Glasgow Media Group

The concept of the mass society was used in early attempts to explain the relationship between the media and public belief. This concept offered a view of the contemporary world as composed of fragmented individuals who were subject to powerful propaganda messages - the so called hypodermic model. This approach has often been challenged - most recently by the theory of the 'active' audience. This offers the notion of small groups or individuals 'actively' constructing their own interpretations and the meaning of the world. The implication is that the media do not have any effects on audiences because people interpret the media's messages in many different ways and according to their own prejudices. People can apparently live in what amounts to a sealed space of thought and language creating their own versions of what is taken to be real on the basis of pre-existing beliefs or values (rather as football supporters are alleged to 'see' only the fouls committed by the other side).

These assumptions appear in different areas of media and cultural studies including studies on pleasure, identity as well as the theory of the active audience. This last theoretical approach illustrates many of the problems in academic work which I think has lost touch with the real world. For an audience to be 'active' could mean simply that people are not cultural dopes who believe everything they are told in the media. I would certainly accept this and my own work suggests clearly that different audiences can understand a media message but can have different responses to it. Some people believe and accept the message, others reject knowledge from their own experience or can use processes of logic of other rationales to criticise what is being said.

If this is what is meant by an audience being 'active' then I have no problem with it. But some theorists go beyond this to suggest that audiences create their own meanings from the text e.g. a news item or any piece of language (all of post modern theory assumes this, for a more detailed account see Philo and Miller, 2000). In this approach, all definitions of reality are just that - merely definitions which are constantly changing with each new interpretation of what is real or what has occurred. In this perspective there is therefore no 'fixed' way of describing anything - it all depends on what is seen and who is describing it. There is no way of saying that reality is distorted by media images since there is no fixed reality or truth to distort. It is all relative to who is looking and truth and reality are in the eye of the beholder. In this version of active audience theory, the suggestion is that a text will mean completely different things to different audiences. This could perhaps happen if the audience literally doesn't speak the language of the message or if there are radical cultural differences between those who produce the message and those who receive it - as for example when European colonists in Africa or Asia appropriated artefacts which were of great cultural or religious significance and thought they would make nice wall decorations.

But our own work on responses to media output suggests that varied audience groups do actually have a very clear understanding of what is the intended message and can reproduce it very accurately. We tested this across a number of different areas of media output and formats - on coverage of Northern Ireland (Miller 1994a), images of mental illness (Philo 1996) and on the reporting of the 1984/5 miners strike (Philo 1990).

In these studies, we asked audience groups to produce their own news accounts and scripts of films and soap operas from memory. They were given a small number of photographs from the particular story to act as a stimulus. In the study of beliefs about the miners strike we gave small groups of people photographs from news coverage with which they wrote their own 'news story' and they were then questioned about what they actually believed. In the event, the different groups were very clear on what the intended message of news reporting was (i.e. that picketing was violent and miners were blamed for the trouble) They did not interpret the intended meaning of the news differently i.e. it was not the case that conservative groups saw the news as showing miners 'fouls' while the miners and their supporters saw the news as showing police 'fouls'. There were of course differences between the groups - not over the meaning of the message but on whether or not they believed it. Some of these differences were related to pre-existing beliefs, but even here not everyone remained fixed in their views. Some who were sympathetic to the strike were weakened in their support by what they had seen in news reports. There were clear examples of media influence on belief and opinion. Everyone who has been to a picket line (both police and pickets) believed that most picketing was peaceful. But a majority of those who relied on information from the media believed that it was mostly violent. We also found that some people criticised the truth of media accounts using processes of logic and reasoning. This was not confined to people who supported the strike. For example one very conservative person commented that she 'would have shot' the striking miners. Nonetheless she rejected the news message and believed that the strike was mostly peaceful. She argued that this was necessarily so because of the numbers involved as she out it 'because of the amount who were actually on strike, if you take that into account, it can't all have been violent'. In another group a respondent made a similar point noting that 'if they had been really violent the police couldn't have coped, it would have been the army' (Philo 1990: 40 & 108).

The use of logic and evidence about what really happened concerned other group members. A group of three solicitors who were very conservative in their views debated the real content of the photograph they were using to write a news exercise. They picked up a photograph of pickets which actually showed people standing around peacefully and sitting on the ground. One then suggested as a text to go with it, "they drove through the angry mobs ". A second person then commented "that doesn't look like an angry mob to me ". The first replied, 'Oh, these ones here don't look too happy'. As a result of this exchange the line eventually became 'they drove through the gates'. (Philo 1990: 60-61). The point here is that these participants used a photograph as agreed evidence to give an account which differed from the initial view of 'picket violence'.

In other groups some people used different forms of direct experience to criticise the news message on violence. Two people from Bromley in Kent who again were politically conservative rejected what they had seen in news reports on the grounds that they had met miners and their families while on holiday in the North of England. They had got on very well with them and had refused to believe that they were the sort of people who could be violent (Philo 1990: 114). Our research did not show people effortlessly constructing the meaning of texts on the basis of pre-existing systems of thought. Some who were sympathetic to the miners were influenced negatively by media coverage, while some others who were politically conservative rejected the news coverage on violence. There was also a large group of people who had a limited knowledge of the strike and did not have any direct experience of the events. These were the people who were most likely to be influenced in their beliefs by news reporting . We also showed that people from different perspectives agreed on the meaning of the message and that the accuracy of the message could be evaluated using agreed evidence. Much of this would be anathema to a theory which portrayed audience members as sealed in their own conceptual space, producing their own interpretations of the text. We are not of course the only people to criticise active audience theory. James Curran has termed it a 'new revisionism', as 'old pluralist dishes' presented as new cuisine (1990: 281), while John Corner has described it as 'complacent relativism' (1991: 151). A key result of our research was to show how people used their own direct experience or alternative sources of knowledge to evaluate media messages. A corrolary of this was that if there was no direct experience or other knowledge of an issue, then the power of the message would increase. In our work on the Gulf war of 1991, we noted the low level of public knowledge when it began and how media outlets were in a strong position to 'instruct' their audiences. The Daily Mirror for example has a whole front page listing (literally) who were the 'Heroes' and who was the 'Villain' (Philo and McLaughlin, 1995; 146).

We normally found that if people had direct experience of an issue and that this conflicted with the media account, then they would reject the media message. An exception to this was where a great anxiety or fear had been generated by media coverage. When we studies TV and press reporting of mental illness, we found that it focussed on violent incidents. People who worked in the area of mental health and who had professional experience tended to discount this media view and pointed out that only a tiny minority of people with mental health problems were potentially violent. Yet we found some cases where the fear generated by media accounts actually overwhelmed direct experience. In the following case a young woman described how she had worked alongside elderly people in a hospital. There people were in no way dangerous or violent yet she was afraid of them because of what she had seen on television:

The actual people I met weren't violent - that I think they are violent, that comes from television, from plays and things. That's the strange thing, the people were mainly geriatric - it wasn't the people you hear of on television. Not all of them were old, some of them were younger. Not of them were violent - but I remember being scared of them, because it was a mental hospital - it's not a very good attitude to have but it is the way things come across on TV, and films - you know, mental axe, murderers and plays and things - the people I met weren't like that, but that is what I associate them with.

(quoted in Philo 1996:104).

In conclusion, our own research showed that beliefs can be influenced by new messages from the media and also by the flow of peoples own experience which can itself be used in the rejection or acceptance of new messages. (As can other factors including cultural histories or processes of logic). In other words the reception model should be dynamic. Media messages change and so does the flow of experience. The two are crucially related. When political ideologies are developed as political practice, they have consequences in public experience. This means that the systems of ideas which legitimise social and political power must be constantly re-worked. For example, in the 1980s the belief that the capitalist economy was best left to free marketeers was challenged after the collapse of share prices on Black Monday in 1987, followed by the collapse of the housing market after 1988. The free market produced radical and very negative changes in many social lives. In the 18 years after 1979, the poor really did get poorer, there were increases in interpersonal violence, unemployment and insecurity at work. These changes led in part to the election of Tony Blair and the New Labour Government and they forced the Conservatives to re-think how they could now justify their own position. Each time there is such a radical change political propaganda must be re-formulated to explain/apologise or legitimise these new relationships and events (Philo 1995b). It is exactly because people are not sealed off in conceptual bubbles that there is a need to constantly re-work social ideas in the relation to the defence of interests. If belief systems were not constantly challenged by new experience and its contradictions there would be no need for political debate. In real societies, there are parties, class fractions and interest groups who contest how the world is to be explained and what is to be understood as necessary, possible and desirable within it. In our work we have analysed the role of the media in such struggles because of its potential power in reflecting and developing such key elements of public belief.

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