SOC103: Chapter 14: Media & Mass Communication

 Mass media: the technology that makes mass communication possible, it includes the printing press, radio, television, photocopier,
& camera, among others
 Mass communication: the transmission of a message from a single source to multiple recipients at the same time
Ways of looking at Mass Media
Functionalists: the way mass media are organized & how this organization contributes to social equilibrium or stability. Interested in the role of
media as a mechanism for informing, socializing & educating the public
Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message
Critical theorists: interested in the ways powerful groups in society use the media they own or control to further organizational & class
interests. This use of the media increases their wealth & ensures continued political hegemony.
 Political economic perspective: focuses on the ways private ownership affects what is communicated & the ways it affects the
exercise of power
 Cultivation theory: (Gerbner & Gross, 1976), theory asserts that mass media – television in particular – have become the main
source of info in society today.
o Mean World Syndrome: a heightened state of insecurity, exaggerated perception of risk & danger, & fearful propensity
for hard-line political solutions to social problems. The overuse of television (4 hours plus) creates a homogeneous,
almost universally fearful populace
Classic Studies – Deciding What’s News
Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News (1979): media organization & journalists decide what to cover (study of CBS, NBC, Times, Newsweek)
 First: concerned with gaining & keeping a mass audience, thus have some stories that appeal to a mass audience (i.e. famous people,
violence, bloodshed, sex & scandal), tendency to report negative views – if it bleeds, it leads
 Second: national news shaped by & in the interests of the elite, stories chosen that will improve their reputation
Despite competition, degree of consensus among news organizations is striking. Communicated similar views: individualism, belief in
responsible capitalism, desire for social order & strong national leadership
Much of the news communicated to audiences is inaccurate or at least distorted. It is delivered in a way that benefits people with power over
the media institutions, the media organization does this to make friends, avoid enemies & preserve itself. He also argues that the news is part
of a submerged class struggle in which the middle class…is acting, even unknown to itself, in the interest of the elite classes
Media Ownership
 Media broadcasting: especially news broadcasting, generally reflect interests of the media owners
 Publically owned media: owned & operated by provincial governments (CBC/SRC, NFB & educational broadcasters, Radio-Quebec &
TVO). Usually funded by the government, but may receive advertising revenues. TVO is an exception being a registered charity &
funded by memberships & donations
 Private ownership: concerned with profit-making, most of Canada’s mass media, problem of massive multimedia empires owned by
a small number of powerful players. (I.e. Time Warner is the largest media company in the world, with interests in internet (AOL),
television (CNN, HBO, TBS, etc), film (Warner Bros.) & Time Inc, largest magazine publisher in the world with over 115 titles –
including Time, Fortune, People & Sports Illustrated with a worldwide audience of over 300 million). In the US, 3 of 4 major
television networks are part of multimedia giants.
 Conglomerate: a business structure that engages in several, usually unrelated business endeavours: moviemaking, gambling casinos
& alcoholic beverages. I.e. huge industrial conglomerate General Electric owns NBC (along with Universal Studios)
 Kent Commission (1981): concentration engulfs Canadian daily newspaper publishing. Three chains control 9/10 of French-language
daily newspaper circulation, while three other chains control 2/3 of English language circulation, which threatens journalism’s social
responsibility. Newspaper publishers fiercely opposed legislation to reduce the power of conglomerates & opposed creating the
proposed Press Rights Council, arguing it would promote government interference & monopoly is no worse than competitive papers
 Cross-ownership: a business structure in which one corporation owns media businesses of different types. I.e. a large corporation
may own newspapers, magazines, television networks & radio channels
Canadian Content
 Private media have no interest in Canadian content, likely returns on investment are too low, thus favour American content for
profit. Canada’s media are regulated by a federal Broadcasting Act, originally established in 1968 & amended in 1991. The purpose
of this Act has been to strengthen Canadian culture through controls on related economic & political institutions. The Act includes a
broadcasting policy for Canada, a specification of regulatory powers to be exercised by the CRTC, & a specification of how the
CBC/SRC is to operate. However, they have shown themselves more sympathetic to private media companies than to public ones. So
in the last 30 years, neo-liberal policies have resulted in media deregulation, privatization & concentration, showing the state’s role
has actually decreased.
Media Bias: Going beyond Fair & Balance
 Martin (2008): some claim the US media outlets show political bias in what they choose to report. According to political scientist Tim
Groeling, public discussions about media bias are often just food fights, with pundits & partisans throwing around anecdotes. He
examined reporting of in-house presidential approval polling by the major US television networks between January 1997 & February
2008. He found that ABC, CBS, & NBC all showed a pro-Democratic bias, all were most likely to report increases rather than decrease
in President Bill Clinton’s approval rating, but favoured reporting drops rather than gains in President George W. Bush’s popularity.
FOX news revealed a Republican bias, with a pattern opposite to that of the other three networks
Media & Politics
 News spreads propaganda & perpetuates mainstream capitalist ideology (coded messages)
 Koenen (2002): News space & time are limited & competitive, forcing editors to make choices about who & what to cover
 During elections, candidates keep statements brief & punchy, resulting in an increasingly, politicians speak in sound bites.
  Media coverage of politics is based increasingly on polls, rather than analysis of the issues (coverage tends to be superficial),
reflecting a concern with public opinion (vox populi: voice of the people)
 Much journalism today is biased in favour of one political party or ideology over another.
 Gans study: all mass media journalism is mainstream, titling slightly left or right. None expresses radical, provocative or anti-
establishment views
 Polling, especially when used to highlight the horserace aspect of a political contest, undermines the idea of democracy as a
deliberative process, producing instead something closer to a popularity contest. By devoting most of the coverage to who is leading
the race, news agencies increase the rates of bandwagonism – people changing their views (or reporting they have changed their
views) to side with the winner. Undecided voters often simply cast their ballots for the candidate who is projected to win, rather
than engaging in the political debate. Even more subtly corrosive is the media’s role in agenda-setting, which focuses attention on
some issue but not others. Whether positive or negative, media coverage influences people’s views of the candidates & sets the
tone in which people talk about the election (i.e. reporting on a candidates’ characteristics (especially evident when the candidate is
a woman)
 Truncation or distortion occurs mostly because the media are privately owned. The privately owned, massive mainstream news
services increasingly condense the political landscape into a two-party competition, each side represented by catchy sound bites.
 It seems that often the role of the media in politics in neither informative nor integrative. It serves the interests of the media owners
& their political friends; in addition, it promotes the illusion of conflict & doubt where there is little or none. It diverts attention from
important issues to trivial ones. In this way, the media reproduces – rather than changes – the existing structure of power & opinion
in society.
Global Media
 West (2002): Canadians consume a disproportionate amount of American culture, many coming to favour it over Canadian culture.
However, Canadians are starting to pay more attention to how other countries & other media views us (i.e. Arab news portrayals of
NA society & culture)
 In the West, the mass media tend to provide a pro-western, pro-American or pro-European bias in their coverage & understanding
of the world
 Media coverage of human rights abuses is biased, tendency to report abuses outside the Western, capitalist world & ignore those
within it
 The media is more likely to report abuses when they occur in large, economically developed non-Western countries (i.e. China &
Russia). Poorer & less-populous countries with equally serious abuses are often ignored – i.e. Sudan, Myanmar, Rwanda, DRC, as
examples of such blind spots (Ron & Ramos, 2006).
 Jurgen Habermas (2006): Can this selective blindness be corrected? Has written that mediated political communication in the public
sphere can facilitate deliberative legitimation processes in complex societies only if a self-regulating media system gains
independence from its social environments & if a self-regulating media system gains independence from its social environments & if
anonymous audience grant a feedback between an informed elite discourse & a responsive civil society. This means that the mass
media will play a politically significant role only when it has freed itself from its current biases & preoccupations with profit-making,
& when informed elites are willing to honestly discuss policy issues with an informed public
Classic Studies: Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory
 Feminist cultural theory: Walters, Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory (1995): Looks at well-known female icons
in popular culture, such as the singer Madonna & the fictional lead characters in the 1991 movie Thelma & Louise. Examines the role
of media in depicting women, how the media represents feminism & how this effects the movement, male gaze, concepts such as
female ways of seeing, argues that there is a need to integrate feminist cultural theory with other theoretical traditions, such as
ethnography.
The Cultural Studies Perspective
 Cultural studies perspective: focuses on types of communication people are regularly exposed & messages conveying dominant
ideology
 McLuhan: important figure in the development of interdisciplinary, cultural studies approach to media & technology
 Tries to understand culture in all its many forms by analyzing the socio-political context in which the culture develops.
 While the political economy perspective focuses on media ownership & control, the cultural studies perspective focuses on the
ideological aspects of the media: its role in supporting & manipulating power. I.e. the cultural studies approach analyzes the
messages communicated in media content, the interpretation of this content by audiences, & the struggles of some groups to
change mainstream media messages or else communicate their own messages in alternative media forms (Ishita, 2002)
 Cultural studies perspective is readily applicable to gender issues, since the depiction of women is an important part of women’s
treatment in a gendered society (i.e. appearance, beauty norms, 95% of anorexics are women, bulimia nervosa: throw up their food
after eating it. 50% of people who have been anorexic develop bulimia, 1 in 25 post-secondary aged women have had bulimia)
 Goffman: presentation of self in everyday life (1959), dramaturgical approach; sigma: any discrediting effect a failing, a flaw or a
handicap.
Media Representation of Disadvantaged Groups
 Mahtani (2001): minority groups are both misrepresented & selectively underrepresented, this significantly affects their well-being.
This is done for an economic reason, producers & advertisers favour programs that most of the population can related to
Media portrayal of women & gender
 Media often represents women in stereotyped & conventional ways (Madonna or whore). (I.e. treatment between Stronach as sexy
vs. boyfriend Mckay as politically savvy)
 Alternative media: outlet for progressive views, used by subordinate groups, branded as educational or feminist by rest of media,
thus watched, read or listened to be relatively few people
  Efforts: male sports stars talking about violence against women, shows with husband as inept, however wives as competent in
domestic sphere
 Male gaze: news story, especially a European-American, male point of view, standpoint is hidden, assumed to be unbiased &
objective
One World, Many Societies
 Equal gender portrayal in the media around the world
 Global Monitoring Project (GMMP) found in a 2005 study that women appeared in only 21% of stories & only 10% of stories were
centred on women. In the 2009 study, women appeared in 24% of stories, while 16% of stories focused on women. Source: WACC
(2009, 2010)
Homogenization & Niche Marketing
 Reinhold (2006): Mass media often treat the mass audience as ill-defined & its members indistinguishable from one another. In the
interests of making the largest possible profit, the media often play to the lowest common denominator. By design, the mass media
bring everyone down to the same intellectual level. The mass media (especially television) is a vast wasteland (Minow, 1950s). They
are a wasteland with homogenizing leveling effects. This simplifying assumption encourages the media to approach us viscerally, at
the animal or chemical level.
 Marshall McLuhan (1964): the medium is the message: how people are affected by media depends largely on whether the medium
is printed or visual (i.e. television is much more direct, visceral & emotionally provocative)
 Limits to the homogenizing effects of mass media: industrial societies are much more diverse, owing to the division of labour &
specialization. Media products have multiplied & are more diverse, targeting market segments rather than everyone at once. Thus,
they play a less integrative role than they once did & reproduce the social divisions & inequalities that exist in society.
 Niche marketing: profit through segmentation (i.e. Spike, W. Today, NFL)
 S-shape: adoption pattern of innovations that were once luxuries but now are needs (television, car etc), small numbers of
adoptions by the courageous few, then a flood of adoptions & finally, belated adoption by the cultural stragglers
 Rainwater, Coleman & Handel (1962): advised the publisher of romance magazine to play on women’s fears of becoming
unattractive, losing their husbands to other women, & losing the love & respect of their children to promote household products
more effectively
Media, Conflict & Crime
 Bushman & Huesmann (2006): young people mimic violence shortly after viewing it (media desensitizes people to violence)
 Boxer et al. (2009): violent media increased likelihood of violet activities, increased behavioural aggression
 Dodge et al. (2006): engaging in violent activities may also reflect previous experiences with violence, in the family home &
elsewhere
 Media Awareness Network: a great deal of research on media effects has been done in laboratories on small children & thus has
limitations. Cross-national research has presented some evidence that media causes, as well as promotes, real-life violence
 Jonathan Freedman (2002): Japanese television (& comic books) contains some of the most violent images in the world, yet has
lower rates of murder than Canada or US. Culture teaches us different ways of effects of media aggression on our arousal. Concludes
that watching violence neither produces violence in people, or desensitizes them to it
 Frustration-aggression hypothesis: leads to aggression only if the frustrated individual has been socialized to be aggressive in that
situation (variety of responses or adaptations to frustration, including innovation, ritualism & rebellion)
Media & the Construction of Social problems
 Herbert Blumer (1971): social problems develop in stages (social recognition, social legitimating)
 Social problems: socially constructed, no problem (even genocide) gains widespread attention & concern without active promotion
by media (which raises awareness & mobilizes legitimacy) i.e. panic about child sex offences overhyped (many facts being half-truths
& distortions)
Jean Baudrillard
Hyperreality: a timeless, perfect fantasy world that they believe to be real, but where nothing is authentic. Within this world, they do not
experience life, but only watch performances, & are controlled by illusions (i.e. Gulf war was an illusion by the television, like a video game)
o Reasoned that the definition of war must include the possibility of defeat for both sides. The sheer military power of the
US meant that the outcome was never in doubt; thus, there was no war
o Pervades the media, people have ceased to act either as citizens to protect their freedoms, or as proletarians yearning for
the revolution. They are merely fact-consumers, & therefore the prey of media-fantasists
 Commodity fetishism: Marx, arises out of growth of commercial trade, where social relationships between people come to be
expressed & transformed into objectified relationships between things (i.e., commodities & money). People are dehumanized, &
things assume unwarranted importance. This process tends to mystify human relations by turning things, & even people, into
systems – objects – that represent something else. Many economic phenomena – including money, consumer products, & social
positions – are said to be fetishized when they attain an independent power vis-à-vis ordinary people
 Gauthier (2009): we find a seductive defiance of perception – a game played with reality. It reveals the continuing struggle between
the rational thinker & contemporary cultural phenomena such as consumerism, the virtual, simulation, & terrorism. This means, in
practice, rethinking every single one of our ideas, methods, & taken-for-granted assumptions.
 Sefat & Kelly (2009): argue that nation-states, which are commonly considered to be sovereign, may not exist as such. Without a
clear notion of sovereignty, sovereign nation-states may not be real
 Staples (2009): notes the polarization of America & Islam has been framed by the mass media in a way that stresses the symbolism
of the 9/11 attacks & overlooks the global role of US power. Following Baudrillard’s work on the binary of the Other, Staples draws
on alternative theories of news coverage & media practice, showing how it contributes to America’s culture of terror, justifying
retaliation & further globalization by the American state
  Walters & Kop (2009): note that digital technology is not only transforming the world, it is revolutionizing people’s inner lives as well
as their social interactions.
 Torikian (2009): asserts that postmodernism is a dangerous philosophy because it questions whether there can (ever) be objective
reality. What he considers the appalling notion of hyperreality replaces the real world with individually constructed illusions of
reality, representing an attempt by postmodernits thinkers to discover the truth behind the truth. But Torikian claims that reality
must, finally, be derived from the world we perceive around us through our physical senses. The notion of hyperreality suggests that
our sense perceptions need not depend on that object’s inherent characteristics – that things are not what they seem (Thus the Gulf
war never happened!)
 Kellner (2006): before 9/11, Baudrillard viewed world history as made up of weak events & boring politics. After 9/11, he viewed
terrorism as a sign that, with globalization & the war on terror, the world has entered a new world war defined by globalization’s
war with itself
 It is this war, viewed through the lens of Baudrillard’s earlier theorizing, that we can understand the postmodern condition as
replacing reality & truth with illusion & appearance.
 Baudrillard’s idea of immanent reversal captures the process by which media images, originally intended to triumphantly present US
military success & power, instead became powerful global symbols of defeat because they gave evidence of US brutality &
arrogance. Baudrillard is viewed as having made culture self-referential by treating signs & symbols as realities in their own right,
regardless of material reality (Campbell, 2008). Absolute truth, from this standpoint, is nonexistent (or at least, unknowable); & we
need to consider the possibility that images are forms of resistance, no depictions of reality.
 Rennett (2009): calls the term reality television a euphemism, these programs don’t show real life at all.
 Rennet finds that Baudrillard sees in reality TV a pretend world & a form of hyperreality, like Disneyland. These illusions of the real
world are so powerful that they can erase the original. They create a normative reality for viewers just as Barbie dolls create a
normative reality for little girls
New Insights
 Gane (2005): media technologies have become the foundation of human life
 According to Kittler: five key figures in media research are Shannon, Weaver, McLuhan, Lacon & Foucault – all question the
materiality of info technology & lead us toward a post-human, post-modern approach to media analysis.
 Rabot (2007): imagine that media still make a difference, argues against the trivialization of media imagery, noting the need to
recognize their potential for deep social importance. New technologies arguably can help draw people together around images that
will recreate emotional & social bonds, & aid in the remythologization of society
 Fuchs & Sandoval (2008): alternative media exemplify the prosumer concept: by making people both producers & consumers, they
reduce repression & increase emancipation in the process of info production. Postmodernists argue that reality is imaginary & media
imagine a public reality, in the form of a hyperreality. The Marxists believe that reality is real & media manipulate it. Thus critical
theorist Ortiz-Negron (2008) argues that the traditional lines between government, business & media have become blurred, looking
at Puerto Rico as an example, media, especially television, influence politics & the working of government.
 Berardi (2006): semi-capitalism: advanced form of control, government-controlled conglomerate incorporating financial, media &
cultural interests imposes repressive conformism on an unwitting public, impeding democracy (happening in Italy, Puerto Rico in the
last 15 years). However, independent media companies are working to counter the effects of the repressive organization
 Martelli & Cappello (2005): media forming new alliances with religion (massive coverage of the funeral of Pope John Paul II & World
Youth Day.
 Recently, television favours postmodern religious expression, which has a mystical, collective flavor, in contrast to the modern
ascetic, individualistic faith. Postmodernity brings about de-secularization, which erases the modern dichotomy between private
faith & public life. The new media portrayals of religion help to integrate religion into present-day social life.
 Lyon (2006): reawakening among Protestants, making use of modern media, younger members occupy social niches, approaching
Christianity in non-traditional ways
 Lau (2004): news reporting also influenced by internal forces (actions & choices of journalists)