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CRITICAL STUDIES Critical scholars have alternative theories for the relationship of media  industry, content, and society. They examine the connection between media and society from political-economic, feminist, ethnic, and media criticism perspectives. These perspectives  focus on the need for media literacy and a critical understanding of media structure and its power, as well as the meaning of its content. That means that we should not just accept the media at face value, as though it were a natural phenomenon like the weather. We should try instead to understand the causes underlying media change and to be skeptical about the motives of the media industry. In contrast to the SMCR model introduced in Chapter 1, the critical studies approach emphasizes the feedback link and an active process in which the human receiver “decodes” the  messages that the human source encodes.

POLITICAL ECONOMY Political economy draws inspiration from the work of nineteenth-century political economist Karl Marx. Marx wrote that society is based on the relations between those who own the means of production (for example, consumer electronics factories and printing presses) and those who work for them. In this view, it is the owners’ interests that are refl ected by media and culture, because the dominant groups in a society—usually those who own the major  corporations—want to create an underlying consensus, or hegemony, of ideology favoring their continued domination (Gramsci, 1994). Hegemony consists of creating a consensus around certain self-serving ideas, like “the poor will always be with us,” through a variety of means, including the m edia. Although consumer needs and the law of supply and demand still  affect the media, they operate in an economic system devoted to preserving the interests of the  ruling classes. This analysis suggests that media reflect the interests of media owners, a dvertisers, and, through the advertisers’ corporations, the general nature of what the people in power want said (Altschull, 1995). The same groups of  people who sit on the boards of directors of major media companies also sit on the boards of other major corporations and the banks that support them. Now the same economic class that dominates the

Political economy analyzes patterns of class domination and economic power.

Hegemony is the use of media to create a consensus around certain ideas, so that they come to be accepted as common sense.

Media literacy means learning to think critically about the role of media in society.

Critical studies examines the overall impact of media.

MAKING MONEY THE NEW MEDIA WAY Electronic auction sites like eBay earn money from sales commissions rather than advertising.

David Young-Wolff/PhotoEdit

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40  PART 1  |  MEDIA AND THE INFORMATION AGE

older  media is asserting control over the new media as well (McChesney, 2007) and the ruling class includes new media entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs of Apple as well as old media barons like Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. Even public service media like PBS are supported, in part, by businesses through direct donations and through large charitable  foundations, such as the Ford Foundation, that are controlled by the same class of people who own the large corporations. Thus, in the recent economic crisis we saw many news reports that criticized m ajor investment fi rms for causing the crisis, but nothing in the mainstream m edia calling for the downfall of the basic capitalist banking system that created widespread suffering. Communication media support the political and economic status quo in other ways. Citizens who can afford the price of a computer and have the skills to get information from the Internet can participate more fully in politics by a ccessing coverage of political issues and contributing to blogs. Unequal access remains  important in the Information Age. African-Americans and Hispanics are less likely than Anglos to have phone service (Mueller & Schement, 1995) or Internet access (U.S. Census, 2007), making access to technology a new dimension of social stratifi cation between the “haves/have nots” and the “i nformation rich/information poor” segments of society. However, the tensions arising from such inequalities do not usually undermine the underlying social order, according to Gramsci (1971), who argued that the media (and educational institutions) convince the poor to accept the hegemony of ideas that keeps the ruling class on top. For example, supporters of the underlying social order might offer the excuse that the poor don’t want Internet access, rather than being unable to afford it or being excluded from opportunities to learn how to use it effectively. Political economy has cultural implications as well. As commercial media reach into more societies, people in different parts of the world become aware of Coca-Cola and Nike shoes. That may undermine ties to their traditional  culture and spur the growth of consumer culture (Featherstone, 1990). The danger is that commercial messages may i mpact our innermost desires and perceptions of ourselves, making us feel dependent upon consumer products for our happiness. While we become more indebted, pursuing materialistic dreams, manufacturers become fat with profi ts. The conversion of what was once public information, such as census data, into a commodity that can be bought and sold by private companies, such as market research databases, furthers the dominance of the owners of information industries (Schiller, 1996). The  modifi cation of copyright and patent laws to favor their owners is another example (Schement &  Curtis, 1997). Now, the personal information that we provide to WHAT’S YOUR POINT? Do cable talk show shows like Bill O’Reilly offer fresh  perspectives or do they merely reinforce a hegemony of ideas? AP Photo/Jim Cooper Culture is a group’s pattern of thought and activity.

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CHAPTER 2  |  MEDIA AND SOCIETY  41

websites (Campbell & Carlson, 2002) or social networks (Koponen, 2009) has also become a commodity. Political economists b elieve that such a ctions further reinforce a hegemony of power that acts against the interests of  common citizens. FEMINIST STUDIES Feminist critics of the media have concerns that parallel those of political economists to some degree, but focus on the oppression of women by men rather than the oppression of the working class by the ruling class. Thus, communication media serve the purposes of the patriarchy that runs society. The oppression also has economic dimensions. Women typically earn only about two-thirds of what men make in comparable jobs, so the perpetuation of sexism in the images we see in the media benefi ts the owners of media organizations and their associates who run corporate America. Over the years, feminist media scholars have focused on the fact that too few women appear in the media and are limited to a few stereotypical roles (i.e., housewife, mother, nurse, secretary, helper). We will examine those patterns of content and their impact in greater depth in Chapter 14 when we examine media impacts. Here we are concerned more with the reasons why such portrayals exist. These include the underrepresentation of women as media producers and in the corporate decision structure, as well as social norms that prescribe only certain roles for women. For instance, women are bombarded by  advertising messages that stress their role as consumers of mass-produced goods and push unrealistic ideals of feminine beauty that in turn drive sales of products targeted to women. These critiques link feminism with political economy in looking at underlying reasons for the structure and content of the media. Feminists also take issue with the way media are targeted by gender. They argue that media for women, such as romance novels or soap operas, have been denigrated as less serious than male-oriented spy novels. They see the pleasure women take in such media as a form of resistance to male dictates about what is enjoyable (Radway, 1984). Meanwhile, video games (Cassell & Jenkins, 1998) seem designed to alienate and exclude women and, in so doing, exclude them from the inner world of computer knowledge reserved for men. Other studies examine women’s particular subjectivity or sense of interpretation of what media mean (Livingstone, 1998). Women influence the development of technology. The telephone was  intended as an instrument of communication for the (male-dominated) business world, and  telephone companies discouraged “trivial” social use of the telephone (mostly by women) to keep the lines clear for i mportant (that is, male-originated) business calls. However, women staged a quiet rebellion against these restrictions, forcing the redesign of the telephone system, by expanding its capacity to handle the social and other uses women made (Fischer, 1992). FEMINISM ON THE LINE Women reinvented the telephone, converting it to an instrument of social interaction. Bettmann/CORBIS

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42  PART 1  |  MEDIA AND THE INFORMATION AGE

We see the “communications specialist” emerge again in new media as women become the dominant bloggers on the Internet (Lin, 2007; Synovate, 2007). But they still communicate from within their homes, limiting personal social contact and continuing the perception that they are not “businessmen.”

ETHNIC MEDIA STUDIES Many of the same issues apply to minority racial and ethnic groups, including African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians. Many scholars (and political groups like La Raza) have criticized media for disproportionately showing AfricanAmericans, Latinos, and Arabs in such stereotypical roles as maids, criminals, or even terrorists. We will examine the extent of ethnic stereotyping and its consequences in Chapter 14 when we examine media impacts. Scholars such as Herman Gray (1995) critique a deeper level of structural problems with race and media. They argue that racial depictions are a form of ideology, designed to keep whiteness associated with dominance and power, whereas black and brown minorities are pointed toward inferior social roles. Racial disparities are also refl ected in the economics of the media. Advertisers undervalue minority audiences, for example, even after correcting for income levels (Napoli, 2002); that benefi ts advertisers of products targeted to minorities by reducing their advertising costs. Minorities have a diffi cult time obtaining fi nancing, which is a barrier to minority ownership in broadcasting (Braunstein, 2000); that reduces competition for white-owned media outlets serving minority communities.

MEDIA CRITICISM Another critical studies approach looks at the media as a kind of literature and applies traditions of literary criticism (Lotz, 2001). Here, long-standing cultural conventions dictate the content of the media rather than capitalist economics or power relationships in society. This approach focuses on genres, categories of creative works that have a distinctive style and format, such as horror or science fi ction. Over time, genres become storytelling formulas that evolve out of the interaction between producers and audiences (Allen, 1992). They transfer from one medium to another. For example, r omance and adventure genres were transported from print novels to fi lm, radio, television, and now to computer games like “World of Warcraft” and “The Sims.” Media criticism scholars also probe for verbal and visual symbolism in media (Berger, 1992; Seiter, 1992). In this semiotic analysis, words, sounds, and images are interpreted individually as signs or symbols of something other than the literal action. The sign has two components: a concept, or the thing signifi ed, and a sound-image, or signifi er. For example, in a Star Trek episode a musical theme (signifi er) functions as a sign to announce that the starship Enterprise is about to come to the rescue (concept). Where do symbols come from, and what makes some more p owerful than others? A related approach is to look for archetypes and symbols taken from psychological theories. Analysis of media content is often seen as analogous to Freud’s interpretation of dreams, since both media creators and audiences

Genres are distinctive styles of creative works. The term is also used to represent different types or formats of media content.

Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

CHAPTER 2  |  MEDIA AND SOCIETY  43

are relying on images created through psychological processes like condensation (fusing symbols together) and displacement (replacement of one symbol by a nother) (Freud, 1949). Other scholars draw upon the work of Carl Jung (1970), who interpreted recurring cultural themes as the expression of underlying a rchetypes, unconscious symbols of concepts like motherhood that all cultures share. We see that the audience has a role to play in the selection of content. Media creators have to follow certain conventions and produce media that fi t the expectations of their audiences. Otherwise, they risk alienating those  audiences. So, the audience wields a great deal of power in the media content creative process. Scholars also point out that audiences frequently interpret media in a way very different from what its writers or producers had in mind, so the question of the power of media to impose meanings versus the power