The rediscovery of ‘ideology’: return of the repressed in media studies

Abstract

Mass communications research has had, to put it mildly, a somewhat chequered career. Since its inception as a specialist area of scientific inquiry and researchroughly, the early decades of the twentieth century-we can identify at least three distinct phases. The most dramatic break is that which occurred between the second and third phases. This marks off the massive period of research conducted within the sociological approaches of ‘mainstream’ American behavioural science, beginning in the 1940s and commanding the field through into the 1950s and 1960s, from the period of its decline and the emergence of an alternative, ‘critical’ paradigm. This paper attempts to chart this major paradigmshift in broad outline and to identify some of the theoretical elements which have been assembled in the course of the formation of the ‘critical’ approach. Two basic points about this break should be made at this stage in the argument. First, though the differences between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘critical’ approaches might appear, at first sight, to be principally methodological and procedural, this appearance is, in our view, a false one. Profound differences in theoretical perspective and in political calculation differentiate the one from the other. These differences first appear in relation to media analysis. But, behind this immediate object of attention, there lie broader differences in terms of how societies or social formations in general are to be analysed. Second, the simplest way to characterize the shift from ‘mainstream’ to ‘critical’ perspectives is in terms of the movement from, essentially, a behavioural to an ideological perspective.

Cite this

Graham Murdock (2005). The rediscovery of ‘ideology’: return of the repressed in media studies. Routledge eBooks. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203978092-9

@article{graham2005the,
  title  = {The rediscovery of ‘ideology’: return of the repressed in media studies},
  author = {Murdock, Graham},
  year   = {2005},
  journal = {Routledge eBooks},
  doi    = {10.4324/9780203978092-9}
}

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