ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how audiences use, re-use, and interact with journalism. The view of citizens engaged with the political system has become an idealized reference point for liberal theories of journalism stretching back to the Enlightenment. Theodore Adorno, a Marxist of the Frankfurt School, saw journalism as merely a part of the 'culture industry' in which undifferentiated audiences blindly follow the siren call of populism. At around the time that Adorno was formulating his concerns about the effects of the culture industry on the minds of the masses, sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld was investigating the relationship between audience and media. Audiences use material in ways that are quite different from that intended by the author. Fiske sees in this refusal to conform to hegemonic readings the possibility of rebellion. He refers to 'knowledge gangsters' who steal information and rearticulate it so that it tells a different story.