Research Proposal on Role of Media
As distinct from politics, the mass-media focuses public attention on a limited range of topics or themes. The media have an extremely limited capacity to transmit a full and complete picture of the nearly limitless wealth of events that comprise political reality, so they always have to pick and choose what they will feature and how they will present it.
The media apply two different filter systems in translating real events into media products. Filter 1 regulates the selection of events by applying news value-criteria: the more of these reportage factors that apply to an event, the higher will be its expected newsworthiness, and the more likely that the media will pay attention to it. Obviously then, the most reliable formula for attracting media attention is to find an event with roughly the following profile: there should be a strictly limited number of well-known individuals involved who come from the audience's immediate circle, whether in a cultural, political, or spatial (three dimensional) sense, who emerge from a conflict-loaded situation either with remarkable successes and achievements or else with serious harm. The logic of events in the real world often does not have much effect on the way the media apply these rules in selecting material to be reported.
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Filter 2 consists of rules of presentation. These rules are picked up from the codes of theater performance and the discourses of popular culture such as story-telling, personification, conflicts of mythical heroes, drama, representative narratives, oral duels, social-role dramas, and actions with symbolic overtones, entertainment artistry, and news-reporting rituals that promote social integration.
The media stage as pre-structured by the twin filters has a large capacity to handle political issues, and to deal with them in different ways. It serves as an opportunity structure for a broad variety of uses. Media productions can be successful by being politically disengaged, empty, and formulaic, i.e., little more than entertainment.
On the other hand they can also be receptive to the political, seeking to transform it along sensitive lines and using their own techniques to throw it into sharp relief through argument and information. There is an almost unlimited number of ways in which the sensibility of the media can be synthesized with politics. In some cases media sensibility can go quite far in promoting a better understanding of politics; in other cases it can be a positive obstacle.
The logic of the mass media is closely interwoven (mix together) with its economic structure. In the case of private media it is obvious that their products are first and foremost commodities, since sales figures are the sole justification for all of their activities. Heightened private-sector competition, especially in the limitless mass market of TV and, in its wake, the rest of the media system, has led to the unchecked order of the rules that were inherent in the media from the very outset.
There is, however, a clear hierarchy of degrees to which various types of media are affected by commodity characteristics, starting from the less affected quality print media at the bottom and running up to the most affected tabloids and commercial TV stations at the top. The pressure for ratings that bothers commercial television is now being felt directly in legally employed public broadcasting systems, of the type that exist in EU nations like France, Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany.
There is a sharp tension between media logic and political logic and between the uncompromising (firm, fix) presentism inherent in the media production time and the time required for political processes. The heart of the political is the unhurried speed of its process with its always uncertain outcome, for which the media have no soft mark. They either reduce it all to a few tense moments supposedly making known the new, new thing about it, or else they ignore it completely, save perhaps for a rare feature in a small-circulation average for sensitive tastes.
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