The Mediation of Power

A Critical Introduction

Aeron Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415404914
• eBook ISBN: 9781134136605
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

The Mediation of Power investigates how those in positions of power use and are influenced by media in their everyday activities. Each chapter examines this theme through an exploration of some of the key topics and debates in the field, including:

• theories of media and power
• media policy and the economics of information
• news production and journalistic practice
• public relations and media management
• culture and power
• political communication and mediated politics
• new and alternative media
• interest group communications
• media audiences and effects.

The debates are enlivened by first-hand accounts taken from over 200 high-profile interviews with politicians, journalists, public officials, spin doctors, campaigners and captains of industry. Tim Bell, David Blunkett, Iain Duncan Smith, Simon Heffer, David Hill, Simon Hughes, Trevor Kavanagh, Neil Kinnock, Peter Riddell, Polly Toynbee, Michael White and Ann Widdecombe are some of those cited.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Critical engagements with mediated power

Introduction

This book is part advanced textbook and part critical engagement with the dominant paradigms employed in studies of media and power. In textbook terms its ten chapters cover a broad range of common media and communication topics that might be included in a one term course. These include: policy and regulation; media production; elite media management and media–source relations; culture, ideology/discourse and power; mediated politics and political communication; new and alternative media; interest groups, civil society and mediated mobilisation; media audiences and effects. Each chapter presents some of the key literature, debates and challenges on the topic, followed by new case study material.

However, the book also presents a series of critical dialogues with the prevailing interpretive frameworks of the subject area. Along the way, traditional paradigms may be supplemented, synthesised, resuscitated and reinvented, or discarded altogether. In each chapter media research is combined with literature from outside the discipline to invigorate the discussions and push conceptual boundaries. Work in politics, sociology, economics and anthropology are all drawn upon. At the same time, many of the usual media topic divides are broken down and crossed throughout the book. New and alternative media frequently feature alongside traditional, mass media. Production and consumption are not always investigated as separate processes. Cultural and qualitative perspectives are merged with political economic and quantitative approaches. Presentation of argument moves between micro forms of communication and behaviour, and, macro, mass media forms. Both are linked to larger-scale political and economic patterns.

Each chapter also offers original case material, based on a diverse mix of studies, to illustrate the debates. These come from a range of subjects and communication environments and include the spheres of politics and political parties, journalism and public relations, corporations and financial markets, interest groups and new social movements. Interview material, taken from some 220 first-hand accounts, is used to present the issues and arguments. The recorded views of journalists, cultural and promotional intermediaries, politicians, campaigners, captains of industry, financial managers, public officials and regulators, all enliven the accounts.

Mass media and power: the elite-mass media-audience paradigm

There is one, central line of reasoning that emerges throughout the chapters of this book: critical enquiry on the links between media, communication and power must look beyond the elite-mass media-audience paradigm. Traditional research has almost invariably been grounded in a framework of elite-mass communication and historical ‘media events’ transmitted via the mass media. However, social and political developments in recent decades, as well as much contemporary research, suggest that this framework can only explain so much. The utility of media and communication in sustaining unequal power relations in society is rather more complex and varied than this dominant paradigm suggests. For many there is nothing new about these developments. Indeed, they have supplied the justification for switching the research focus away from issues of media and inequality or discussions of power in society altogether. However, it is not the intention of this book to provide further evidence of this trend nor to argue for a complete paradigm shift. Rather it is to set out steps towards an alternative, but in many ways complementary, critical research project.

What evolves through the book might best be described as: an inverted political economy of communication that focuses on the mediation of sites of power and those actors who inhabit them. This approach moves away from media-centred investigations of power that seek to document the political, economic and cultural means by which media is shaped to further advantage those in power. Instead, the starting point is to identify political and economic sites of power and those that operate at those sites. Investigation is then led by asking how media and culture are used by, as well as influence, those actors, processes and sites themselves. Further explanation of this approach follows a review of work linking media, communication and power.

Much work in political science, and in the subdisciplines of media politics and political communication, is rooted in an elite-mass media paradigm. Political writing on the establishment of democracy, old and new (see Held, 1989, 1996, for overviews), does not feature media with much frequency. But there is a consistent focus on the legitimate authority of the state and its representatives, and on how that is established and maintained without the regular use of force. Debate, on the ways political leaders are best selected, act according to the public will and are consistently held accountable for their actions, clearly involves public communication. Studies, therefore, hold very securely to an ‘ideal type’ of democracy that links elite decision-making to the mass of consumer citizenry via mass communication and ‘public opinion’.

Consequently, this has directed much research in departments of politics or journalism towards those institutions, individuals and events where legitimate state authority is publicly reinforced or questioned. This usually involves documenting and evaluating the large media events and public personalities associated with ‘history’. Thus, there is now a wealth of studies on wars and elections (Blumler and Gurevitch, 1995; Kavanagh, 1995; Crewe et al., 1995, 1998; Hall Jamieson, 1996, 2006; Norris, 1999; Herman and Chomsky, 2002; Hess and Kalb, 2003; Miller, 2004; Tumber and Palmer, 2004). There is also a strong body of work on political party and government communication with leading journalists and citizen-voters (Zaller, 1992; Scammell, 1995; Fallows, 1996; Iyengar and Reeves, 1997; Glasser, 1999; Barnett and Gaber, 2001; Lees-Marshment, 2001; Patterson, 2002; Hess, 2003).

Alongside these studies there has developed a framework of evaluation, grounded in political theory, and applied in studies of media sociology and media history. Drawing on historical treaties and declarations on ‘the press’, a set of ‘ideal’ public communication functions in democracies have emerged (see Keane, 1991; Curran, 2002, for discussions). These dictate that the media should provide: a source of ‘objective’ information widely available to all citizens and interest groups; a check (‘watchdog role’) on the activities of powerful institutions, organisations and individuals; a platform for rational debate on the issues and policies affecting society and the state; and access for a wide range of citizens and interest groups to put forward their views. Such debates about the media’s ability to fulfil its ideal functions have continued in various forms and currently are most commonly discussed in terms of Habermas’s account of the ‘public sphere’ (Habermas, 1989 [1962]). The public sphere concept, documented as the public, deliberative space between the state and private citizens, appears readily adaptable to work on media and politics. It has been applied in the assessment of public communication spaces at the national, transnational and electronic levels (see collections in Calhoun, 1992; Dahlgren and Sparks, 1992, and also Thompson, 1995; Goldsmiths Media Group, 1999; Sparks, 2001; Dahlgren, 2001, 2005).

Indeed, much writing on media and politics, in effect, is based on an evaluation of one of more of these ideals (Hallin, 1994; Schudson, 1995; Norris, 2000; Bennett and Entman, 2001; Meyer, 2002; Corner and Pels, 2003; McNair, 2003; Franklin, 2004; Curran and Gurevitch, 2005; Lewis et al., 2005). Thus, these works variously document and debate: campaign media effects or lack thereof; rising public apathy or alternative forms of political engagement; the growth of political news management or the ‘media colonisation’ of politics; political marketing as a tool for manipulating or responding to the public; and the tabloidisation or public-responsiveness of news media.

Critical work, in media, sociology and cultural studies, has been directed by other concerns but has similarly adopted the elite-media-mass paradigm. Thinking here was originally driven by a model of society that revolved around economic class inequalities, legitimation crises and conflict. Under such circumstances one central concern drove critical investigation in media and culture: the question of how mass consent was maintained in a patently unequal society. The answer for many was to be located in the dissemination of dominant ideologies and false consciousness. Members of the Frankfurt School (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979 [1947]) saw modern, mass culture as dulling and distracting public minds. Lukes (1974) argued that the all-important third dimension of power was ideological. Althusser’s (1984) ‘ideological state apparatus’ and ‘interpellation’ explained the institutional means of mass cultural assimilation. Hall (1973) looked to the encoding of preferred meanings in mass produced texts. The adoption of Gramsci’s earlier writing (Forgacs, 1988), particularly his concept of hegemony, added a sense of fluidity and change. Each of these scholars offered a set of intellectual tools with which to observe and explain mass consent.

Arguably, in critical cultural studies, the consent question, along with other research parameters, have continued to determine the way culture and power have been linked. The other parameters are a focus on popular/mass media and culture and an emphasis on investigating culture in the anthropological tradition; that is, as a ‘whole way of life’. Each of these research emphases can be traced back to the work of the discipline’s founders: Williams (1958, 1961) and Hall and, to a lesser extent, Hoggart (1958) and Thompson (1963). So, ‘popular culture’ became as significant a subject of study as ‘high culture’. Culture, as a ‘whole way of life’ inseparable from the social fabric of society, was to be observed and documented. Along the way, critical studies enforced the links between each of these elements: popular/mass media and culture, culture as a ‘whole way of life’ and the mass consent question. These links became firmly established in the work of Hall and later Williams (Hall, 1973, 1980, 1982, 1983; Williams, 1977).

Alongside critical cultural theorists, media political economists have sought to locate the material means by which elites, at the state and corporate levels, influence the production of mass media texts. Usually this has come to mean a focus on news texts (Schiller, 1989, 1992; Garnham, 1990; Eldridge, 1995; Philo, 1995; Stauber and Rampton, 1995, 2002; Ewen, 1996; Herman and McChesney, 1997; Golding and Murdock, 2000; Curran, 2002; Davis, 2002; Herman and Chomsky, 2002 [1988]; Curran and Seaton, 2003; Bagdikian, 2004; McChesney, 2004; Miller, 2004). All offer detailed accounts of the power of state and market forces to shape news media and public information. This top-down influence has been maintained through a mixture of conscious, direct means and unconscious, indirect influences. In terms of overt, conscious influences, ownership, whether by the state or private corporations, has brought with it the power to allocate resources, appoint senior staff and influence editorial agendas. The state has additionally applied pressure through regulation, licensing, censorship and libel laws. Corporate elites have extended their control through overlapping networks of shareholders and directorships, and through advertising – a principal source of media funding. Overt influence has become all the more effective with the steady professionalisation of corporate and state communication operations. These alternate between blocking, ‘spinning’ and threatening journalists, on the one hand, and guiding, subsidising and offering incentives, on the other. At crisis points, caused by union activity, mass protest, war or economic depression, this full range of overt influences is brought to bear in an attempt to ‘manufacture consent’.

Indirect, less conscious influences come down to the economic and organisational conditions that direct media production in a capitalist system. Market pressures, to take advantage of economies of scale and greater advertising revenues, have encouraged production for mass audiences and a steady stream of industry concentration and conglomeration. The results have been cuts in uneconomical public news and information production, and restrictions on entry for alternative and critical news and cultural producers. Several studies have also shown that news organisation and news values encourage journalists to repeatedly seek out and promote certain elite sources over others (Fishman, 1980; Gandy, 1982). For some this results in a self-perpetuating ‘primary definer’ status (Hall et al., 1978) being bestowed on those who are already politically and economically advantaged. For others, although such a status is fluid and contested, elite groups continue to dominate news coverage (Miller, 1994; Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994; Manning, 1998; Davis, 2002). In some news beats journalists appear to have become such a part of the ‘issue communities’ they report on they have become all but ‘captured’ by their sources (Negrine, 1996; Schlesinger et al., 2001; Davis, 2000b).

Over time, investigation of media, culture and inequality has broadened considerably to now include gender, race, ethnicity and sexual identity. In addition, a variety of continental European theorists and concepts have been appropriated by critical cultural theorists. Foucault’s (1980) ‘discourse’ and ‘power/knowledge’, and Bourdieu’s (1979) ‘fields’, interchangeable forms of ‘capital’ and ‘habitus’, have been most widely taken up. More recently Callon (1986, 1998) and Latour’s (1987) ‘Actor-Network Theory’, where ‘actants’ are ‘performed’ in ‘disentangled material-semiotic networks’, have presented an alternative cast-off point. Each set of concepts has reinterpreted the links between individuals, institutions, power and culture. Adoption and interpretation of these theorists and concepts by media and communication scholars has directed the field in several disparate directions; including moves away from discussions of power altogether.

However, when absorbed into the media-power framework, usually the concepts are employed either to emphasise the structural reinforcement of the elite-media-mass paradigm, or forms of resistance to that. Work on active audiences, everyday resistance, oppositional subcultures and ‘semiotic guerrillas’ (Hebdige, 1979; de Certeau, 1984; Ang, 1986; Fiske, 1989; Silverstone, 1994) has emphasised individual, cultural autonomy but within the same elite-mass framework. Much recent scholarship within media and cultural studies, whatever its stance, has tended to retain a baseline attachment to the paradigm’s original research precedents. Typical introductory overviews (e.g., Grossberg et al., 1992; Gray and McGuigan, 1993; Storey, 1998; Turner, 2003) all begin with the Williams and Hall (and Hoggart and Thompson) history and their shaping of the culture and ideology (or discourse) project. Many key works, although quite dispersed and varied, from media production, ‘media events’ and audience consumption (Dayan and Katz, 1992; Fiske, 1996; Sparks and Tulloch, 2000; Kellner, 2003), to ‘political culture’ and ‘cultural economy’ (Kellner, 1995; Street, 1997, 2001; du Gay and Pryke, 2002), have been developed within these conceptual parameters. Wars, conflicts and terrorism, viewed through the critical media lens, continue to be documented as incidents of state management of media and public opinion (Herman and Chomsky, 2002; Thussu and Freedman, 2003; Miller, 2004).

Of course, each of these bodies of work offers an impressive range of research and interpretations and cannot simply be summed up as part of the elite-media-mass power paradigm. However, they do share at their mainstream centres such a set of defining characteristics. Whether mass media and culture are a means of upholding or undermining the legitimacy of democracies, a means of maintaining dominant elite hegemony or ensuring the continued circulation of powerful elites, elite-mass ...

Table of contents

• Communication and Society
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Media policy
• Chapter 3 Media production
• Chapter 4 Media management and public relations
• Chapter 5 Culture, discourse and power
• Chapter 6 Mediated politics
• Chapter 7 New and alternative media
• Chapter 8 Interest groups and mediated mobilisation
• Chapter 9 Media audiences and effects
• Chapter 10 Conclusions
• Appendix I A short note on research methods
• Appendix II List of interviewees
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index