Probably no other writer has had a profound an influence on the philosophical direction of the AML since its formation than Len Masterman, a lecturer at Nottingham University in England. Len's book Teaching the Media, is considered a seminal work in the field of media literacy and his ideas strongly influenced the writers of the Media Literacy Resource Guide, particularly in its examination of the relationship between ideology and media literacy. Len has been one of the most popular speakers and workshop presenters at the AML's international conferences in Guelph. The following interview took place in March of this year in Vancouver and was conducted by AML executive member John Pungente, SJ, Director of the Jesuit Communication Project. The questions were prepared by Barry Duncan, AML President.
JP:
You indicated in 1991 that a new paradigm in media education had emerged centred in part on the pervasiveness of advertising and trends in public relations and promotional culture. Could you give us
some recent updates in this area?
LM:
I don't know whether a new paradigm has emerged. Personally, I am trying to figure out where media education might most profitably go. What I was really trying to look at were the kinds of trends and
tendencies within the media themselves that we would have to grapple with as media teachers. I am not necessarily certain that we have started that yet but it's quite clear that questions around the
market and commercialism in the media are going to be absolutely essential because the expansion of the media into the next century is going to be almost entirely an expansion of commercial media.
The key questions of the nineties and beyond are going to relate to the extent to which market-driven media can actually deliver democratic values.
That represents a switch from the concentration on questions of ideology that engaged most of us throughout the 70's and 80's. I think the reason why questions of ideology were important then was because, certainly in Britain, we were looking at a tradition of broadcasting that raised quite specific questions about the role and function of public service media within a democratic society.
JP:
Do public service media work in the interest of majorities of citizens in a democratic society in the way that the textbooks say they should?
LM:
The mark of a democratic society is amongst other things, freedom of speech, expression, the guarantee of some degree of human rights with regard to communications, and some degree of access by
citizens to the media. Are public service media fulfilling their democratic potentialities, or are they simply servants of the government and the state? Are the people who control them passing down
their ideas to the rest of us? A political analysis of the media was one way of explaining that key conundrum of Marx: that the ideas of economically and politically dominant groups are, in every
epoch, the dominant ideas. Subordinate groups in society very often hold ideas, attitudes and values that don't seem to express – indeed seem to work against – their material
interests.
Analysis of the ideological role of the media (and of the school and the family) offered the possibility of some kind of solution to that question. But above and beyond that, it was also helpful in suggesting strategies for strengthening democratic values around the media – by developing media literacy programmes, encouraging kids to "de-naturalise" the media, looking at questions of representation, raising questions of access and power, and generally trying to give them more power as audiences.
JP:
So who controls the ideological agenda of the media and how is that control evolving?
LM:
I think that what happened from the early 80s represented the "death of ideology" in a narrow sense, in that, with the development of market philosophies, you didn't have to worry about these things
any more. The market makes the question of whether the media are or are not ideological state apparatuses virtually irrelevant. All of those detailed analyses of the precise relationship between the
media, the Government and the State, which concerned media analysis in the 60s and 70s, didn't have much force within the predominantly commercial media environment of the 80s. The voice of the
market itself is very soothing and reassuring on this issue. It says "Don't worry. Democratic values are actually guaranteed by the market. In fact they're virtually synonymous with it." Consumer
sovereignty will ensure that the democratic function is served. When, for example, Russia began to move over to a market economy, the western media generally assumed that democratic values would
thereby be guaranteed. Television images of Russia have generally assumed a correspondence between the length of queues outside the shops and the extent to which this is a democracy.
JP:
Is this a system which really does serve the interests of most people? Does it provide us with "democratic" media or does it principally serve the interests of those who control, and finance it?
LM:
I've been looking at particular aspects of marketing, like sponsorship and public relations, in relation to that key question. I've tried to analyse the benefits and drawbacks of these different ways
of promoting goods, services and ideas in terms of their impact upon democratic values.
The sponsorship work has been fascinating. To begin with you run into the difficulty that most people don't actually see sponsorship as being any kind of problem, in the way that, say, advertising is. In fact most people, certainly most kids, think of sponsorship as a form of charity, as an act of corporate generosity. It's true that sponsorship is seen as a lifeline to survival for all kinds of activities, in the arts, in sport, even in academic research – activities which are desirable for and couldn't sustain themselves in terms of the number of customers they attract. If you're drowning, you don't criticise the person who is throwing you a life-belt, and that's the dilemma that faces the critic of sponsorship, and makes it difficult to mobilise support. People, on the whole, don't regard it as a problem.
Yet the long-term consequences of sponsorship upon any society strike me as being disastrous, and worth drawing attention to. For example, sponsorship is the worst possible mechanism you could think of for distributing resources in any culture or society. It gives the most to those who need it least. This is because sponsors generally want to be associated with already-proven success. So if you're a golfer looking for sponsorship, it's better to be Nick Faldo than a youngster struggling to buy his first clubs; if you're a theatre group, it's better to be the Royal Shakespeare Company than a "fringe" theatre group; if you're an artist, be David Hockney and not someone starving in a garret.
In other words, sponsorship distributes resources in indirect proportion to need and produces results which even its beneficiaries regard as obscene. Sportsmen, who are already multi-millionaires, can make hundreds of thousands of dollars with a single putt, or by winning a tennis march, whilst, in the UK for example, children's playing-fields are being sold off at an unprecedented rate, and decent sporting facilities at a community level are difficult to find, particularly where they are most needed.
JP:
So what do you see as the ideological implications of the sponsorship issue?
LM:
If the first rule of sponsorship is that money follows rather than creates success, then the second is that sponsorship is a profoundly conservative influence wherever it appears. What sponsors hate,
above all else is controversy. They don't want to be associated with work that may upset or alienate people. They generally support what is safe, known, and popular rather than what is risky and
experimental. Now that's fine for sponsors, but it's absolute death to the arts or the media, whose lifeblood is new ideas, new forms and new writing which challenges and pushes beyond established
styles and tastes. Sponsorship has virtually made the British Theatre moribund in a decade, and pushed all of the arts towards an utterly lifeless heritage culture.
Equally important is the fact that sponsorship continually threatens the integrity of everyone who works in the media, in education or in the arts. Anyone working in these fields has an implicit contract to speak to their public (in the case of teachers, it will be their students) as honestly as they can, free from political, commercial or partisan interests.
That's precisely why we value the arts, education and good broadcasting. Anyone breaking that implicit contract is practicing a debased form of their profession. Any form of sponsorship immediately raises the question "Whose interests are being served, those of the public or those of the sponsor?" Before very long sponsors, as paymasters, start to control the agendas of a whole range of supposedly autonomous institutions and professional practices.
All too many professionals, to their shame, are complicit in this process. They give up thinking for themselves and, instead, think up projects which they hope will be attractive to sponsors. In universities everywhere, the key to promotion for staff is to generate as much external income as possible, in the form of research grants and sponsorship. Setting your own priorities, and trying to work on important issues has no prestige unless your priorities are shared by a major funder. In the long run our universities and our societies are in trouble if they allow their agendas to be set for them by the boardrooms of the major corporations.
Critiques of a simple marketing technique like sponsorship raise issues of the most fundamental kind about what's happening to cultures and societies across the world. The same is true of other marketing techniques like public relations, product placement, and a whole range of publicity techniques. The analysis of marketing will have to go way beyond our conventional ways of critiquing advertising, and getting the arguments and issues clear seems to me to be centred to any meaningful media studies agenda for the future.
JP:
What is your sense of the approaches American media educators are taking?
LM:
I don't know what my attitude to media education would be if I were living within American culture. I do think that American television is pretty awful! On the other hand, I disagree with the
analysis of someone like Neil Postman in that I don't think that this has very much to do with the medium itself or with the technology.
I found myself following in the footsteps of Postman a few years ago when I was doing a lecture tour of Finland. He'd spoken at many of the same places a few weeks earlier, and Finnish Television spliced together a prime-time programme contrasting our views of television. When I saw the programme what struck me as curious was Postman's relative indifference to Finnish television itself, or indeed to any other national television system. He assumed that when he was talking about American television, he was talking about "television". And he had no sense of the struggles and areas that were worth fighting for within television in various cultures.
If you write television off, then you're conceding all the important arguments. There are areas of really important political and cultural struggle going on around, say, the future of the BBC at the moment in the UK. Who wins and who loses in those struggles is going to be a matter of the greatest consequence for the future of British television and British broadcasting. To say that television is inevitably going to have trivializing effects is to concede the argument to those who want to trivialize it.
Postman really doesn't see television as a site for struggle. He sees it as a battle that has already been won. And in a sense, in America, it already has been won. In America, the decision was made very clearly in the 1920's in radio and the 30's in relation to television that these were going to be primarily advertising-based media. Almost all of the things that we see on American television directly flow from that decision. So let's not blame the kids or the audiences or the technology. It all relates to that decision to make the primary economic base of the medium an advertising one, and to make the chief product of television not the programmes, but the audiences.
I think that that settlement has almost certainly vitiated media education in the States. In most other countries media teachers tend to be energized by the fact that they are dealing with arguments, the outcome of which will be of central importance to the future shape of their cultures.
JP:
What about the whole cultural studies paradigm which media education seems to have embraced in the past ten years?
LM:
I think that Barry Duncan's own work in this field is very interesting and has provoked me to think a lot about the possibilities and potentialities. I like his work on things like shopping malls and
student fads and crazes. He's shown how you can take a very contemporary culture and make it teachable and validating of the students' own experiences. I certainly would want to support that kind of
work myself. I don't do that because I'm not quite certain what cultural studies is.
In the same way I'm not quite certain what "communication studies" is. I can't define either of those terms because definition involves delimiting. It means drawing a line and saying what lies within and outside of that line. I can't think of anything that is not a form of communication and I can't think of anything that is not a form of culture.
Culture to me is a whole way of life. Similarly "communication" seems to cover everything from Coronation Street to how you blow your nose and that raises a fundamental question for me: "What is the area of study?" I don't think you can have a disciplined study of any subject if you don't know what the subject is, if you don't have a fairly clear idea of what falls inside of it or what falls outside of it. For that very simple, naive, pragmatic reason, I've never thought of myself as being a cultural studies or a communication teacher, although I'm an admirer of a great deal of work in both fields and have learned an enormous amount from it.
Actually, I've only been interested in media studies for about the last 8 or 9 years because I was never quite sure what media studies was. I was never able to convince myself that I was a media studies teacher until I managed to convince myself that there was a field of study that could be worked upon in a coherent and disciplined way.
When I wrote Teaching about Television in 1980, I actually argued against the notion of media studies not because I was against the idea of media studies but because I couldn't see in any clear way how it could be pulled off. In fact, it was desperately unclear to me in the 1970s whether a single medium like television could be studied with any rigour. After all, television served the functions of cinema, newspaper, magazine, theatre, sports arena, and billboard all rolled into one.
So the task I set myself in the 70's was the limited one of trying to make sense of that single medium, television. It stood to reason that if I couldn't do that, then I had no hope of making any sense out of all of the media and their complex inter-relationships. This led to quite a long period of immersing myself in teaching about television in a very practical way in schools. This was between 1972 and 1980, during which time I put together and taught the first ever Television Studies course in UK schools. By the end of that period I was reasonably happy with the practical answers I had come up with to the problem of how you teach about the medium in a coherent way.
Once that was out of the way it was easier to take on the question of how you could do the same thing with the media as a whole. And that work, completed by around 1984, was the basis of Teaching The Media. Going beyond that, and asking how you engage in a sustained and systematic way with culture as a whole seems to me to require a major leap forward.
JP:
Audience studies – especially in the work of David Morley and John Fiske – seems to loom large in media education discussions. What do you seen as the strengths and weaknesses in this
approach?
LM:
David Morley's latest book, TV Audiences and Cultural Studies really summarises a decade of work that he's done on audiences, and is a terrific state-of-the-art study. It's probably wrong to link
Fiske with Morley. Morley's quite severe with what he calls Fiske's "semiotic democracy", a sort of readers' liberation, where audiences can make their own progressive and pleasurable sense out of
the most reactionary texts.
Actually I'm sympathetic to Fiske's project. He's saying that real people aren't dopes when it comes to watching television, and that still has to be said. His early work is clearly written in a polemical spirit, and it's generously conceived and courageously argued. It's clever, too, in turning the hoary conservative arguments or consumer sovereignty on their heads and making them progressive. But Morley is surely right to re-emphasize the ideological significance of the text, itself.
Greg Philo's recent book, Seeing and Believing, demonstrates that television can still have a relatively straight forward ideological impact upon its audience. Looking at media coverage of the Miner's Strike in the UK in 1984, he discovered a major difference of opinion between those with direct experience of the strike and those relying on media reports. Everyone relying on the media was convinced that violence was a regular occurrence on the picket lines. Everyone who had been there - pickets and police - said it wasn't. Further, in writing news reports on the strike, people unconsciously reproduced whole sentences and phrases from contemporary news accounts. Not much evidence of deviant readings there!
JP:
Radical social critic, Herbert Schiller objected to the audience power advocates' notion that we can resist so easily the dominant, oppressive texts and that the corporate powers would rejoice in
being given a kind of intellectual dispensation to mess us up. What do you think?
LM:
I agree with Schiller. That's the major criticism made of Fiske's work, that it does nothing to context existing power relations. Whatever the media throw at us, it's argued, its OK with Fiske as
long as it's popular. Actually I think Fiske's more recent work is much more nuanced than that. By concentrating on questions of audience reception, we may be neglecting political, economic and
ideological issues about production, which are more important areas of struggle.
JP:
Over the years, David Buckingham has taken a number of potshots at you. How do you reply to these criticisms?
LM:
Well, David's put a lot of energy into his work, and I regard myself as being on the same side as anyone who is working to improve the quality of media education. I'm not interested in conducting
internecine warfare, and I'm pretty philosophical about the impact that reviewing and criticism of one's work can have. I must have read a couple of hundred reviews of my work, and almost all of them
have been helpful and written in good faith. Everyone likes praise, but the most helpful reviews are those which are well-informed and positive, but focus on key problem areas or points of
omission.
But ultimately reviews don't much matter. What's important is whether the ideas and the strengths work, whether teachers find them useful. David has been generous in acknowledging that my books have been influential: he said somewhere that there wasn't much doubt that Teaching about Television was the most influential book of the decade in media education. But he then proceeds to give an account of my work that is just plain wrong ("wrong" isn't a word I'd normally use, but since I'm a bit of an expert or what I believe, I'll make an exception here). He says that my version of media education involves imposing upon students my own ideological readings of texts. Why such a stupid and narrow practice should be in any way influential David doesn't explain. He must believe that teachers have a high credulity threshold if they can fall for such guff.
Actually, every page I have written has been about how to develop students' critical autonomy, how to get them thinking independently of the teacher, how to encourage them to stand on their own two critical feet. And if I've achieved anything, it's in showing how this can be achieved in the classroom through a whole battery of participatory exercises, simulations, games and student-centred activities. I say quite explicitly that students need to be made aware from the outset of their own paramount responsibility for shaping their own responses to the texts they encounter, because without students taking on this responsibility, very little progress is possible. I've even included examples of course evaluations by students where they point to the importance of group discussions in helping them sort out their own ideas.
David ignores all of this and hangs his case on a very slender thread: my definition of media education as a process of de-mythologising or de-mystification. I define it in this way in the context of discussing the immediacy and apparent transparency of television, and the ideological significance of this. Media education begins when, and only when, this transparency is challenged, and this is an act of profound ideological significance. But it's an act of freeing rather than binding, It's not moving students towards ideological closure, but away from it. It's the learning of a new language, a new way of seeing that will increase not lessen their autonomy. Of course I also believe that texts possess ideological levels of meaning (something which David appears to deny), but what those meanings are very much up for general discussion and debate.
So I think David's analysis is miles wide of the mark and, in fact, very idiosyncratic. must have spoken with tens of thousands of teachers over the years and not one of them has mentioned the issues he raises, so I don't think he's in any way representative of a wider movement. Perhaps that's just as well, because his suggestions for classroom practice take us back to the Dark Ages and are actually risible. If I thought that they were going to have any influence I'd be much more concerned than I am.