The Routledge Companion to Media and Race

Christopher Campbell, Christopher P. Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317695820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Companion to Media and Race serves as a comprehensive guide for scholars, students, and media professionals who seek to understand the key debates about the impact of media messages on racial attitudes and understanding. Broad in scope and richly presented from a diversity of perspectives, the book is divided into three sections: first, it summarizes the theoretical approaches that scholars have adopted to analyze the complexities of media messages about race and ethnicity, from the notion of "representation" to more recent concepts like Critical Race Theory. Second, the book reviews studies related to a variety of media, including film, television, print media, social media, music, and video games. Finally, contributors present a broad summary of media issues related to specific races and ethnicities and describe the relationship of the study of race to the study of gender and sexuality.

Chapters 1, 3, and 11 of this book re freely available as downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I

STUDYING RACE AND MEDIA

THEORIES AND APPROACHES

1
REPRESENTATION

Stuart Hall and the “Politics of Signification”

Christopher P. Campbell

Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born British Studies cultural critic whose work heavily influenced a generation of scholars’ examinations of race and the mass media, died only a few months before the infamous 2014 fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer. Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old African-American man, was shot by a white police officer. After the shooting, some news organizations included in their immediate coverage of the event a photo of Brown taken from his Facebook page. In the photo, Brown stands in a tank top, unsmiling and flashing a peace sign (misidentified by some of those organizations as a gang sign). Later, other photos from Brown’s Facebook page surfaced that presented a less incendiary figure. Within a few days of Brown’s death, a hashtag—#IfTheyGunnedMeDown (as in, “If they gunned me down, which photo of me would the news media use”)—“trended” on social media applications like Twitter and Tumblr. Young African Americans posted two photos of themselves, one in which they appeared less than angelic juxtaposed against a photo that reflected them in a positive light, for instance in a graduation gown or military uniform.

These postings reflected an insight into the notion of media representation that likely escapes many Americans who view with regularity news coverage of black men who have been arrested for (or victimized by) violent crime. That is, the young African Americans who posted the photos intuitively recognized the problems inherent in the dominant media representation of black people as pathological criminals, a representation that goes largely unchallenged in the journalism industry and affects both racial attitudes and public policy decisions.

Stuart Hall would have been quick to recognize the meaning of the social media postings that followed Brown’s death. His work challenged the “preferred reading” of media texts, and he described the cultural power of those meanings as the “politics of signification” (1980: 138). Hall used the term representation to describe the complex ways in which the mass media not only present images, but how they are actually engaged in re-presenting images that have multiple meanings, especially when it comes to meanings about race and ethnicity. For Hall, the analysis of media representations is key to unlocking the power of the dominant meanings ascribed to those representations, meanings that serve the interests of the wealthiest and most powerful members of a society. His believed his notion of representation was transformational and

a way of constantly wanting new kinds of knowledges to be produced in the world, new kinds of subjectivities to be explored and new dimensions of meaning which have not been foreclosed by the systems of power which are in operation.

(Quoted in Jhally 1997)

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the work of Hall and others who have examined race and media through the lens of representation and how powerful meanings about race and ethnicity are generated through media texts.

“Reading” the Media

As Fiske (1992) explains, “The definition of culture as a constant site of struggle between those with and those without power underpins the most interesting current work in cultural studies” (292). He cites Hall’s seminal essay, “Encoding/Decoding,” as a “turning point” in cultural studies, as it

introduces the idea that television programs do not have a single meaning but are relatively open texts, capable of being read in different ways by different people. Hall also suggests that there is a necessary correlation between people’s social situations and the meanings that they may generate from a television program.

(292)

Hall described “decoding” media texts through three levels of analysis. The first level is the denotative or “preferred” reading—that which was intended by the producer—and is followed by connotative (“negotiated” and/or “oppositional”) readings of the same message. Hall explains:

The domains of “preferred readings” have the whole social order imbedded in them as a set of meanings, practices and beliefs; the everyday knowledge of social structures, of “how things work for all practical purposes in this culture,” the rank order of power and interest and the structure of legitimations, limits and sanctions.

(1980: 134)

What Hall would describe as a “negotiated” reading of media texts allows for analysis beyond the meaning intended by their producers. According to Hall, such a reading requires a recognition of the “dominant ideology” that is at work and how that ideology is “shot through with contradictions” (137). Hall writes, “Negotiated codes operate through what we might call particular or situated logics: and these logics are sustained by their differential and unequal relation to the discourses and logics of power” (137). For Hall, the denotative, commonsense meanings of the stories are insignificant without the connotative, interpretive readings.

Similarly, Fiske and Hartley (1978) say these deeper levels of analysis allow us to identify the potential of a message to create larger cultural meanings; they also describe three levels of codes to be found in television messages. Like Hall’s “preferred reading,” the first order is the denotative message and “the sign is self contained” (41). Like Hall’s “negotiated reading,” the second order calls for the connotative reading of the message, including its potential for cultural myth-making. In this analysis, Fiske and Hartley include the impact of television production techniques to connote meanings: “Camera angle, lighting and background music [and] frequency of cutting are examples” (45).

Hall describes “oppositional” readings of media messages in which a viewer “detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference.” He adds, “One of the most significant political moments… is the point when events which are normally signified and decoded in a negotiated way begin to be given an oppositional reading. Here the ‘politics of signification’—the struggle in discourse—is joined” (138). Fiske and Hartley describe this highest level of analysis of media messages as that which recognizes the “mythology” or “ideology” that hides in the coding of media messages: “This, the third order of signification, reflects the broad principles by which a culture organizes and interprets the reality with which it has to cope” (46).

Other cultural studies scholars have advanced similar notions in interpreting media texts. Louis Althusser (1971), for instance, described the concepts of hailing and interpellation to explain the way in which media messages “hail” audiences into specific understandings that serve the interests of the message producers. As Fiske (1992) notes, “These terms derive from the idea that any language, whether it be verbal, visual, tactile or whatever, is part of social relations and that in communicating with someone we are reproducing social relationships” (1992: 289). Likewise, Antonio Gramsci (1971) used the concept of hegemony—the subtle, unseen political, social, and economic ideology that reflects the interests of the wealthy and powerful—to describe the way in which media representations function.

Like Althusser and Gramsci, Roland Barthes was concerned with the subtle way in which hegemony functioned, almost without notice. In introducing his seminal work Mythologies (1957/72), Barthes described his efforts to examine French popular culture through the prism of cultural myths:

The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the “naturalness” with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history…. I hate seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there.

(11)

Barthes was concerned with the way artifacts of popular culture—advertising, photojournalism, studio wrestling, and others—reflect a kind of groupthink that doesn’t allow for more complicated interpretations of events. Similarly, the work of cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, especially his essay “Common Sense as a Cultural System,” is often cited in critical examinations of the media. Geertz (1983) argued,

As a frame for thought, and a species of it, common sense is as totalizing as any other: no religion is more dogmatic, no science more ambitious, no philosophy more general. Its tonalities are different, and so are the arguments to which it appeals, but like them—and like art and like ideology—it pretends to reach past illusion to truth, to, as we say, things as they are.

(84)

Cultural studies scholars have frequently addressed the notion of representation in news coverage, which routinely reflects mythical common sense about the events of the day. Fiske and Hartley (1978) identified “myth chains” as one of the ways in which journalistic storytelling embeds ideological understandings, and they pointed out that “news reporting and fiction use similar signs because they naturally refer to the same myths in our culture” (65). Himmelstein (1984) identified the “myth of the puritan ethic” (205) in news coverage that routinely extolled the values of hard work and middle-class life while implicitly questioning the values of the underclass. Richard Campbell (1991a, 1991b), in describing the myth-making capacity of journalism, suggested that the notion of “balance” was itself a “code word for… middle American values.” He continues,

These values are encoded into mainstream journalism—how it selects the news, where it places its beat reporters, who and how it promotes, how it critically reports and thereby naively supports government positions.

(1991a: 75)

Race, Representation, and the News

Among the most significant analyses of contemporary racism and the media is embodied in the work of sociologist Herman Gray (1986, 1991, 1995), who has examined both primetime television programs as well as journalism. Hall identified in 1986 the “twin representations” of African Americans in fictional and nonfictional television (304). He contrasted the upper-middle-class life portrayed on the mega-hit sitcom The Cosby Show with the underclass black life portrayed in a 1985 PBS documentary titled The Vanishing Family: Crisis in Black America. Race as it is portrayed on fictional television, according to Gray, is consistent with the American Dream, and “appeals to the utopian desire in blacks and whites for racial oneness and equality while displacing the persistent reality of racism and racial inequality or the kinds of social struggles and cooperation required to eliminate them” (302).

Gray argues that the underclass black life on nonfictional TV, on the other hand, fails to

identify complex social forces like racism, social organization, economic dislocation, unemployment, the changing economy, or the welfare state as the causes of the crisis in (the urban underclass) community.

(300)

Gray concludes:

The assumptions and framework that structure these representations often displace representations that would enable viewers to see that many individuals trapped in the under class have the very same qualities (of hard work and sacrifices as seen on Cosby) but lack the options and opportunities to realize them.

(303)

My own work on race and news attempts to expand on Gray’s examination of the “twin representations” of African Americans (as well as representations of Hispanic and “other” Americans); in describing my approach in Race, Myth and the News I wrote, “The danger of the commonsense claim to truth is in its exclusion of those who live outside the familiar world it represents” (1995: 18). My first study (Campbell 1995) found the racial mythology embedded in broadcasts across the United States represented “a hegemonic consensus about race and class that sustains myths about life outside of white, ‘mainstream’ America” (132).

I’ve identified three myths that appear to be persistent in representations of race in American journalism (Campbell 1995, 2012). In identifying a “myth of marginality,” I argued that people of color are ignored and therefore less significant and marginalized in news coverage (1995). I first cited the general “invisibility” of people of color in the news, noting the underrepresentation of minority news sources and the lack of coverage of minority communities in the newscasts I reviewed, including newscasts from cities with large minority populations. Additionally, I cited other studies (including Entman 1990, 1992 and Gist 1990) that provided evidence of the underrepresentation and stereotypical portrayal of minorities in all forms of daily news coverage. I also analyzed coverage from two cities that I argued provided evidence of lingering “traditional” or “old-fashioned” racism—...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Studying Race and Media: Theories and Approaches
• PART II Race, the Medium, the Message
• PART III Race, Ethnicity, and Intersectionality
• Index