ABSTRACT
In the fifteen years since the publication of Bad News (Glasgow University Media Group 1976), the media landscape has been changing with increasing speed. Television news analysis in the 1970s took place against the background of relatively stable institutions and a still strong consensus about the values and goals of public broadcasting. However vigorous may have been the disagreements about their practical application, there was much common ground. The keenest debate at the time-lasting all of ten years-was about the form which one additional terrestrial channel should have within the system of public regulation. The subsequent acceleration of technical, economic and political change has made the work of researchers as well as practitioners more uncertain and complex. The field of media studies has grown and diversified during this period partly in response to these changes but the process of maturation still has some way to go. The main argument of this chapter is that sociology provides resources in the shape of concepts, theoretical approaches and forms of empirical analysis which the expanding field of ‘media studies’ has been neglecting to its disadvantage. I discuss reasons why this is so and try to identify some of the consequences. The second part of the chapter examines the question of how sociology, broadly interpreted, can inform media research in such a way as to contribute to a more coherent, critical and relevant field of study.
