Biasing the News: Technical Issues in `Media Studies'

Abstract

The first part of the article is a general critique of radical media/cultural studies; the second is an illustration of these criticisms detailed through analysis of one media student's treatment of a newspaper. In general, the authors find media studies do not establish that their reading of materials is the reading made by media consumers; that the bias they allege in the media is not significant; that they set up a false and irrelevant model of what the media producers are trying/claiming to do; that they displace the technical-professional interests of media producers with their own ideological interests and that their analysis of texts is crude. In particular, they show how trivial identifications are turned into significant ones; how items are transformed in their transfer from media page to media criticism page; and how readings of a media text are argumentatively and constrastively organized. In summary it is argued that such plausibility as the media critics' arguments possess derives not from the accuracy but from the presentational organization of their analysis.

Media Representation of Research: The case of a review of ethnic minority education

“…These complaints about distortion link to a broader tradition of sociological research on the media, much of which has been concerned with bias. However, in my view, the notion of media distortion or bias has been poorly conceptualised in that literature, generally speaking; and inadequate attention has been given to the complex judgements involved in coming to conclusions about the existence and operation of bias (see Anderson & Sharrock, 1979;Harrison, 1985). In several respects, the case I am examining here is ideal for exploring these issues.…”

On the communicative constitution of risk objects in mediated times

“…Indeed, some years ago Murdock himself famously came under fire from two ethnomethodologists, who seemed to regard him as some kind of exemplar of the entire oeuvre of media studies (Anderson and Sharrock 1979). We take the view that this particular attack was unreasonably destructive, and we have already made clear that we are delighted to include the papers by Murdock and Altheide, and regard them as making important contributions to this collection.…”

Charting the logical geography of the concept of ?cease-fire?

“…Anderson and Sharrock (1979), also agree that members do not need media analysts to tell them (us) how to make sense of the world) Rather, that achieved sense of the world is commonplace and unproblematic. Our task is to unpack its logic, not to "decide" what is correct or incorrect based upon a theory or methodology which is "mapped onto" the phenomena of inquiry.…”