Introduction

At one point in their essay on Stuart Hall’s ‘Encoding/Decoding’ paper as a ‘canonical’ text in media research, Michael Gurevitch and Paddy Scannell say that ‘to a very considerable extent, a new academic field emerged from the work of CCCS in the 1970s’ where ‘30 years ago none of this existed’ (Gurevitch and Scannell, 2003: 233-4). In this context I see my task here as that of tracing how this came about, outlining which specific contributions to this process were made by the Media Group, particularly during the 1970s, and what that work’s longer term influence has been on the constitution of the field of media studies today.