The Hidden Injuries of Media Power

Abstract

The consumption landscape is saturated by media messages and media values, as many pessimistic diagnoses of contemporary culture have emphasized. We lack, however, the tools for understanding the details and the structural forces at work within that landscape, a gap which this article aims to fill by developing a concept of media and the boundaries and hierarchies that help produce the media's legitimacy. ‘Media power’ means here the concentration of symbolic power in media institutions, particularly those of television, radio and the press (the common-sense definition of ‘the media’), although the long-term impact of new media on media power is considered in the article's conclusion. The central parts of the article discuss, first, the theoretical framework that underlies this approach, which draws by analogy on Durkheim's account of the social generation of the sacred/profane distinction, but also on the work of Bourdieu and others; and second, material is presented from the author's empirical research on situations where non-media people come into close contact with the media process (both at leisure sites, such as Granada Studios Tour, the home of the set of the UK's longest running prime-time soap, Coronation Street, and at protest sites featured in the media). The conclusion looks more broadly at the implications of this approach for grasping the tensions and conflicts inherent in today's mediated landscape of consumption.