Much of today’s media research is a pale imitation of earlier work, or an awkward marriage of distinct approaches, eager not to offend. Critical conversations tend to be trivial and a paralysing sense of caution prevails.

VERY RECENT HISTORY is a strange thing. We can talk easily of any decade except our own — and scholarship is no different in that respect from art, fashion, music or politics. It is easy to describe the trends of 20 or 30 years ago, but much harder to make sense of recent developments. My own research convinces me that media scholarship has entered a highly cautious and — dare I say — ‘conservative’ phase. If such a prognosis were ever accepted it would, of course, be regarded as a small victory for the columnists of The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail who have led a long sniping campaign against Media Studies. But is it true?

Studying television current affairs history over the past three decades has been a fascinating reminder of how far Britain has shifted from the assumptions of a welfare state, mixed-economy mindset that characterised almost every aspect of life under a nominally socialist Labour government in the 1970s and which persisted for a considerable time into Thatcher’s Britain.

Reading PhD studies, academic papers and critical literature, or watching videotaped current affairs and documentary programmes of the 1970s and 1980s is like entering an ideological Tardis. You emerge in a landscape where battle lines are carved deeply, where trenchant, oppositional views about the direction the country should take are traded centre stage rather than at the margins of society, and where radical perspectives are debated in a forthright, unembarrassed manner. Academic study of the media is characterised by the clear sense of an imminent threat posed by the nation’s move towards a more ‘free market’ economy and a refusal to compromise critical perspectives.

Of the 70s, 80s

None of this should be a surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with recent British history, but it is still something of a shock to explore and savour the texture of thought from some 20 or 30 years ago. What strikes me most is the unashamedly radical ambition of cultural criticism of that time. Birmingham and Glasgow Universities clearly led the way in developing the social scientific study of the mass media in the 1970s and 80s, seducing academics from other disciplines in sociology, psychology, philosophy and English Literature to engage in a new and undoubtedly significant and socially relevant field of applied theory.

Stuart Hall, probably Britain’s most important thinker in a generation, then based at Birmingham’s Centre for Cultural Studies developed a rigorous yet sophisticated model for understanding the ideological ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ of media messages by institutions and audiences. Hall identified the role of ‘primary definers’ (the government, police, courts and other powerful institutions) to set an agenda for news reporting.

The Glasgow University Media Group was a second powerhouse of critical thought where the research conducted complimented the work done in Birmingham. Greg Philo, David Miller and others produced exhaustive and definitive studies of broadcast news coverage showing the bias against trade unions, for example, and towards ruling class elite and business perspectives. I should pause to note here that even the word ‘class’ itself has almost passed out of use in contemporary scholarship, as if the widening poverty gap and entrenched class system of Britain had somehow simply disappeared from academic view.

From America, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s ‘propaganda model’ offered further insights showing how the media employed particular ‘filters’ to reproduce dominant ideological perspectives. Chomsky and Herman’s ongoing analysis retains its explanatory power and is highly influential beyond the academy, although curiously, like Marshall McLuhan their work is deeply unfashionable and avoided altogether by many academics.

Much of this work drew its analysis from a line of Marxist-oriented critique inflected and developed through the work of Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, the Frankfurt School and others. The analysis of ruling class domination of the media (‘the intellectual means of production’) and the ‘resistant practices’ of dominated groups was based on a conception of ongoing class struggle. Academics from this period describe their own work quite explicitly as a part of this struggle, an important element of wider ‘resistance’.

Critical ‘radicalism’ in the 1970s and 80s was certainly not confined to academics. Within the media radical perspectives were also influential. A recent study by John Corner (et al) reminds us how refreshingly ‘anti-establishment’ a prime time current affairs programme such as World in Action could be and still draw audiences of up to 10 million. To see John Pilger in prime time on one of only three available broadcast channels exploring the ‘silent mutiny’ of American soldiers in Vietnam; or to discover the dangers of asbestos, tobacco, and poor motor car design; or delve behind the saintly corporate image of Marks and Spencers to see the child labour used to produce the clothes sold in their shops, is to enter a broadcasting environment so different from our own that it produces real disorientation.

The last barricade

That’s not to say that all current affairs from the 1970s and 1980s posed a challenge to the status quo, or that good investigative journalism does not happen today. It’s just that most of it is tucked away in programmes such as Dispatches on ‘minority’ channels facing competition from tens or even hundreds of channels of cheap, titillating, celebrity-driven, advertising-friendly alternatives. Similarly, not all media research today is complacent or unambitious. Simply that with so much more of it around and with the theory wars of the 1990s well and truly played out, there does not seem to be the same invigorating, challenging sense of discovery of 20 years ago, or the explicit debt to Marxist perspectives.

The important, but overstated, work of John Fiske and others in the late 1980s celebrating audience power to decode subversively and transform the products of ‘dominant power blocs’ into ‘resistant practices’ combined, particularly, with the influence of French theory on Cultural Studies, to become something of a theoretical free-for-all with academics rushing to dismantle what remained of crucial Marxist insights into the media’s role in society.

The result is that much of today’s media research is a pale imitation of earlier work, or an awkward marriage of distinct approaches, eager not to offend. Critical conversations tend to be at the level of minutiae and a paralysing sense of caution prevails. As universities are squeezed financially, and academics feel a draught from the cold winds of capital blowing through the economy they are careful not to make themselves targets for future cuts.

No one would admit as much, but academic freedom to think is constrained by the realities of having to pay a mortgage. More ominously, two overtly right-wing publications masquerading as academic studies – Aitken’s Can we trust the BBC? and North’s Scrap the BBC! (by his own admission funded by anonymous ‘interested parties’), both published in 2007, suggest how the future might look for ‘media research’.

Good work still goes on, by Philo, Miller and others, but it is quietly marginalised or often ignored altogether. ‘Mainstream’ media theory, I would argue, is drifting, unanchored. By degrees it pulls away from its theoretical underpinnings and moves to accommodate the shifting realities of a deregulated, ‘free-market’ media environment.

Unpicking the BBC’s remaining public broadcasting commitments and funding guarantees remains the final challenge for neo-liberal ‘reformers’ that stalk television’s regulatory bodies and the corridors of power. Media academics should rally to this last remaining barricade of public service broadcasting against the onslaught of private power.

Fully understanding the threat to our media from corporate power and challenging that threat requires a reconnection with the critical roots of academic media analysis. This would clearly aggravate those traditionally opposed to the tradition, particularly in the right wing press. But then if it didn’t upset those critics media academics wouldn’t be doing their job.

David McQueen is the author of Television: A Media Student’s Guide (1999) published by Arnold. He is currently researching an archive of current affairs programmes at Bournemouth University.

Image: Sunil Krishnan

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