We spend endless amounts of energy talking about the mass media û usually not in complimentary ways. We talk about how our children spend too much time watching television or playing video games or surfing the net and too little time doing, well, whatever it is that we must all have been doing when we were children. We lay blame for the fact that children kill other children on the shows that they watch and we blame the moral decline of our leaders on the shows that they watch and we blame the growing obesity of Americans on the shows that they watch and we blame hate crimes on the shows that the bigots watch.
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 not to blame the mass media for every ill in society nor to hold them up as bright shining beacons, but (if the book has a single goal) to demystify them, to remind us that television, no less or more than Congress or churches or rap music, is part of a cultural whole that is constantly changing, often ambiguous as to meaning, and never beyond our understanding. The authors continually argue for the importance of studying the mass media on the grounds that...