur and Ball-Rokeach 1975). Our lives are so awash in media products, imagery, and, most importantly, media logic (cf. Comstock 1980; 1989). We have stressed in our previous work on media logic that the traditional distinctions between form and content were becoming blurred as the new mediation forms, and especially those of the electronic media, were altering the temporal and spatial formats of experience.

Our experience, and the way we think about that experience, increasingly is mass mediated (Davis and Baran 1981). Ours is a folded culture in which the content of the messages we rely on are influenced and shaped by forms of discourse (Carey 1987). It is as though the unique, single experience has vanished; now, more experiences are reflections of previous encounters shaped by formats that in turn direct future experience. Indeed, the ultimate indication of this folded condition is when standard formats are changed in favor of others, such as occurred in a recent play-that-isn’t-a-play (“The Living Movie,” Tamara), in which the audience was invited to join in the activities, to erase the line between the actors and audience (Lapham 1988). Despite the erudite interpretation of this play as a feature of postmodernism in which objective vantage point vanishes, and in which “text can be placed on top of text”—of course, it can—, it was hardly new, but was quite consistent with Music TV Videos (MTV) that have been airing for several years. Forget about the plays, imagine “real” plays on what we have been saying.

Imagine this. A posh English wedding, costing $35,000, was videotaped, but the wedding was reenacted because the mother of the bride was dissatisfied with the footage, “The video was dreadful…. There were no shots of the reception, and the video man missed the bride going up the aisle” (Arizona Republic October 19, 1988).

Try this one, noting how quickly things change. In November 1988, a producer for “America’s Most Wanted,” one of the most popular “new” TV crime shows that dramatizes violent attacks and invites the audience to help capture the accused, stated, “We take precautions. One thing we never do is report rewards because if we were to put a price on a guy’s head, our show would become essentially a game show” (Arizona Republic November 26, 1988).

In December 1988, about two weeks later, it was reported that a $100,000 reward was being offered for information leading to the conviction of a serial killer. Sixteen thousand calls were logged in by the police within a few days (Arizona Republic December 12, 1988). This is interesting not only because it was reported as “news,” but also because it further suggests that audiences are meaningfully involved with the TV as medium and with the logic underlying programs.

Serious personal criminal attacks happen rarely, but they are regarded as typical and quite common by American citizens because virtually all mass media reports about crime focus on the most spectacular, dramatic, and violent. This is illustrated by the “America’s Most Wanted” show noted above, and it has also been documented with an analysis of the “Missing Children” issue that stared at us in newspapers, TV movies, docudramas, news reports, milk cartons, posters, and “junk mail” (Fritz and Altheide 1987). Any discussion about crime and justice in the United States today must begin by correcting the audience member’s assumptions about crime. With the images of blood, guns, psychopaths, and suffering in front of them, and inside their heads, it is quite difficult to offer programmatic criticisms of our current approach to crime and accompanying issues such as prisons, and other modes of dispute resolution, including restitution and negotiation. As long as crime and mayhem are presented in such familiar and “fun” formats, new information will not be forthcoming, but only a recycling of affirmations tied to previous popular culture. And in general as long as experience is enacted by human beings who participate in mass mediated imagery, and orient consumption toward markets and products that look like the status groups, personal identities and forms of conduct displayed through a host of mass media, media and culture will not only be electronically and technologically joined, they will be meaningfully united as well.

The mass media are significant for our lives because they are both form and content of cultural categories and experience. As form—which this book is mainly concerned with—the mass media provide the criteria, shape, rhythm, and style of an expanding array of activities, many of which are outside of the “communication” process. As content, the new ideas, fashion, vocabularies, and a myriad of types of information (e.g., politics) are acquired through the mass media.

Communication, Power, and Social Control

The mass media’s transformation of our social world requires a new approach to understanding communication and social power. All official, unofficial, formal, and informal modes of social control involve communication formats (Altheide 1988; 1989). The mass media are merely one moment of such control, but they are the most powerful entities in the world today (cf. Noelle-Neumann 1973).

But, if these points are already known, why should we do this book? The problem is that all accounts of media effects have been flawed, including our previous efforts. There are three general problems with most theories about mass communications effects. First, their claims about the control of content and the effects on individuals are not supported by empirical examination, since most ad campaigns and new products fail. There are too many exceptions. For example, a number of scholars continue to look for overpowering effects on audience members of “the image,” arguing that people are being duped and manipulated, and that these members of the audience—like teenagers—are not sophisticated enough to offset such efforts (cf. Ewen 1988; Miller 1988). These claims by “scholars,” who are usually located in media centers such as New York and Los Angeles, continue to receive serious attention by both print and electronic news media, because of the continuing bias toward “content” as the explanation, rather than the form and logic of communication. Second, mass communication theories are focused on individual effects, and very significantly, the nature of these theories presumes that the individual audience members are passive and not active, incapable of interacting with the images to develop their own interpretations and meanings. This means that actors are regarded as “judgmental dopes,” who are presumed to incorporate and accept certain messages as fact, rather than creatively sorting, redefining, and interpreting information and images within a specific context. Students in the “uses and gratifications” (cf. Levy and Windahl 1984) tradition have attempted to delineate this point, but the best work, in our view, remains that of Lull (1982, 1988). But the third problem is the most critical. Virtually all theories and models of media effects are based on content of messages rather than the communication form. It is the latter that occupies our attention. For example, despite a number of very significant insights into the impact of new electronic formats on political life, students of rhetoric continue to focus on the content of speeches, rather than the style, format, and logic, which makes something recognizable and credible as “a speech” (cf. Jamieson 1988; Hart 1987), these dimensions are not easily discussed or articulated by audience members because they are nondiscursive, but are taken for granted as essential elements of conversation and leadership. Ronald Reagan was a powerful “communicator” not because of what he said, but the look, rhythm, and format of how he appeared and was presented as a familiar TV character who looked like a “decisive and confident leader.”

There are a few points to consider at the outset. Social order and communication are reflexive. They cannot be separated, either in terms of first cause or in terms of impact. One could argue that all social science has been based on this premise, although it has been mainly the symbolic interactionist, ethnomethodologists, and phenomenologists who articulated this relationship (cf. Schutz 1967; Luckmann 1989), which is now being rediscovered by students of postmodernism, semiotics, literary criticism, and cultural studies (cf. Fiske 1987; Newcomb 1974).

Power is about controlling the definition of the situation. Any person, agency, entity, and, as we will argue, format that controls social definitions, on the one hand, and can implement those while avoiding alternatives, on the other hand, will control the situation. Social order is about shared definitions, including the temporal and spatial configurations for realizing and enacting definitions (cf. Blumer 1969; Giddens 1984). Any theory of social order or social change implies a theory of social control, and a process through which meanings are established, negotiated, and sustained (Katz and Szecsko 1981). It is for this reason that we argue that any comprehensive social theory or perspective must articulate the relevance of communication, especially the mass media.

Another consideration is data or evidence. Any claim about a theory of social order must be subject to some kind of demonstration and test. As we noted above, it is this requirement that has set back most of the macrooriented theories of social order; there are too many exceptions. People simply do not cooperate with the theorists and behave as they should! For example, numerous studies that treat the media as hegemonic cannot stand up to even the most casual scrutiny; there are too many exceptions when, for example, the theory of “hegemonic control” predicts no coverage of certain topics from certain points of view (Altheide 1984a). Invariably, they do not hold up. This can be seen with some of best work to date on terrorism (cf. Schlesinger et al. 1983; Altheide 1985b, 1987c). The topics and emphases do not follow from what the hegemonic theories predict.

Our task, then, was to work with many of these other scholars, to reexamine the studies, and to develop a theoretical perspective about the media’s impact that was not tautological, yet could be useful in understanding the media’s impact on social life. That is what this book is about. We take it as basic that the mass media are the most powerful institutions in the world today, and that all forms of legitimacy and control pass through the logic and formats that distinguish the various media. We are very mindful of the differences between the mass media (cf. Ericson et al. 1989), and how certain content (programs) can have disproportionate effects. Nevertheless, what is needed is a major reformulation of the nature and consequences of communication forms, logic, and media for social order, which transcend conventional wisdom and practices of students of communication.

A Point of View

Our approach is intended to build on previous studies of mass media, while charting a different course into institutional and cultural analysis (Gronbeck 1990, Hall 1988). We pursue this other direction because the accumulation of findings, new theoretical developments, and major shifts in media effects demand it. Our cultural and institutional analysis focuses on the form and logic of mass communication within a social context.

Let us list a few things that we take for granted so that reviewers and others will not be misled. The mass media are irrevocably ideological, cultural, and, in many instances, hegemonic devices to serve a relatively small number of spokespersons, sources, and interests. This is so well established that it hardly needs stating, but we do so because the political and ideological climate of social science today requires it. Second, we support any and all efforts to make the media channels more accessible to a range of class, economic, and ideological interests. This would contribute greatly to the range of opinion, issues, and even news content. However, this would not be nearly enough.

As we have argued over the years, changing the “ownership and control” of the mass media would change some features of its operation, and some of its content, but its impact on social order would not be fundamentally altered. This is our point. Mass communication logic and discourse extends well beyond its content and information impact; that is relatively minor, compared to the discursive, temporal, and sense-making perspectives that have merged with media industries in the Western world—and, increasingly, throughout the world—over the last 50 years.

For several decades the scientific community and the general public have been asking how the various media affect our lives. Do media shape attitudes, sell political candidates, increase violence, dull one’s senses, destroy culture, or even stop wars? Although huge sums of money have been spent and many volumes written seeking responses to these questions, there is still considerable doubt as to exactly how the media operate in society. We contend that the mass media have not been well understood because of two separate, but often related points of view guiding most inquiries. First, most media analysts have been oriented by a concern with the nature of messages and their origin. Specifically, the search has been for the instrinsic persuasive techniques in messages and the economic intersts that stand to gain by acceptance of those messages. With rare exception (McLuhan 1964; and Gronbeck on electronic rhetoric, 1990), media analysts have not considered that media may be significant in their own right in the process of affecting cultural change. Rather, the media are conceived of as but another element of the economic equation. Second, most studies of mass media effects have emphasized individual effects in order to be guided by rather narrow questions that have been formulated to be consistent with very limited positivistic research methods to generate statistical findings.

During the 1980s, more media analysts adopted the position we have been articulating for nearly 20 years that meanings in a mass communication context are the result of negotiation between medium and audience and are tied to the context in which they occur. Recent work by Kubey and Csikszentmihalya (Arizona Republic April 4, 1990) seem to agree with this position, namely that television offers people another alternative for making sense of their lives, to alleviate frustration, and to accompany other activities with which they are involved. Of course the essential insight about the contextual feature of meaning was not ours, but rather the work of major symbolic interactionists who have systematically developed how social order is meaningfully constructed, negotiated, and challenged through a process of symbolic interaction.

It is in this same tradition that John Fiske’s elaborate and provocative “negotiative” theory (1987) articulates how audiences gain as opposed to lose a feeling of empowerment in the process of wrestling with interpretations of media experience. Anderson and Meyer’s “accommodation” theory (1988) takes essentially the same position in arguing that individuals interpret mediated texts within the routines of social action, and in any social action context there is always room for maneuvering and accommodation (p. 308). We agree, and acknowledge the intellectual debt in symbolic interaction in general and the dramaturgical model in particular (Brissett and Edgley 1990). Given these works, and many others over the past decade, the research direction has finally shifted from the messenger as ideologue and propagandist to the self-involved audience member. The new question concerns the kinds of situational factors that audience members use to make sense of media experience.

Although the work of Fiske, Anderson and Meyer, Gronbeck, (1990) and others makes these exciting times in media theory and research, everyone would agree that we must press for conceptual clarity and distinguish clearly among the various factors (or variables if statistical analysis is being used) that are being examined. Our concern has always been to determine the most fundamental set of rules that a person follows in constructing meaning. All of the previously cited works begin with the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis that cultural meanings are consistent with the grammatical structure (logic) of a language. And everyone in this group seems to accept the general approach of Georg Simmel (1950) that culture emerges through the process of using social forms (problem-solving strategies that are independent of content). However, differences emerge between our media logic approach and the work of Fiske, Anderson and Meyer, and everyone doing semiotics analysis.

Our theoretic concern is with the identification and description of social forms, and we try to articulate how content emerges through those forms. Even though we illustrate the power of these forms with “content” examples, our emphasis is on the way in which forms and their logics shapes the content. Other approaches obscure the distinction between form and content, such as Fiske’s concept of “discourse,” which he defines as “both a topic and a coded set of signs through which that topic is organized, understood, and made expressible” (1984:169). We think this distinction is important for several very fundamental reasons. First, form is prior to content in the temporal process of constructing meaning. Second, since form is abstractly independent of content, any contamination of form in conceptualization and analysis obscures how form operates in the process of constructing and changing such cultural constructs as discourses. Third, and most important for the 1990s, people are more concerned with maintaining proper form than with substance or content! If this strikes a responsive chord, then let us get on with it.

We begin with a much different assumption. Although no social scientist would deny that economic considerations play a major role in social life, it is the way such influences interact with other elements of culture and social structure that is important. For more than 50 years we have known that mass media in every society tend to stress images and messages that reflect dominant beliefs and ideologies of that culture, and are less favorable to others. Our perspective is much different. We examine mass media influences in terms of the logic, rationale, and taken for granted assumptions that individuals collectively share as a result of media logic. We include the way social institutions operate and reinforce how situations are defined.

Everyone knows media are important influences; in fact, it is difficult to imagine getting through the day without at least one—from clock radios to miniradios with headsets to newspapers to television to video recorders to curling up with a good book. It is our contention that media are so pervasive and influential that they are the dominant institutions in contemporary society.

Contemporary life cannot be understood without acknowledging the role of various communication media in the temporal and spatial organization and coordination of everyday life. The important work of Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan not only directed attention to the contribution of the technology of media for any message, but further argued that it is the technology that is most important in altering information and social relationships. However, it has remained for others to examine their thesis and incorporate the surviving corpus within an awareness of culture and especially popular culture, commonly associated with mass production, including mass media programming and other information.

Our approach to understanding media as a social force in society is to treat them as a form of communication that has a particular logic of its own (Elliott 1972). Media logic becomes a way of “seeing” and of interpreting social affair...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• About the Authors
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Media as Culture
• 2 Media Entertainment
• 3 Postjournalism Media Views
• 4 Media Politics I: The Politicians
• 5 Media Politics II: The Bert Lance Case and Beyond
• 6 A Political Kaleidoscope
• 7 Media Ministry
• 8 Media Sports
• 9 Conclusion: Our Media Condition
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index