ABSTRACT
It’s not too contentious to assert that we know most of what we know about the world beyond our doorstep courtesy of the mass media. The mass media are those in and through which largely one-way few-to-many communications are achieved on a daily basis. Today, radio, television, newspapers, magazines, cinemas, billboards, games consoles and (increasingly) the Internet are the most important mass media – though we might also include such things as zoos, museums, theme parks and galleries because the most successful of these attract very large numbers of visitors. 1 These media communicate content in a wide range of genres, from television soap operas to popular music to video games to investigative journalism. The mass media does today what it’s always done: it aims to inform and edify millions of people, to entertain them and (as product advertising makes abundantly clear) to actively shape their values, tastes and preferences. Until relatively recently, it was largely domestic in scale, with each country having a relatively small number of national newspapers and broadcasters. This ensured that the mass media was largely ‘mainstream’, its format and content remaining within the perceived bounds of what most members of a country would regard as ‘acceptable’. Despite some recent diversification and a degree of geographical disembedding – exemplified by the proliferation of pay-TV channels, the rise of ‘reality television’ and the creation of ‘global’ news channels like CNN’s – the mainstream mass media rarely strays beyond the perimeters of ‘decency’. In large part, this is because it’s been able to define and over time slowly redefine where those perimeters lie. Whether it simply reflects or sets the pace for changes in its wider sociocultural milieu has been a perennial question for mass media analysts.
