ABSTRACT
If, in the British context, media studies was reinvigorated in the early 1970s by what Stuart Hall (1982) has characterized as the ‘rediscovery of ideology’, this rediscovery led, in the first instance, to a focus on the analysis of the ideological structure of news (both on television and in the press) and, more generally, to a focus on the analysis of media coverage of politics, particularly media coverage of explicitly controversial issues such as industrial and race relations. Some of this work was framed within a more (or less) sophisticated concern with bias (see Morley 1976, and Glasgow Media Group 1976, et seq.), while other studies mobilized concepts of ideology derived from the work of Gramsci and Althusser (see, inter alia, Hall et al. 1981). However, while internally differentiated in this respect, much of this work shared two key premises: first, that it was in the field of explicitly political communications that the concern with the reproduction of ideology (and the presumed consequence of the maintenance of social order or hegemony) would be most productively focused; and second (partly inscribed in the theoretical model of ideology underpinning the first premise-see Abercrombie and Turner 1978; Abercrombie et al. 1984), that the (ideological) effects of the media could, in effect, be deduced from the analysis of the textual structure of the messages they emitted. To this extent, the media audience was largely absent from these analytical discourses, and the power of the media over their consumers was often taken for granted (see Connell 1985).
