International Media Research

A Critical Survey

John R. Corner, Philip Schlesinger, Professor Philip R Schlesinger, Roger Silverstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415090353
• eBook ISBN: 9781134667550
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

International Media Research offers a rigorous and critical review of key approaches and concerns that have recently defined the field of media research. In this clearly argued collection of essays, the contributors analyze and reflect upon dominant themes and debates that have made media research an increasingly important element of cultural theory. The volume begins with a critical evaluation of the work of the leading media scholar, Elihu Katz, and continues with an exploration of the relationship between media studies and adjacent disciplines: cultural studies and gender and sexuality.
Contributors drawn from Britain, America, Canada and Belgium consider the relationships between media research and media policy in different national and international contexts. Focusing on the European Union, East-Central Europe, North America and Latin America, chapters assess the impact of social, economic and political circumstances on policy debates and the shaping of the research agenda. The final chapter adopts a transatlantic perspective in tracing and analysing the history of the media's role in reporting war.

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EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

John Corner, Philip Schlesinger and Roger Silverstone

PURPOSE AND SCOPE

In recent years, media research has enjoyed explosive growth as the centrality of the media to contemporary societies has increasingly imposed itself on our consciousness. It has become more and more obvious that, with the internationalization of media institutions, products and consumption, media research cannot be limited to what happens within given, national frontiers; at the same time, the rapidly expansive nature of recent academic investigation, while most often still profoundly steeped in national traditions, has been on an increasingly international scale as the field entrenches itself more widely in all continents.

The pace of work has been such as to allow little time for reflection within the research community on the factors that have shaped specific areas of investigation, and in particular, those where we have shed most light, and those patches of darkness that still remain. Despite the plethora of monographs, edited collections and journals that have appeared, there has been much less by way of considered assessment of overall findings in the most densely researched areas than might be expected. The conventional forms of publishing have simply not provided sufficient space for extended analysis on the scope and limitations of existing achievements. Bearing this perspective in mind, the present collection is the beginning of an attempt to provide the necessary elbow-room for a wideranging set of individual explorations.

So this book responds to our sense that it is now time for a deeper evaluation of the present state of media research than is customary. We think of this collection of lengthy essays not as complete in itself but rather as the first of several such surveys of the field over the coming years, and ask our readers to interpret it in that light. Clearly, therefore, we do not intend the book to be taken as an exhaustive account of the present state of play but rather to be read as a contribution that will both illustrate and illuminate several major themes judged to be both of interest and importance for those engaged in media scholarship.

In this introductory chapter we want to look, first, at some features of the field as it has been constituted historically, noting not only the difficulties in achieving a coherent intellectual and academic identity but also the continuities with current concerns. We then want to comment briefly on three themes that we identify as of particular significance and which are developed in different ways throughout this book. These are: the comparison between circumstances in North America and Europe; the changing form of the linkage between states, markets and media systems; and the perennial question of the relationship between research and policy. In a final section we look at some prospects (and some problems) for future enquiry before introducing the chapters themselves.

THE HISTORICAL FORMATION OF THE RESEARCH FIELD

As John Durham Peters has recently remarked, ‘the future of the field depends in many ways on coming to terms with the past of the field’. This is a past not only of routes taken but of routes ignored and, indeed, sometimes of routes actively discouraged. Towards the end of this introduction we look at the present shape of media research, but it may be useful here to reflect briefly on key elements in its making.

There is a sense in which ‘mass communication’ (or more recently ‘media research’) is, internationally, a project which has been in a sometimes precarious state of formation for over fifty years. Its history is far less a matter of tracing a narrow, continuous strand of specialized enquiry than of looking at a rather disparate and still not fully documented succession of theoretical projects, empirical engagements and often heated debates. Right from the start, in the separate kinds of intellectual response in Europe and North America to the emergence of modernity, public communication and ‘mass culture’, the field has never consolidated itself fully as an international academic enterprise.

The separate national and historical contexts occasioned by, for instance, the propaganda campaigns of 1930s European fascism, by American preoccupations post-World War II, both with public opinion and with the world’s most aggressive young advertising industry, and by the longstanding concern of the British literary intelligentsia about declining cultural values, produced radically different starting points for enquiry. We may note, however, that some form of anxiety about some form of influence was a factor held in common across the diversity and it is only recently, as we shall discuss later, that this has become less so.

Even in the United States, where from the 1930s onwards the most sustained and ambitious programmes of research into ‘mass communication’ were undertaken from within the social sciences, there was a running anxiety about the coherence of the field, related to an eagerness (which has continued through to this day) to spot ‘convergence’ wherever it showed itself. So much so that Bernard Berelson, albeit with polemical intent, was able to offer an obituary for the entire enterprise in his famous Public Opinion Quarterly essay of 1959, ‘The state of communication research’. He argued that the main problem was excessive fragmentation combined with a perceived absence of significant new ideas after the developments of the previous decades (for instance, the work of Lazarsfeld et al. on mediated influence, and of Hovland on persuasion). However, as many commentators have since pointed out, Berelson painted a more gloomy picture than was perhaps justified by exaggerating the number of relevant ‘bits’ that ought to cohere.

In 1950, the publication of the volume which he edited with Morris Janowitz, A Reader in Public Opinion and Communication, had signalled a major point in the emergence of an interdisciplinary project. As well as the roll call of North-American-based pioneers—Lasswell, Blumer, Katz, Cantril, Lazarsfeld, Lippmann, Hovland, Löwenthal among them—the collection drew extensively from the work of writers who would not easily have recognized themselves as researching from ‘within’ its ostensible boundaries. Post-facto recruitment of ‘outside’ researchers is still, of course, an important way in which the field reconfigures and develops. It is worth noting here just how important certain anthologies have been, as acts of attempted consolidation. Twenty years later in Britain, Jeremy Tunstall’s Media Sociology (1970) performed a rather similar function, as did Denis McQuail’s Sociology of Mass Communication (1972), the latter indicating at its margins the arrival of ‘new’ critical and cultural theory to supplement, and at times to contest, the social science emphasis.

Such a tradition of concern over shape and direction, divergence and convergence, should not be seen simply as the ‘failure’ of a research specialism to establish itself properly. It is a reflection both of the increasing centrality of media-related issues to a whole range of studies in the social sciences (and latterly, in the humanities too) and also of the way in which study of the media has a tendency, because of the interconnections between questions of structure and agency, process and meaning, to draw attention to the limitations of particular theories and methods which are applied to it. In doing so, it acts to ferment both dissent and development, pulling in new ideas and new approaches to the perennial question ‘What is it important to look at and how should we look at it?’ with the same energy as it rejects others. The very dynamics of media developments themselves —the rate and scope of change across the technological, institutional and cultural realms—have in a sense determined the awkward character of media research’s lineage. Our chapter assessing the work of Elihu Katz (chapter 2) brings out well some of the detail of this in the course of plotting one highly distinguished career.

In nearly every national academic system, media research has been an interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary endeavour (only quite recently with any roots in significant undergraduate teaching) and thus has never really acquired an institutional identity strong enough to keep its boundaries tidy. One might argue that such an ambition, were it to develop, would be self-defeating anyway.

Thanks largely to Paul Lazarsfeld’s perceptive—but by no means disinterested account, one aspect of earlier conflict has attained widely recognized status internationally—namely, the division between ‘critical’ and ‘administrative’ research. This dichotomy, essentially one between a European-influenced commitment to placing media processes within a framework of political scepticism and critique and a dominant (but by no means exclusive) tendency towards assessing the functionality of media systems within ‘given’ policy parameters in the USA,has been revisited many times. It has been variously revised and refuted, although its continuing use as a reference point must indicate a certain suggestiveness. Allowing for the simplistic nature of the division, it is certainly not hard to see on which side the greater possibilities for research funding lie. With this come greater opportunities for at least some form of sustained investigative relationship with institutional practices and processes. We consider the question of the relationship between media policy and media research a little later.

So even the briefest of genealogical sketches produces a rather turbulent picture, though a fascinating and valuable one for intellectual history, in which continuities are less apparent than differences and disjunctions at each new stage in the development of media technologies. Although media research has always been overdetermined by the interplay between the different economic and political perspectives on modernity, in its analyses and enquiries over the years it has engaged with an astonishing range of conceptual shifts and methodological reappraisals. In the last two decades, perhaps the most important of these have concerned the re-positioning of many strands of research within a larger project investigating the changing shape of late modern ‘culture’. The European contribution here, theoretical and empirical, has been stronger in determining the general character of the field than at any previous stage in its development. A number of our contributions connect with this point and we return to it ourselves below.

THREE THEMES

Making comparisons

When we were considering the overall design of this book, we were concerned to ensure that a comparative element was built into it. This was not a quest for individual essays that engaged in formal comparison so much as for the collection as a whole to provide sufficient diversity of content to bring into relief international similarities and differences both in the style of media research and in its objects of study.

The reader cannot fail to be struck by two broad sets of comparisons that inform almost all of the essays. One grand line of distinction concerns Europe and the Americas. And there is a further division within each of these broad geographical categories: first, our contributions cover both North America (with its own significant fissure between the USA and Canada) and then Latin America; they also deal with the ‘advanced’ Europe centred upon the European Union and with part of the post-communist Europe that awaits entry to the EU. Each of these areas is characterized by distinctive relations between the national state, the market, and the media, in which the historical weight of inherited institutional patterns, political and economic practices and cultural norms should not be underestimated. And it is this matrix of relations which holds the interpretive key to the developments that are assessed in these pages.

As we noted earlier, the United States has been the first and foremost locus of media research in historical terms. The USA has also made the running in the reshaping of the media environment, most notably in terms of technological advance and deregulatory policies whose impact has been felt both in the Americas and also across the Atlantic, as well as further afield. Despite its proximity to the United States, Canada’s federal government has striven to use media and cultural policies to shore up the state’s distinctiveness. Hence, the theme of politico-cultural power relations, and how these are underpinned by media economics, is a central issue for debate. But this question traverses all the Americas and resonates far beyond, as the stand-off between the European Union and the USA over GATT in late 1993 showed. That said, proximity to the USA produces an especially sharp reaction to the question of cultural sovereignty. Much media development and policy-making in Latin America has been shaped by the pattern of US investment and cultural exports to that continent and this has interacted with indigenous factors to produce some unique results.

In the European Union and its member states, so far as questions of media and cultural policy are concerned, the USA has been both a model at times to be emulated and at others to be rejected. On the European continent itself, the expanding European Union has provided an aspirational model for the transitional national states of the post-communist era. For such aspirant outsiders the EU signifies modernization, the market economy and pluralistic democracy. Looked at from within, however, the drive to integration has hardly been without contradictions between the economy and culture, and institutional differences rooted in the distinctive histories of the member national states continue to hold sway over the Union’s development. These differences are manifest in the field of media policy and will continue to be so. One way of looking at this is to say that there is therefore no single ‘European’ model for the media, as the weight of the national state remains decisive in the shaping of media institutions. Nevertheless, by comparison with the United States, there is still a different range of possibilities in Europe for the relations between state, market and media. Hence, moving from the west of the continent to its centre, it is apparent that the postcommunist states are being profoundly shaped in their development patterns by ‘European’ constraints and possibilities.

Media, state and market

A further theme which is addressed at several points, sometimes directly and sometimes only through its bearing on other factors, is the positioning of media systems in relation both to the organizations of the state and to the mechanisms of the market. Media systems have an important public role both in information provision and also in offering a forum for debate and space for a public to recognize itself as such. Thus, media systems are necessary institutions to any form of civil society. This perspective emphasizes output which is broadly journalistic over that which is offered primarily as entertainment, but there is by no means a sharp division here and there are grounds for seeing many kinds of dramatic material, serious and popular, as having a public function too.

The notion of the ‘public’ has been a troubled term in contemporary political analysis, indicating a degree of autonomy both from direct state intervention and from the realm of market structures and corporate influence. In Britain and other European countries, for instance, there has been a tendency for the tradition of ‘public’ broadcasting to become too closely linked with the interests of the state (thereby allowing more recent commercial initiatives to project themselves as democratic and liberatory). In many other countries, however, notably the United States, ‘public’ broadcasting exists only in a marginal form where it exists at all, even though national regulation has produced a pattern of provision which is by no means a simple reflection of private imperatives.

Systems of funding are a major factor, of course, but they are not the only one, since requirements of ‘public’ responsibility have regularly been made of ‘privately owned’ media and this looks likely to become the dominant mode by which any public requirements upon the media might now conceivably be made. Such sanctions have either been implemented through bureaucratic oversight over commercial activities (as in the case of the British Independent Television Commission) or through the ‘softer’ mechanisms of bodies of public appeal (as in Press Complaints Boards). An additional problem in the regulation of public media systems is that notions of ‘the public’ have often tended towards an emphatically unitary idea, and consequent unwillingness to register multiplicity and variety; this has also occasionally led to countenancing imposed homogeneity. Reappraisal on this point, retaining a principle of cohesion but discarding neat unities, is clearly a prerequisite of any cogent policy in the future, whatever national historical differences obtain.

But how might media systems gain the maximum space for independent information-gathering analysis and debate, with the consequent expectation of ‘public’ value, and also have viable and stable funding? This has been the problem, variously posed, for the critical review of media systems internationally, and it has increasingly become precisely an international issue because to address it in the terms solely of a national media economy has become either impossible or imprudent. It is not suprising that the ‘solutions’ variously arrived at, often carrying strong historical legacies, have so often been one form or other of accommodation to the international media market. As our three chapters on policy shifts show, the intensified round of deregulation in western Europe (where the United States model has been influential though not decisive) has been joined by the wholesale deconstruction and reconstruction of media systems, and media-politics relations, within the former communist countries. Here, the swing from state to market has been most dramatic (notwithstanding concealed continuities), carrying an impetus which has had, so far, little time for that ‘intermediate’ category of the public that has been the focus for so much liberal democratic debate.

Yet, despite the widespread consolidation of market models, linked to new technologies of production and distribution and variously pledged (or not) to the observance of ‘public’ principles, state and supra-state organizations (for instance, the EU) still exert a measure of regulatory influence over the media as an industry and over certain forms of public representation. Governmental effectiveness in the former area is determined by the particular forms of economic control which specific states operate, namely the larger settlements made in any given polity between the ‘state’ and the ‘market’. Their function as regulators of content depends in some measure on the strength of ‘public feeling’ upon which they can draw (and also orchestrate) concerning specific notions of cultural nationalism and morality as well as broader rights of citizenship. That the state could, and should, intervene to protect citizenship against erosion through the unchecked promotionalism, selectivity and inequalities of markets— thereby paradoxically regulating for freedom against neo-liberal constraint— should be an established principle of any self-aware democratic politics. But the protection of state interests against those of public knowledge is, of course, still a major cause of actual intervention in many countries. Moreover, the possibilities of certain kinds of state interest being well served by market interests, to the general detriment of the broader public interest, are considerable. It is how to initiate cogent policy in this complex configuration, rather than any single alignment with either side of the state/market relation, which now represents the greatest problem for ensuring the democratic character of press and broadcasting.

All of the above means that, outside of improbable schemes for wholly alternative funding, the products of mass media systems will have an increasingly commodified character as the exchange-value of media products extends to areas where it has so far been resisted and intensifies in areas (e.g. globally marketed entertainment) where it has always been present. It is thus very hard to resist the view that a global economic squeeze on public culture is occurring. Assessing just how and to what degree ‘public’ values are sustainable or not in the face of this underlying pattern of commodification and how states might act in the public interest to check and contest a thoroughgoing privatization of citizenship is therefore a more important task for international media research than either of the two rather ‘diversionary’ paths which offer themselves—the search for non-cornmodified alternatives or the repetitive denunciation of commodification per se.

Research and policy

The well-established, though contentious, distinction between critical and administrative research mentioned earlier emerges in a newer form in a number of the chapters that follow. Colin Sparks, Jean-Claude Burgelman, Vincent Mosco and Vanda Rideout and Elizabeth Fox, in their various ways, explore the relationship between media research and media policy. One way of understanding that relationship is to suggest that the funding crisis in scientific research in almost all the developed countries has created a situation in which media research is increasingly being constrained, if not determined, by the perceived needs of government and industry. This results, it can be argued, in a profound skewing of the research agenda to issues defined as more or less exclusively relevant to the management of the polity and the economy. In turn, media research, like so many other areas of social science, is increasingly condemned to short-termism and pragmatism both in the selection of research areas and the approaches that are taken. And this can lead not only to a narrowing and skewing of the research focus, but also to a weakening of an alternative, humanist and critical tradition, which is left to scrabble at the margins of media research and scholarship. The increasing emphasis on the involvement of what in the UK’s particular jargon are research’s ‘end-users’, an emphasis which has now been enshrined in the basic agenda of the research infrastructure and has been incorporated into the two major programmes of media research funded by the British Economic and Social Research Council over recent years, can be seen to embody this trend towards ‘relevance’ most clearly.

However, the increasing relevance of media (especially, of course, the converging technologies of television and telecommunications) in the formation of national policy, and the increasing success of media researchers in persuading policy-makers and funders at all levels that there is indeed a social agenda to be pursued here, produce something of a double-edged sword. It can lead, reactively, to the reinforcement of extraneously denned political and economic priorities at the core of media research.

Two factors complicate matters further. The first is the argument that media research has an obligation to engage in public policy, but to do so with the aim of actually shifting the policy agenda. In addressing issues of political communication and of representation (in both senses of the word) as well as those of the regulation and consumption of new information and communication technologies, media research should be seen to be involved in a constant debate with those who, by virtue of ownership or election, have the power to steer media culture. The second complicating factor, and this comes through particularly in the contributions of Fox and Sparks, is the variation in the relationship between research and policy, geographically and historically. In both Latin America and in post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe changing statemedia relations and the relations between states and wider sets of regional or global forces have both defined and legitimated a necessarily shifting relationship between research and po...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Editors’ Introduction
• 2: The Work of Elihu Katz: Conceptualizing Media Effects in Context
• 3: Cultural Studies as a Research Perspective: Themes and Tensions
• 4: Gender and Media Studies: No Woman, No Cry
• 5: Post-Communist Media in Transition
• 6: Issues and Assumptions in Communications Policy and Research in Western Europe: A Critical Analysis
• 7: Media Policy in North America
• 8: Media and Culture in Latin America
• 9: The Media and War