ABSTRACT
You are reading this book at the time of a major ‘crossroads’ for mass media. The key critical areas outlined in the five points above are under more scrutiny, and subject to more change, than perhaps at any time in the history of Media Studies. This means you are studying media in a very ‘rich’ time period for analysis. In the UK, in 2011, allegations of high-level collusion and corruption between tabloid newspapers, politicians and the police came to public attention. It became apparent that there was widespread use of phone hacking by tabloid journalists, often seriously unethical and illegal. The most serious evidence showed that the News of the World had been involved in hacking into the voicemail of a murdered schoolgirl, at the time she was missing, and even deleting
messages to make room for any new ones. Worse still, there were allegations that senior executives in the huge multinational News Corporation, politicians and the police were complicit – or at least aware and failed to respond. We will cover the News of the World scandal (and subsequent closure) in detail shortly but to begin with we need to engage with their significance for ‘macro’ areas of Media Studies. When the production of news becomes the news, we can say, perhaps, as Anne Guest has it, that ‘media will eat itself’. At the very least, it is not just conspiracy theorists who now believe in a symbiotic relationship between media, politicians and even the police. Furthermore, critical students of media in democracies such as the UK and the US now have to question their assumptions that they are looking at a ‘free media’ as opposed to ‘undemocratic’, state-controlled media. Where Marxist media theory might have looked outdated in the age of the prosumer, advanced capitalist economics and postmodern ways of looking at meaning and identity, the phone-hacking scandal that hit Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, a plethora of high level UK politicians and the police force, lends considerable weight to this argument from R. Murray (2011):
This is what a ruling class looks like – politicians who don’t represent us, a media which doesn’t inform us and police who don’t protect us. The collapse of the once-imposing power of the Murdoch empire, a cornerstone of the network of class power in Britain for 30 years or more, has shone an unforgiving light of the larger workings of the set-up that controls the country.
