Mass Media and Society

Edited by James Curran and Michael Gurevitch
London: Arnold, 1996

Reviewed by Molly B Hankwitz

A compendium of high-minded, elegantly written essays on contemporary media, Mass Media and Society is one of the best contemporary anthologies on western media today. It is a comprehensive representation of Anglo-American, Australian and Dutch communications and media scholarship with contributions from unrivaled university scholars and theorists: Len Ang, Jay G. Blunder, John Corner, James Curran, John Fiske, Simon Frith, Christine Geraghty, Peter Golding, Michael Curevitch, Daniel C. Hallin, Joke Hermes, Judith Lichtenberg, Sonia Livingstone, Denis McQuail, Graham Murdock, Michael Schudson, Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi, Lisebet van Zoonen and Janet Wasko.

The book is beautifully organized into three sections: 'Mass Media and Society: General Perspectives', 'Media Production', and 'Mediation of Meaning' and includes seven newly commissioned essays. It primarily emphasizes British and American news and television media. The first edition published under the same title in 1991 had an explicitly educational focus and was quickly utilized by universities everywhere. The first edition was republished four times in six years with a wide academic readership and translations into Korean and Japanese.

Essays of particular note in this volume are Peter Golding and Graham Murdock's 'Culture, Communications, and Political Economy', Liesbet van Zoonen's 'Feminist Perspectives on the Media', 'Postmodernism and Television'' by John Fiske, co- author of Reading Television (London: Nethuen, 1978) with John Hartley, Michael Chudson's 'The Sociology of News Production Revisited', Annabelle Srebeny-Mohammadi's 'The Global and The Local in International Communications' and Janet Wasko's 'Understanding the Disney Universe'.

This new edition is an excellent read for those interested in revisionist theories of contemporary media, neo-Marxist-liberal pluralist debates, effective sociological analysis or policy-oriented critique of mass media. Seventeen dense and explicit essays cover issues from corporate ownership and state control to the history and development of newspapers, to new technologies, television and the construction of news as literature.

Perspectives, both radical and liberal in cultural and political economy are represented in each section of essays, with a strong emphasis on the role of audience, both conceptually, in terms of markets and socially, in terms of how audiences may make or reevaluate, read or use media.

Thus this book gives its readership a much-needed handle on the central political debates in media, communications, and cultural studies departments of the west while positing precise, descriptive analyses of changes in the structures of western media, the influence and roles of new technologies in making media, and shifts in the regulation-deregulation of media as they affect our understanding of what we see or of what we make or of who is making what we see. Excellent critical documentation and historical analysis of surrounding discourses such as political climates, definitions of journalism, and the re appropriation of media from the public to the private spheres give this book a particularly critical edge and scholarly sophistication. The book is a fine foray into media in general through the first section and as it examines deeper structures of production and meanings in the second and the third.

What is also remarkable about Mass Media and Society is that it suggests throughout that what we have come to term "mass media" in discursive practice needs to be reexamined--and that many discourses have failed to do this effectively enough, moreover, have insisted on evaluating media's role in contemporary society simplisticly-- that mass media is, rather, a highly-variegated complex of multiple operations in which new levels and constellations of ownership, interest, intention, power, subjectivity, audience and access exist and which theorists must consider and must move beyond, from earlier models of mass communications created in the late-sixties and seventies, through the conservative period of western political history, the eighties, to the present. Thus, the anthology is edited to emphasize functional social, economic and historical narratives for examining the complexities of media and effectively avoids monolithic systemizations of Marxism or all-encompassing categories. Critical positions on liberal theory are undertaken as well. The editors are successful in their pragmatic approach to redressing positions without--as was their goal stated in Curran's introduction-- taking sides. The fact that digital, television and print media are examined only makes the book more interesting, especially as today's readers seek signposts in the landscape of criticism with which to comprehend the problems inherent in such current phenomena as the Web boom, changes in the social role of reading, the field of media education, the collective social intake of news, or the much-tauted, and perhaps debatable, "restructuring" in an electronic and digital age.

Moreover, for professional critics and the critically-minded, this anthology represents a clear continuation of rationalist discourse expressed by Jurgen Habermas' in his major work, The Transformation of the Public Sphere, the critical writings of Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky and others. It is solid discourse on art, media and technology. The writers do not seek to preach their referents, but, in fact, to give specific critical underpinnings for their discussions. (This is profoundly comforting to this reader.) The methodologies of Habermas can be found in historical analyses which undertake policy-making, social history, restructuring of the organizational bases of media, reorganization of corporate power and capital, trends in viewership and new uses for media as part and parcel of a new landscape of media in society. It can be found in the absence of texts which simply beat ideological drums; moreover, in the presence of texts, such as van Zoonen's which overturn rhetorical drums. The acknowledgement of a solid critical traditions, vantagepoints from which reader's can agree or disagree, identify or reject the positions and suggestions within it makes the book an excellent example of discourse which dismantles assumptions rather than simply reframing them in a less-than-democratic manner. The writers' ask larger questions and almost every essay concludes with queries for new thought or suggests areas of media and communications theory which need further work, which need to be revisited and considered.

That the book redresses media in terms of cultural and political economy is its best feature, for it suggests all the possibilities of a strong future for international and multicultural critique, for the speaking subjectivities of non-objectified audiences. It undermines the very blind assumptions with which centrist, individualized media distorts world views.

Mass Media and Society, in the second edition, offers new thought and new analysis especially in the areas of audience participation in the mediation and making of meaning. It speaks to students. It is a superb reference text for the media-bound.