The Media & Its Audience

What we generally fail to do in all of this rush to lay blame is to stop to remember that They are We û that the media are not something external to our society, but something integral to it, something more reflective of culture than capable of producing it. Something that in many ways follows the same rules that the rest of our social and cultural institutions follow, only somewhat more obviously and more publicly so that we are more aware of them. Whatever is up there on the big screen is hard to ignore and so we focus our blame and our desire and our urge to reform on the mass media instead of on other elements of society.

Croteau and HoynesÆs 1997 Media/Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences reminds us of a number of these truths by examining the institutional structures of mass media organizations, including the role that we as an audience serve. Their goal is

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pport or undermine mass media. It is important to note here as elsewhere throughout this paper that the term ômass mediumö covers a wide variety of sins and that while it is useful in some ways to talk in general terms about the mass media as if they were all something of the same type of animal, it is also essential to remember (as the authors are in general careful to do) that MTV and the Los Angeles Times are not the same. This is true not only in terms of their content (which in fact can often be quite similar) but in terms of what politico-legal restrictions can be placed upon them. Newspapers and magazines have far more freedom than do radio and television stations, in part because of that handy First Amendment, in part because airwaves are limited by physical constraints that publications using paper do not have, and so are held by the government and by private companies using them in the public trust. The authors note that ôMedia organizations operate within a context that is shaped by economic and political forces beyond their control, but the production of media is not simply dictated by these cultural constraintsö (p. 95), which is a nice summary of the ways in which politics affects mass media. There are continual atte
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Approximate Word count = 2149
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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