Biasing the News: Technical Issues in `Media Studies'

Abstract

The first part of the article is a general critique of radical media/cultural studies; the second is an illustration of these criticisms detailed through analysis of one media student's treatment of a newspaper. In general, the authors find media studies do not establish that their reading of materials is the reading made by media consumers; that the bias they allege in the media is not significant; that they set up a false and irrelevant model of what the media producers are trying/claiming to do; that they displace the technical-professional interests of media producers with their own ideological interests and that their analysis of texts is crude. In particular, they show how trivial identifications are turned into significant ones; how items are transformed in their transfer from media page to media criticism page; and how readings of a media text are argumentatively and constrastively organized. In summary it is argued that such plausibility as the media critics' arguments possess derives not from the accuracy but from the presentational organization of their analysis.