Television

Policy and Culture

Richard Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134997817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

In this important and wide-ranging text, Richard Collins combines original research with provocative analysis and argument. He focuses on the impact of new television technologies, national policies for television for television in North America and Europe, the effects of internationalisation, television news and documentaries and the history and likely development of media studies.

Chapter 1
Paradigm Lost?

What is media studies? There is a limited consensus among UK scholars about the content and limits of the subject. In 1988 I circulated a two page questionnaire to 200 ‘primary definers’ in media studies inviting respondents to cite the five most important books or articles for media and film studies published in the last ten years and to make any further comments they thought appropriate. The questionnaire went to those named as contacts for higher education courses in film and television in the directory of courses (Orton, 1987) published by the British Film Institute (BFI), to members of the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) Register of Specialist Advisors with media studies expertise, and to colleagues at the Polytechnic of Central London, at the BBC and IBA and in other universities, colleges and polytechnics not reached either through the CNAA or BFI lists and who were known to me to be active media scholars. The 60 respondents who replied nominated 146 different titles. The most cited work was instanced only by 15 respondents and the top 16 titles cited accounted for only 111 citations (out of a possible total of 300 citations). The most cited title was thus instanced by only a quarter of respondents. Thus, assuming that the indicator I chose was appropriate to its purpose, there seems to be little agreement about the nature and limits of media studies. However several respondents commented that the core texts which they thought defined the subject had been produced more than ten years ago and that therefore the last decade had been a rather fallow period. Intuitively that feels right: an important territory and agenda was marked out in the 1970s and has not yet been displaced. Three reflections follow from this observation.

First, this absence of development is a symptom of the institutional history of UK higher education in the last decade. There has been very little renewal of personnel in higher education. Many lecturers can testify to the lost generation—generations— of very talented students who have been unable to find academic jobs in the UK. Most of them have been lost to academic life altogether, although a few have found posts in the United States and Australia. Thus a crucial resource for renewal and reworking of paradigms has been lost to the subject. The story goes, perhaps apocryphal but certainly credible, that UK universities have between them only one tenured social scientist aged less than thirty. Most of those media scholars who are fortunate enough to be in jobs have been in post for nearly two decades. Decades in which they have been denied the stimulae brought by new colleagues and new ideas and have worked in steadily worsening material circumstances. Classes have grown in size, there is less time for supervision of individual students, library services and provision of time, resources and institutional legitimacy for research have all eroded. And, most absurd and dysfunctional of all, lecturers paid perhaps £20,000 a year are spending more and more time performing the duties of absent and unreplaced former administrative and technical colleagues who were paid half as much.

Second, key agencies for fostering talent which existed in the 1970s have been lost. There is now nowhere for young academic writers to learn their business. I, and others of my generation, benefited enormously from being able to ‘learn how to write’. First by reviewing and writing short articles and then longer and more considered pieces in Screen Education. The British Film Institute television monographs performed a similar valuable nursery function. Where now does someone go to write their first article or review or first 40,000 words?

Third, in spite of factors 1 and 2 above there has been an important intellectual migration away from the paradigm articulated in the 1970s and which remains dominant. However, the migration, manifested in criticism of the old dominant paradigm and explorations in a variety of new directions, has not yet been focused in a coherently articulated revisionist thesis. New initiatives remain an unsystematized series of partial antitheses to the 1970s thesis. Here the changed material circumstances which have distinguished the late eighties from the late seventies and, a fortiori, the late sixties, have been decisive. The pace of intellectual change and development has slowed, sometimes it seems to a glacial pace. But change there has been. However, the emerging new problematic in media studies needs synthesizing, clearly articulating and quite simply marketing better.

The seventies paradigm of the ‘dominant ideology thesis’ still, I think, marks the co-ordinates on which our mental map of the media is plotted. Ideology is usefully defined by Lovell as ‘the production and dissemination of erroneous beliefs whose inadequacies are socially motivated’ (Lovell, 1980, p. 51). The dominant ideology thesis attributes to a unified body of erroneous ideas—ideology—causal status in what is defined as a systematic and pervasive mystification of people’s understanding of society and social relations. The mass media are customarily understood to be at least a major agency, and often the decisive agency, in the propagation and reproduction of ideology. Implicit in the dominant ideology thesis is a notion of a strong media effect (despite the lack of satisfactory empirical demonstrations of a strong effect as a general phenomenon). The dominant ideology thesis can be seen as a particular instance of a general tendency in twentieth-century political theory to emphasize the role of ideas rather than force in holding society together. It has several characteristics that made it, and still make it, more seductive than other rival theories which also emphasize consent rather than duress as the vital social glue which keeps society together.

First, it was a grand theory. It offered comprehensive explanation of the workings of society. It made comprehensible the fantastic complexity of modern social relations by positing a master contradiction, or a few fundamental and related contradictions, from which social structure and social relations were generated. It asserted that fundamental truth(s) was (or were) misrepresented by a false system of ideas (whether or not consciously managed and mobilized by those advantaged by the misrepresentations of the dominant ideology) which served the interests of a few and masked the interests of the many. Second, and consequentially, it had a moral dimension. It gave an attractive social role to intellectuals whose task it became to demystify the false image of the world that the dominant ideology constituted as real. We were invested with, and enthusiastically assumed the role which Brecht prescribed for the dramatist, ushering the audience into ‘his [sic] own real world with attentive faculties’ (Brecht, 1961, p. 13). The mass media were designated as the principal agency through which the dominant ideology was disseminated. The role of media studies was to strip the legitimizing mask from the media and by revealing them as agents of oppression hasten the day when justice would triumph. We have not lost our taste for such melodramatic morality plays, as examination of the demonization of Rupert Murdoch will show.

Yet the notion that the mass media are crucial sites for the exercise of social power through which ruling groups successfully maintain their rule has, in recent years, been put under considerable pressure. However, an emerging revisionist critique of the dominant ideology thesis has not yet been clearly and systematically articulated and for that reason has not become a new countervailing paradigm. At least within the field of film and media studies it has not. There are, for example, few citations of Abercrombie, Hill and Turner’s book The Dominant Ideology Thesis (first published in 1980 and reprinted in 1984 and 1985) in the academic literature of film and media studies—none of the respondents to my questionnaire cited it—although Abercrombie, Hill and Turner subject this ‘dominant paradigm’ in media studies to a powerful and remorseless critique. Indeed they rebut not only a core proposition of the dominant ideology thesis but an axiomatic assumption in media studies. They propose that:

The evidence of media influence is so thin and subject to so many caveats that our conclusions must be that the media are not significant except in the most isolated instances. (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, 1985, p. 152)

By and large media scholars have not noticed the sapping of the foundations on which their subject was built. But they have been able to ignore the widening cracks in the structures they inhabit because the walls have not yet fallen; nor has the new structure, which promises a superior vantage point, yet risen above its foundations. The critique of the old dominant paradigm has not yet been followed by a convincing new totalizing vision. Although there have been powerful assaults on the system of ideas on which the UK’s orthodoxy in media studies has been founded, and various explorations of alternative lines of argument, there has been no convincing new paradigm articulated. Unless such a revisionist paradigm is systematized it is unlikely to replace the established paradigm (however time-worn and full of holes), because no substitute can so far be offered for one of the most attractive elements in the old paradigm: its claims to comprehensive explanatory power. Any theory which has general applicability will be preferred to one that hasn’t. For the role of intellectuals is to explain, analyse and systematize, not simply to describe. Letting go of a holistic paradigm which seems to make general sense (however contestable its premises are in particular local instances) of what otherwise appear as contingent, random and inexplicable phenomena in exchange for a sceptical critique, which though making better sense at points A, B and C, doesn’t have a’big picture’ analysis to compare with that of the, admittedly, flawed holistic paradigm seems a bad bargain. For without the ability to paint a big picture our pretensions as intellectuals are unsustainable. Any intellectual system that makes comprehensive sense is likely to be more attractive than another which lacks a totalizing power. Herein lies the primary explanation of the continuing dominance of the dominant ideology thesis in our thinking. The second is that our material interests have been served by it. As teachers and researchers concerned with the media, our jobs—not to speak of our cultural capital—have depended on arguing that the media are important. Consequently any decline in the plausibility of the dominant ideology thesis sets us problems. First of finding a new general theory and second a new kind of general theory which will, like the old, maintain our professional raison d’être.

What then are the objections to the dominant ideology thesis and its associated notion of a strong media effect? Abercrombie, Hill and Turner (1985) attack the dominant ideology thesis on theoretical and empirical grounds. The core of their case is put forward in an examination of the extent and origins of social coherence at three moments in British (essentially English) medieval and modern history. They argue that the absence of a dominant ideology performing the functions designated for it at these moments (of feudalism, nascent capitalism and post-Second World War capitalism) falsifies the thesis’ claims to have general explanatory power. They argue moreover on theoretical grounds, but drawing on their empirical rebuttals, that the dominant ideology thesis is unlikely to have even a limited explanatory power in other historical instances. As Abercrombie, Hill and Turner recognize, their challenge is not only to a Marxist theory but also to ‘functionalist theories of common culture in sociology’ (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, 1985, p. 2). To some extent these propositions have been anticipated in an important trajectory in media and cultural studies, which has challenged and qualified the notions of a dominant ideology and an overall social coherence in contemporary capitalist societies. Both feminist scholarship in film and media studies and cultural studies scholarship in general have attested to the authenticity and robustness of contradictory subcultures, persuasively arguing that there is no single dominant ideology but rather that society is animated by a plurality of distinct belief systems. These manifest themselves in a variety of subcultures and worldviews which are differentiated by a number of factors, not least that of gender. However, such studies have characteristically either left unanswered the questions of how large-scale and complex developed societies reproduce themselves and how separate subcultures interrelate. Or they have reiterated the old and unsatisfactory dominant ideology thesis—which is fundamentally inconsistent with the positive recognition in such studies of the plurality of cultures and belief systems in modern societies—anew in terms of a loosely associated but fundamentally compatible unholy alliance of racist, patriarchal and capitalist beliefs. An impressive monument (not least for its bulk) to this trend in scholarship is the more than one thousand page three decker Patriotism of the History Workshop (Samuel, 1989).

Patriotism is representative both in its impressive sensitivity to different cultures and traditions in British society and in its lack of a comprehensive integrative intellectual paradigm able to articulate the relationships between the distinct subcultures it surveys. It exemplifies the achievements and limits of a cultural studies approach, here directed towards the understanding of a powerful contemporary social force, nationalism. Thus far its contribution has been productive.

The founding editorial of its journal, History Workshop Journal, defined History Workshop’s purpose as bringing ‘the boundaries of history closer to people’s lives’ and making ‘history a more democratic activity’. It did so by changing those who made history, both by extending the production of history outside the academy (evident in the occupational profile of contributors to the journal, still more so in the participants in workshops, and assisted by the regular sections on archives and sources in the journal) and by redefining the subject of history, epitomized by Raphael Samuel’s assertion (which triggered Robert Skidelsky’s wrath in the running Methodenstreit provoked by The History Working Party’s essay in curriculum definition) that the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 is more important than the Battle of Trafalgar. Samuel in his public jousting over the content of the history section of the National Curriculum has effectively broken lances to champion ‘history from below’ and the study of the private as well as the public sphere. History Workshop Journal (HWJ) began (as History Workshop) in 1976 as ‘a journal of socialist historians’ and derived from a decade of History Workshops (which continued in parallel to the journal) held at Ruskin College. Though never edited by a single named editor, Raphael Samuel (the editor and biggest contributor to the Patriotism collection) has the most powerful claim to be considered the principal animator of the enterprise: he was a founding editor, joint author (with Gareth Steadman- Jones) of both the first editorial and that which opened the ten year anniversary issue and was named as a member of the four who, in 1982, became the ‘inner group’ running the journal. In 1982 History Workshop Journal metamorphosed into a ‘journal of socialist and feminist historians’. It marked this transition from asexual axolotal to mature salamander by stating (in the editorial to Issue 13 of Spring 1982 when ‘feminist’ first appeared on the masthead):

socialist history means not merely the history of socialist movements or labour organisations, but the reinterpretation of all dominant social and cultural institutions in terms of a class perspective, so a historical analysis influenced by feminism demands that we ask new questions of the past, challenge old assumptions and become sensitive to the central significance of sexual divisions in the shaping of both past and present.

It is notable how much less clearly defined was the feminist than the socialist project in HWJ; socialist history is clearly and programmatically defined, feminist history is rather an opening to an undefined new subject matter and approach. The first prescriptive, the second permissive. Patriotism is in the latter mould, exemplifying an opening of History Workshop to new problematics which lend themselves uncomfortably to analysis in terms of a class perspective. Throughout its decade and a half HWJ has opened up new territories for history and historians. Its fat (more than 200 pages per issue) volumes embrace not only the stuff of academic discourse, the articles and reviews proper to a conventional journal, but also anecdotes (put enough of them together and they become data), obituaries, notices of meetings, scholarly and entertaining gleanings. HWJ is the parish pump around which socialist and feminist historians meet. Diverse, pluralistic, demotic (its notes for authors demand excision of ‘foreign, including Latin, words’) and democratic. Its strengths have been its heterogeneity, its parti pris and openness to new voices and material.

But Patriotism reveals vulnerable points in History Workshop’s line of battle. An idiosyncratic approach to what can count as evidence, and a disinclination to move from the thickets of particular historical experience to the theoretical high ground. Fine grained concrete particularity is the stuff and strength of History Workshop history, but that strength risks becoming a magpie accumulation of material, and resurrection of what has been hidden from history may shake into creaking life what might better be left unobtrusively interred. There is a consequential underproduction of powerful new generalizations and challenging interpretative paradigms which will make sense of and justify the retrieval of an abundance of empirical material. Such a process demands not simply the addition of new categories to an established system, for example the addition of a feminist to a socialist perspective, but critique of the old organizing principles and synthesis of new. Nowhere more than in the study of nationalism/patriotism is such new theorizing needed. For patriotism is a sentiment attached to an object, the nation, which is opposed to the class perspective espoused by the HWJ. Moreover patriotism, the sentiment in which the ideology of nationalism manifests itself, testifies to the existence of more than one dominant ideology circulating in modern societies. They are neither to be understood in terms of a single master discourse, a dominant ideology which organizes and glues them together, nor in terms of a disconnected plurality of subcultures thrown together in an adventitious proximity. Nations are communities commonly bound together by ethnicity, language, culture, geography and, yes, history. Such communities, notoriously for socialists, are ‘vertically’ differentiated from other communities, other nations. Whereas a class perspective, classically manifested in an international socialism, asserts horizontal bonds of class which rupture the vertical bonds of nation to bind together workers (and rulers) internationally. History Workshop has rightly paid attention to the history of human attitudes and sentiments, to the ideas which animate and limit human actions. An important part of its expansion of the boundaries of history has been the inclusion of culture within the historian’s ambit. Its focus on the local and particular is symptomatic of English Cultural Studies’ prioritization of subcultures as an object of study. But reading culture as history too often becomes the substitution of culture for history. Recovering and reporting the sentiments expressed by historical actors (even a writer of fiction’s report of the statement of a small child) is potentially productive of insights and new knowledge but it has its dangers. The collection yields examples of the grabbing of a shard of ‘evidence’ in order to substantiate a proposition. Evidence which may not even attain the status of one of Norman Mailer’s factoids (see chapter 2): a real gem (and I have not made it up) is the citation of the behaviour of a vicar in a Richmal Crompton novel in order to demonstrate the social/political role ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Paradigm Lost?
• Chapter 2: Media Studies and Research On Information and Communication Technologies In the UK
• Chapter 3: The Language of Advantage: Satellite Television In Western Europe
• Chapter 4: The Prognosis for Satellite Television In the UK
• Chapter 5: White and Green and Not Much Re(a)d: The 1988 White Paper On Broadcasting Policy
• Chapter 6: Broadband Black Death Cuts Queues: The Information Society and the UK
• Chapter 7: Wall-to-Wall Dallas? The US-UK Trade In Television
• Chapter 8: Broadcasting and National Culture In Canada
• Chapter 9: National Culture: A Contradiction In Terms?
• Chapter 10: Walling Germany With Brass: Theoretical Paradigms In British Studies of Television News
• Chapter 11: Seeing is Believing: The Ideology of Naturalism