Cultural Approaches to Media Research

In the 1960s, cultural approaches to media research emerged to challenge social scientific media effects theories and to compensate for those theories’ limitations. In contrast to social scientific media research, the cultural studies mode of media research involves interpreting written and visual “texts” or artifacts as symbols that contain cultural, historical, and political meanings. For example, researchers might argue that the wave of police and crime shows that flooded the TV landscape in the mid-1960s was a response to Americans’ fears about urban unrest and income disparity. A cultural approach thus offers interpretations of the stories, messages, and meanings that circulate throughout society.

Like social scientific media research, cultural studies media research has evolved in the decades since it first appeared.

Early Developments in Cultural Studies Media Research

In Europe, media studies have always favored interpretive rather than scientific approaches. Researchers there have approached the media from the perspective of literary or cultural critics rather than experimental or survey researchers. These approaches were built on the writings of political philosophers such as Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci, who investigated how mass media support existing hierarchies in society.

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In the United States, early criticism of media effects research came from the Frankfurt School, a group of European researchers who emigrated from Germany to America to escape Nazi persecution in the 1930s. Under the leadership of Max Horkheimer, T. W. Adorno, and Leo Lowenthal, this group advocated augmenting experimental approaches with historical and cultural approaches to investigate mass media’s long-range effects on audiences.

Since the time of the Frankfurt School, criticisms of the media effects tradition and its methods have continued, with calls for more interpretive studies of the rituals of mass communication. Academics who have embraced a cultural approach to media research try to understand how media and culture are tied to the actual patterns of communication in daily life. For example, in the 1970s, Stuart Hall and his colleagues studied the British print media and the police, who were dealing with an apparent rise in crime and mugging incidents. Arguing that the close relationship between the news and the police created a form of urban surveillance, the authors of Policing the Crisis demonstrated that the mugging phenomenon was exacerbated, and in part created, by the key institutions assigned the social tasks of controlling crime and reporting on it.13

Contemporary Cultural Studies Approaches

Cultural research investigates daily experiences, especially through the lenses of race, gender, class, sexuality, and imbalances of power and status in society. Such research emphasizes how some groups have been marginalized and ignored throughout history, particularly African Americans, Native Americans, Asians and Asian Americans, Arabic peoples, Latinos, Appalachians, gay men and lesbians, immigrants, and women. Cultural studies researchers also seek to recover these lost or silenced voices. The major approaches they use are textual analysis, audience studies, and political economy studies.

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Media critic Jack Shaheen analyzes the cultural messages behind portrayals of Arabs and Arab Americans in film and TV, such as the Bugs Bunny cartoon shown here.
From the film “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People” produced and distributed by the Media Education Foundation

Textual Analysis

Textual analysis entails a close reading and interpretation of cultural messages, including those found in books, movies, and TV programs—such as portrayals of Arab and Arab American characters in popular films.14 Whereas social scientific research approaches media messages with the principles of modern science in mind—replicability, objectivity, and data—textual analysis looks at rituals, narratives, and meaning.

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Although textual analysis has a long and rich history in film and literary studies, it gained new significance for mass media in the early 1970s with the work of Stuart Hall in the U.K., who theorized about how messages were sent and understood (encoded and decoded) via television, and with the publication of American Horace Newcomb’s TV: The Most Popular Art—the first academic book to analyze television shows. Newcomb studied why certain TV programs and formats, such as the Beverly Hillbillies, Bewitched, and Dragnet, became popular. Trained as a literary scholar, Newcomb argued that content analysis and other social scientific approaches to popular media often ignored artistic traditions and social context.

Both Newcomb and Hall felt that textual analysis, which had largely focused on “important,” highly regarded works of art—debates, film, poems, and books—should also be applied to popular culture. As Hall argued, things like television and popular music were important because they were what most people were using or experiencing most of the time. By the end of the 1970s, a new generation of media studies scholars, who had grown up on television and rock and roll, began studying less elite forms of culture. By shifting the focus to daily popular culture, such studies shone a spotlight on the more ordinary ways that “normal” people (not just military, political, or religious leaders) experience and interpret their daily lives through messages in media.

Audience Studies

Audience studies differ from textual analysis in that the subject being researched is the audience for the text, not the text itself. For example, in her book Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, Janice Radway studied a group of midwestern women who enjoyed romance novels. Using her training in literary criticism and employing interviews and questionnaires, Radway investigated the meaning of romance novels to these women. She argued that reading romance novels functions as personal time for some women. The study also suggested that these particular romance-novel fans identified with the active, independent qualities of the romantic heroines they most admired.

As a cultural study, Radway’s work did not claim to be scientific, and her findings cannot be generalized to all women. Rather, Radway investigated and interpreted the relationship between reading popular fiction and ordinary life for a specific group of women.15 Such studies help define culture as comprising both the products a society fashions (such as romance novels) and the processes that forge those products.

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Political Economy Studies

A focus on the production of popular culture and the forces behind it is the topic of political economy studies, which examine interconnections among economic interests, political power, and ways in which that power is used. Major concerns of such studies include the increasing consolidation of media ownership. With this consolidation, the production of media content is being controlled by fewer and fewer organizations, investing those for-profit companies with more and more power to dominate public discourse. The theory is that money—not democratic expression—is now the driving force behind public communication and popular culture.

Political economy studies work best when combined with textual analysis and audience studies to provide fuller context for understanding a media product: the cultural content of the media product, the economics and politics of its production, and audiences’ responses to it.

Evaluating Cultural Studies Research

A major strength of cultural studies research is that researchers can more easily examine the ties between media messages and the broader social, economic, and political world, since such research is not bound by precise control variables. For instance, social scientific research on politics has generally concentrated on election polls and voting patterns. But cultural research has broadened the discussion to examine class, gender, and cultural differences among voters and the various uses of power by individuals and institutions in positions of authority.

Yet just as social scientific media research has its limits, so does cultural studies media research. Sometimes cultural studies have focused exclusively on the meanings of media programs or “texts,” ignoring their effect on audiences. Some cultural studies have tried to address this deficiency by incorporating audience studies. Both social scientists and cultural studies researchers have begun to look more closely at the limitations of their work and to borrow ideas from each other to better assess media’s meaning and impact.