ABSTRACT
Consider the long-running argument in media scholarship about the comparative importance of the two ‘moments’ of communication: reception and production. We know that each position has a distinct theoretical approach. So, broadly speaking, audience research (located in cultural studies) is premised on relativism and constructionism, whereas work on production (the political economy tradition) draws on a materialist view of the world. These intellectual approaches are not only intellectual, of course. Behind them is a division of labour such that academics in the field tend to work on just one moment. As a result intellectual partisanship and professional self-interest reinforce each other, and positions become embedded. Now in one sense this is just another story of specialism in the academy. But what marks out media studies is that even as they occupy their ‘own’ moment, specialists frequently claim it as the moment, that it trumps the other in significance, and encompasses the fullest meaning of the media. In other words, there is a kind of hegemonic thrust in each of these two branches.1
