The Place of Media Power

Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age

Nick Couldry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134614073
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This fascinating study focuses on an area neglected in previous studies of the media: the meetings between ordinary people and the media. Couldry explores what happens when people who normally consume the media witness media processes in action, or even become the object of media attention themselves.

Part 1
A NEW THEORY OF MEDIA POWER

1
LOCATING MEDIA POWER

A television producer tells a visitor how excited his team will be to see her at the studio. ‘Oh, the studio!’ says the woman to her husband. ‘That’s where all the magic happens.’ The producer smiles disdainfully: ‘Oh, you’ve worked in television?’ ‘No,’ replies the woman, ‘but I’ve watched a lot of it.’

The dialogue comes from Wayne’s World,¹ a film about how a talk programme produced by Wayne and Garth in their basement and broadcast on public access television, gets adopted by a commercial channel. The channel’s sponsor proudly takes his wife one day to the studios to see the new acquisition being rehearsed. There she meets the producer’s professional disdain. The short encounter crystallises in fictional form the question from which this book starts: what do nonmedia people’s encounters with the media world (whether ‘magical’ or not) tell us about the symbolic power of media institutions?

More broadly, how is media power – the particular concentration of symbolic power that the media represent – reproduced as legitimate? The aim is not to criticise symbolic power as such: all aesthetic production involves boundaries and hierarchies around the fictional world it creates. Nor is it to argue that the mediation of social life is necessarily bad, requiring a return to an idealised world ‘before’ mediation (if one ever existed).² I am interested instead in questions about the particular concentration of symbolic power in contemporary media institutions: how is it legitimated and naturalised, and what is its social impact?

I approach these questions by exploring how non-media people interact with media institutions, and how they talk about those interactions. We know a lot about the media’s institutional structures, and about how people interact indirectly with them through consuming media texts, but direct interactions between nonmedia people and media institutions remain something of a mystery. What happens, for example, when people witness media production? What are people’s experiences of appearing in the media themselves? These questions remain underresearched.³ Yet it is in such cases – when people see the media process close up – rather than in the relaxed, but distanced, context of everyday domestic consumption, that the media’s symbolic power is most likely to be contested. People’s talk about these interactions offers insights into what is perhaps the most fundamental question for media theory: why do we place any value, or credence, in media outputs at all?

To emphasise non-media people’s direct interactions with media institutions is also to focus on the spaces where those interactions take place: studios, filming locations, sites of news coverage, and so on; hence, one reason for the book’s title, ‘the place of media power’. This simple point has wide implications. We can think of the whole media process (production, distribution, consumption) as involving the normal separation of media people from non-media people; this limits the chances of direct interaction with media institutions (cf. Debord, 1983). This separation is, in fact, one reason why the authority of media institutions seems natural: most of us simply don’t go near the places where detailed knowledge of what media institutions do is available. The links between media power and geography, then, go deep, but are themselves only part of a wider pattern of how the media’s symbolic power is naturalised.

By ‘symbolic power’, I mean the media’s ‘power of constructing reality’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 166) in a general sense. Each programme, text or image, of course, has its particular way of maintaining your belief (that it is a true representation of the facts or a convincing fiction). But I am interested in something more general: our complex sets of beliefs about the media and the media’s status as sources of social knowledge. How is belief at that general level reproduced?⁴

At the core of this book are two main claims. First, I argue that the media’s symbolic power is far from automatic; in fact, it has to be continually reproduced through various practices and dispositions at every level of social life. Second, I argue that people’s talk about those situations when, unusually, they get close to the media process offers important insights into the patterns of thought, language, and action by which the media’s authority is reproduced. ‘Media power’ – by which I mean the concentration in media institutions of the symbolic power of ‘constructing reality’ (both factual representations and credible fictions) – is a social process, which we need to understand in all its local complexity.

Let me explain this more fully. Media power is not simply something that media institutions (or media texts) ‘possess’ or their audiences ‘absorb’. Instead, following much recent social theoretical work on power,⁵ I will analyse media power – the massive concentration of symbolic power in media institutions – as the complex outcome of practices at every level of social interaction. Media power is not a binary relation of domination between ‘large’ and ‘small’ ‘actors’, with ‘large actors’ (the media) having the automatic ability to dominate ‘small actors’ (audience members) simply because of their ‘size’. Media power is reproduced through the details of what social actors (including audience members) do and say.

This might seem paradoxical. Surely, what is distinctive about modern media is precisely their ability to have effects simultaneously across a large territory, transcending (and making irrelevant) the scale of local interactions? But to make that assumption elides important dimensions. Historically, as Armand Mattelart has argued, the ever-increasing scale of modern communications is closely connected with the notion of communication ‘as a system of thought and power and as a mode of government’ (1996: xi), an unfinished history of the social production of scale. And sociologically there are important insights to be gained from the work within Actor Network Theory (Callon and Latour, 1981) on how power and influence is achieved in scientific and technological practice. We can understand the media’s ability to become ‘obligatory passing points’ (ibid.: 287) in the general circulation of images and discourse, not as something superimposed on social practice from the outside; instead it is endlessly reproduced through the details of social practice itself. The media, I will claim, have social effects on a large scale not only because centralised mechanisms of broadcasting are in place, but also because we believe in the authority of media discourse in countless local contexts, because we believe that most others believe the same, and because we act on the basis of these beliefs on countless specific occasions. These local patterns of belief and action have become so routine that, in practice, we run them together in a general conception of the media’s ‘effects’ largely abstracted from those specific contexts of reproduction. As a result, the workings of the media’s social authority tend to be hidden, and media power comes to seem natural.

This in itself makes analysis difficult. Media power is generally too obvious to be articulated and criticised. We need analytic tools to cut into this process of naturalisation. If we follow the logic of the argument that media power is locally reproduced, however, we must acknowledge that the media’s social authority is likely to be unevenly reproduced. Media power, however broad its impacts, cannot be absolute or inescapable. At the very least, there are moments and places where it is de-naturalised, perhaps even contested. My second claim, then, is that it is precisely such situations that give us insight into the normal processes by which media power is naturalised. Just as the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel argued that we can understand the ‘“seen but unnoticed”… background features of everyday scenes’ by studying what happens when those features are suspended (1967: 36, 46), so too we can understand the processes which help naturalise media power by studying what happens when they are interrupted.⁶ Such disruptive moments may be more common than normally realised: it is precisely because media power is naturalised, that we do not normally connect them up into any wider pattern.

Inevitably, however, this research strategy involves choices. For one thing, if media power is as deeply embedded in social practice as I claim, then there will be significant differences in how that process works in different places, what we might call different ‘media cultures’. My argument will generally assume as its background the British context with its still quite centralised broadcasting institutions, but the invitation to international comparisons with other media cultures is clear (cf. Chapter 9).

In addition, I have been using the term ‘the media’ so far in a deliberately nonspecific way. This is open to the objection that the authority of different media (television versus radio, the press, music, film, video, and so on) varies significantly. My basic argument, however, is that many common-sense assumptions about the media’s authority operate with a sense of ‘the media’ which is highly non-specific: for example, the hierarchy I analyse in Chapter 3 between ‘media’ and ‘ordinary’ ‘worlds’. Such distinctions cut across the undeniably important differences between how particular media function, or the complex differences within a particular medium’s outputs. Analysis needs to reflect the vagueness, as well as the precision, of talk about ‘the media’ (cf. Becker, 1995: 634–5). In so far as my empirical material is specific in dealing with ‘the media’, it refers mainly to television, but also to radio and the press; in my theoretical chapters, I also refer occasionally to film and music. My principal focus, however, remains the media in the usual ‘commonsense’ definition i.e. the principal mass media: television, radio and the press (including magazines).⁷ I argue that the potential differences between media are less important than how people interact with the institutional sphere of ‘the media’ in general, and how this, in turn, reflects the media’s symbolic status in our generally mediated society.

My approach to the media differs from many others in not being concerned with the impacts of particular texts. It focuses more generally on what it means to live in a society dominated by large-scale media institutions. I want to pose these questions not abstractly, but through detailed empirical work on how members of the media audience themselves talk and act. It is true of course that particular media texts contribute to attitudes and beliefs about the media’s status – I will refer to a number of examples in later chapters – but this is not the only way, or perhaps even the main way, in which the media’s special status is reproduced.⁸ Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argued a decade ago for the importance of analysing not just discourse (and the hierarchies it expresses) but the hierarchic relationships between ‘distinct discursive domains’ (1986: 60). ‘The formation’, they wrote, ‘of new kinds of speech can be traced through the emergence of new public sites of discourse and the transformation of old ones’ (ibid.: 80). We need, then, to study ‘the way discursive traffic and exchange between different domains are structured and controlled’ (ibid.: 195). Stallybrass and White’s main concern was with literature but, by analogy, an important aspect of contemporary media is the asymmetrical connection they establish between different sites of discourse: between public places of media production and private sites of reception. Seen in this light, contemporary media may have important features in common with earlier discursive hierarchies such as the mediaeval Catholic church (Curran, 1982).

Moving away from specific media texts allows us to place in better focus these broad questions about the status of the media in contemporary societies. We need, as Jesus Martin-Barbero has proposed, to place the media in a wider historical ‘field of mediations’ (1993: 139, my emphasis): the history of the various forms by which social action has been mediated through the public circulation of images and text. This, in turn, opens up connections with another history: the history of people’s attempts at alternative ‘mediation’ that challenge the authority of existing media institutions. I return to this particularly in Chapter 8.

The media are a site of profound inequality and, therefore, of potential conflict. As Stuart Hall noted in an early essay, there is:

a fundamental a-symmetry between those who shape events, participate actively in them, those who have skilled and expert knowledge about events, and those who have ‘privileged access’ to events and participants in order to report on and communicate about them: and, on the other hand, the great majorities and minorities of the ‘mass audience’, who do not directly participate in events (even when they are directly affected by them), who have no expert knowledge about them, and who have no privileged right of access to information and personnel.

(1973: 11)

More than one dimension of power, of course, is involved here: state and corporate power, as well as the power of media institutions. I am focusing on the latter. This is not just a technical, but a political issue, since it is an asymmetry in people’s ability to constitute social reality itself. As James Carey has argued, ‘reality is a scarce resource’; ‘the fundamental form of power is the power to define, allocate and display this resource’ (1989: 87). Or, at least, we can say that this power is a fundamental aspect of social power. Its unequal distribution is a central dimension of contemporary social inequality.

This point has been made recently with great force by the sociologist and political theorist Alberto Melucci (1989, 1996) in his work on new forms of social activism. Melucci has for some years argued that, in an increasingly standardised and commodified social environment, conflicts over information and symbolic resources acquire a particular importance (1989: 55). Recently he has focused on the power issues surrounding the media themselves. The increase in symbolic production through the media requires ‘a new way of thinking about power and inequality’ (1996: 179), a study of ‘new centralities and marginalities’ in relation not merely to material resources (as usually defined) but ‘control over the construction of meaning’ (ibid.: 182). ‘The real domination’, he has argued, ‘is today the exclusion from the power of naming’.⁹ Even if this may go a little too far – since, for example, inequalities of economic resources surely remain a central form of domination – it rightly puts centre stage, not only for media theory, but for social theory more widely, the question of how the media’s privileged access to ‘the power of naming’ is reproduced as legitimate. That is the focus of this book.

MEDIA POWER: BEYOND TEXTS AND AUDIENCES

My argument is a response to a crisis, or at least a turning-point, in the sociology of the media (cf. Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998; Ang, 1996: 66; Corner, 1997: 260). More than two decades of empirical work on media audiences has analysed in detail how they interpret media texts and the uses to which the media are put in everyday life. But the suspicion remains that underlying issues of power in relation to the media have not been adequately addressed, and perhaps not even adequately posed.

Let me briefly (and quite schematically) review the different ways in which media sociology has approached issues of power. A crucial term, of course, has been not ‘power’ but ‘ideology’, which has itself provoked great debate. There is no need to enter that debate here, but we can for convenience adopt John Thompson’s definition of the study of ‘ideology’ as the ‘study [of] the ways in which meaning serves to establish and sustain relations of domination’ (1990: 56). The type of connection suggested, then, between ideology, media, and power, is clear: ideology in media texts reinforces wider power imbalances (whether between the state and civil society, or between corporate interests and individuals). We need to understand the difficulties with this, since they are important background to my own approach.

Perhaps the simplest treatment of the media–power relation is to analyse ideological structures ‘contained’ in media texts themselves. This can sometimes be effective if combined with a sophisticated theory of how wider power imbalances and ideology are reflected in media production (Kellner, 1995). But, from the perspective of how best to study the relation between power issues and the media, such an approach offers no detailed consideration of how media texts are a...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• THE PLACE OF MEDIA POWER
• COMEDIA
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PLATES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PART 1: A NEW THEORY OF MEDIA POWER
• PART 2: MEDIA PILGRIMS: ON THE SET OF CORONATION STREET
• PART 3: MEDIA WITNESSES: TWO DECADES OF PROTEST
• PART 4: THE FUTURE OF THE MEDIA FRAME?
• APPENDIX: METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY