ABSTRACT
We now move on to consider the final, and broadest, of our five explanatory perspectives concerning the influences on news and journalism, one which we labelled earlier ‘the cultural air we breathe’. Borrowed from British cultural theorist Richard Hoggart, this pithy phrase embraces those influences on newsmaking related to ‘the whole ideological atmosphere of our society’ which in turn tells us how ‘some things can be said and others had best not be said … ’ (Glasgow Media Group, 1976: x; cited in Eldridge, 1995: 8). As noted, the image of ‘the cultural air we breathe’ evokes the total or surrounding atmosphere of prevailing ideas, ideologies and discourses which permeate news content, its language, forms and ‘feel’ in a given societal context. Furthermore, it embraces matters that are both spoken in the everyday discourses of a particular culture as well as relevant factors that remain unspoken and subject to forms of self-censorship or other discursive silences. This perspective also connects with the concept of structure of feeling which
Raymond Williams defined as ‘the culture of a period … the particular living result of all the elements in the general organization’, where a period’s arts and their ‘characteristic approaches, and tones in argument’, are of major importance (Williams, 1961: 64-65). The ‘structure of feeling’ is not shared in the same way by all individuals in any community, as it is shaped by special interests, including those of class (Eldridge and Eldridge, 1994: 79-80). Yet, it has ‘a very deep and very wide possession, in all actual communities, precisely because it is on it that communication depends’, even though it is not learned in any formal way (Williams, 1961: 65). In this sense, news now constitutes one important dimension of the wider culture or ‘arts’ of a particular period and community. In some respects, this broad explanatory perspective on news culture has a
long history. It was shared by many pioneering and early academic efforts to conceptualise the influences on news and journalism in a rounded or holistic manner but which were sidelined by the emphasis on micro-or meso-level theorising favoured by US-based academic studies in the mid-twentieth century.
For example, some of the pioneering US theorists of journalism and its role and responsibilities in relation to the public were well attuned to holistic analyses embracing cultural power and ideological factors, as well as the inter-linkages between individuals and the broader social setting in which they are situated (e.g. Park, 1940; Dewey, 1927). It has long been recognised that just as ‘there is something reciprocal in the relations of the press to the public’, the news ‘cannot be studied or fairly judged’ apart from its environment because like all institutions, it is ‘caught in the complex of our actual state of civilization’ (Ogden, 1912: 322). In reflexive mode, we might note that academic fields engaged in studies of
news culture (i.e. not merely their objects of study) have been influenced by ‘the cultural air we breathe’ – including, in this case, the context of the post-war social democratic settlement and its attendant political culture. This may help explain why, in Britain and France, the early post-war decades witnessed two distinctly innovative approaches to the analysis of media and popular culture – as exemplified in the work of Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes, respectively. These were developed quite separately and independently – indeed undertaken with a degree of isolation that seems quite remarkable when viewed in retrospect today, only some 40 to 50 years later (Mattelart, 2007). Yet these early post-war French and British approaches to media culture shared several important features which distanced them both from the general thrust of work then underway in the USA. We may identify three such distinctive features, and these also inform many of the subsequent studies of concern in this chapter: (a) an explicit or direct concern with questions of power and its unequal distribution across different class groups or sub-cultures; (b) a concern to relate studies of the media to the macro (overall) processes or structures of the social and cultural formation – in contrast to the micro-or meso-level concepts favoured by the dominant strands of US media research of the time; (c) an orientation to the study of collectivities (social and cultural groups) rather than individual-level analytic categories. For example, Williams in Britain and Barthes in France both emphasised how the subtle operations of communication must be understood in terms of power relations and the role of (more or less) shared cultures, codes or communities in shaping the meanings and interpretation of media content or texts.
