Representations in Mass Media Research Paper

No representation is comprehensively accurate. All media representations inevitably omit some aspects of the item represented. Indeed in most cases only a tiny fragment of the actual idea, person, or group will be perceivable to the audience. Audiences may and often do fill in much of the absence themselves, drawing on their pre-existing mental theories or schemas. Studying representation means probing the combination of absences and presences, the meanings this total package is likely to convey to audiences, and the ramifications of these patterns of representation for power and belief in a society.

It is also vital to understand that there is no one-toone correspondence between representation in the media text and the representation of the text and its signals as inferences drawn in the minds of audiences. The message that a communicator intentionally encodes in a media text may get decoded in ways that contradict or bear little relation to the communicator’s purposes. Because representation involves both encoding and decoding, the conscious intentions of the communicator may have surprisingly little relevance to individuals’ reactions and thus to the political and social impacts of media representation. This point is sometimes lost in popular and even academic studies of the media’s influence, which frequently take individual media personnel to task for what analysts assume will be the effects of the representations. Vidmar and Rokeach (1974) provided a classic example of the slip between intentions and influence in their study of the popular American television program ‘All in the Family.’ To illustrate the absurdity of ethnic prejudice, Norman Lear, the show’s creator, made its central character, Archie Bunker, a laughably ignorant, outspoken bigot. Yet despite the ridicule heaped upon Archie and his bigotry in most episodes, Vidmar and Rokeach revealed, the show merely reinforced viewers’ predispositions. Far from changing their minds or even experiencing discomfort, prejudiced viewers saw Archie’s tirades as vindication of their own sentiments.

Communication scholars studying media representation have typically done so to discern likely media influence. But cultural studies analysts and others working in the postmodern mode found surprising allies among those within the positivist and behavioralist traditions in stressing that individuals’ interpretations of a given text vary so markedly that studying texts in isolation from their audiences produces flawed accounts of media representation. The major work of representation goes on within each thinking individual’s brain rather than in the text, they say. Therefore, much of the scholarly focus in the 1990s shifted towards exploring the audience’s interpretations rather than the media text by itself.

This research paper assumes that the representations in the text influence without determining individuals’ sentiments. Beyond this, at the aggregate level, the pattern of representations in a society’s mass media illustrate and help define its culture, reinforcing dominant cultural values yet also revealing and stimulating cultural change. These assumptions do not require a one-to-one correspondence between text and mind or text and culture, but do insist that the correlations are often significant. The conflict over just how significant—that is, how powerful media representations are—runs through media scholarship from its earliest days and continues in the most recent work. To cite ideal, polar types, some take the position that individuals make up their own minds, independently reconfiguring anything represented in the media to find meanings that suit their own experiences, knowledge, psychic needs, and goals. Others assert that in ‘telling people what to think about,’ the media can significantly and sometimes decisively influence an audience’s attitudes and preferences. Between these two poles lies a diverse array of theorists who believe an audience’s thinking is both influenced by and influences the representations that media transmit, with the degree of media impact depending on many environmental and individual differences.

One of the first major bodies of social scientific research on mass communication explored the representation of violence in movies and its impacts on youth. World War II spawned much research on propaganda—on media texts and their uses of symbols and language to generate potential shifts in mass attitudes. The next two decades saw a dry spell as scholars generalized from this and other early empirical research into media effects, concluding that any consequences of media representation were of minimal significance, limited largely to reinforcing existing predispositions. Advances in conceptualization and in analytical techniques challenged this stance and led to a renaissance in scholarship on media influence.

The more recent social scientific scholarship tends to run in two channels, one focusing on journalism and the news, the other on television and film entertainment (with occasional attention to magazines, radio, popular music, and novels). However, scholars toward the end of the century were increasingly recognizing the blurring of this alwaysproblematic distinction between entertainment and news. Not only was news becoming more ‘entertaining,’ more shaped by strategies for audience appeal traditionally used by entertainment—in response to rising competition from commercial broadcasters, websites, print media, and other sources—but entertainment offerings on the US broadcast networks were becoming increasingly topical. A resulting hybrid dubbed ‘infotainment’ occupied increasing portions of the broadcast airwaves and of daily newspapers as well, in the US and elsewhere. As a result of this dissolution of once-distinct lines, an essay on media representation must not limit itself to the traditional news media, even though the bulk of social scientific research has probed the news.

1. Framing

Representation is always partial, always requires selection of aspects to stand for the whole (otherwise we would be speaking of presentation, not representation). Since framing is the process of selecting, highlighting, and suppressing, it is the means through which most media representation takes place. Framing has organized an increasing portion of the literature on media representation. Most of this research rests on the proposition that framing devices are worth studying because they affect (without necessarily determining) the audience’s thoughts and perhaps actions. Framing can be defined as selecting aspects of a perceived reality and making them more salient in a communicating text, thereby promoting a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and or treatment recommendation.

The classic experiments of Kahneman and Tversky show that framing the same basic event or problem differently can have marked effects on an audience’s understanding of the item represented. For instance, Kahneman and Tversky (1984) gave subjects in one group a choice between a disease prevention program, A, that would ‘save’ 200 out of 600 people, and B, which would have a one-third probability that all 600 would be ‘saved.’ Then, using a matched group, Kahneman and Tversky reversed the frame so that option C meant ‘400 people will die’ and option D offered a one-third probability that ‘nobody will die.’ Option C was identical to A, as was D to B, excepting only that A and B were framed in terms of ‘saving’ and C and D in terms of ‘dying.’ Yet in the first experimental group, 72 percent of subjects chose A, whereas only 22 percent in the second group chose the identical option C—presumably because C was framed to highlight death instead of lives saved.

Kahneman and Tversky’s experiments typically involved small changes in wording bringing about significant changes in response (apparently because the participants in the experiments thought about the matter differently, focusing their minds on different aspects of it). Media studies tend to document far more global differences in framing, involving not just word choice but disparities in visual portrayals, aspects of the item emphasized, sources relied upon, people quoted, and more. If differences of a single word can cue markedly different responses, the multidimensional differences in media frames often demonstrated by scholars implicitly suggest considerable media influence.

For example, US media developed starkly different frames for two incidents in which civilian airliners were shot down by military forces, resulting in nearly 300 deaths each. In the first incident, the downing of a Korean Air Lines jet by the Soviet Union in 1983, adjectives and nouns, dramatic graphics, attributions of agency and other aspects of the text emphasized the suffering of the victims and the Soviets’ moral guilt. This frame fit with then-president Ronald Reagan’s political agenda of heightening Americans’ distrust of the Soviet Union and polls showed that the overwhelming majority of Americans accepted Reagan’s interpretation of the incident. By contrast, when US forces shot down an Iranian passenger jet in 1988, the media framed the event as a regrettable accident traceable to understandable human error and deficiencies in technology. Language eschewed moral judgments and the victims received scant attention. Here too large majorities of Americans in surveys accepted the Reagan administration’s framing—this time exculpatory rather than condemnatory. Public acceptance of the way the media represented the incidents in turn had significant political and policy consequences (Entman 1991).

Nonetheless, framing is far from all-powerful. William Gamson’s studies of ‘collective action frames’ have shown how individuals, interpersonal discussion, and media frames interact. Studying issues including nuclear power and affirmative action, Gamson (1992) found that audience members take cues from news reports, but, depending on their individual thinking, group discussions, and the nature of the issue, can draw from the media-supplied frames new ways of understanding the phenomenon reported. For example, journalists did not construct the dominant news frames and thus the representation of nuclear power to stimulate antinuclear activism. Nonetheless, audience members gathered by Gamson in focus groups were sometimes able through collective deliberation to reframe the issue in a manner that might have moved some to action.

An understanding of the bidirectional influence of media representations and audience thinking immediately cautions against inferring any single meaning or effect from a particular media text. The same text can represent or ‘mean’ different things to different people in different circumstances—including different historical periods. Thus the words ‘racial equality’ represented one concept during the 1950s and 1960s—equal treatment and equal rights under the law for black Americans. More recently, the words appear to connote something quite different for many at least in the US, something akin to radical redistribution of income, wealth, and opportunity from the majority Whites to minority groups.

Despite these cautions, the bulk of research on media representations appears to assume that one basic interpretation often—though certainly not always—dominates, at least among the members of any specific culture at a particular time. In fact, one definition of a culture might be sharing cognitive habits and schematic mental linkages that promote similar responses to an attitude object among the individuals who constitute its membership. The (typically implicit) assumption that representations in the media have a ‘preferred’ or ‘privileged’ interpretation or meaning in a given culture structures much of the remaining research reviewed here.

To generalize broadly (an inevitability in a literature synthesis covering such a wide area of research), media research explores three aspects of representation corresponding to three kinds of effects (often presumed rather than empirically demonstrated): the ways representation reflects and affects the general social status of group members such as women and blacks; the ways media representations might affect a mass audience’s political preferences in a particular dispute, say in an election or a debate over legislative proposals; and the ways media representations might influence political elites and government officials.

2. Status Reinforcement or Enhancement

Students of media representation frequently examine depictions of groups and how they might reflect, reinforce, or challenge existing status hierarchies. For this purpose, a wide range of human classifications has been invoked, from race and ethnicity to gender, sexual orientation, age, and language groupings.

In this research tradition a major thrust focuses on ethnic groups. For the most part, the research suggests that media images reflect and reinforce dominant status judgments. That is, in framing activities involving members of lower-status groups, the media highlight aspects likely to reinforce perceptions among the dominant group’s members of their difference from and superiority to outgroups. Representations tend to carry explicit or implicit judgments of the outgroups on dimensions of morality, intellectual capacity, industriousness, lawfulness, and other valued traits. But because media images are in constant flux and often contain contradictory elements, they also provide cognitive resources for challenges to status markers.

Of particular concern to many researchers has been a pattern whereby the media link crime and dangerous deviance to people of color and especially black males (Entman and Rojecki 2000). Experimental studies repeatedly have suggested that these representations engender cognitive and emotional effects on white audiences that affect the exercise and distribution of power—in this case heightening support for punitive prison sentences or diminishing support for white candidates when political advertisements associate them with black criminality (Gilliam and Iyengar 2000).

Studies of depictions of ‘foreigners,’ by which is usually meant nations and peoples other than those with white, European ancestry, also fit into this mode. For example, news media coverage of humanitarian crises in Africa, though typically sympathetic to those suffering, manages to endorse racial status hierarchies that place whites at the peak of the pyramid. Thus, Western news media made Bosnian whites appear in a variety of ways more human, more worthy of help, than news of the genocide going on simultaneously in Rwanda (Myers et al. 1996). The same appears true in entertainment. For example, a study of Brazilian TV star Xuxa suggests that her celebrity (and earnings) derived largely from her conformity to North American and North European ideals of blonde sexuality and beauty (Simpson 1998)—even in an ethnically heterogeneous country priding itself on multiracial tolerance. This white cultural preference reflects continuity with a long history in which European and US mass media implicitly derogated black people and valorized whites and the qualities typically associated with whiteness.

In a similar vein, gender representations in the media are found to register cultural change on some dimensions but to endorse traditional patriarchy and gender roles on others. Thus we see women actors portraying business executives in advertisements, and single women living happy lives without obsessing over men. But, although women’s sports now receive media attention that gives the lie to assumptions that women are inevitably passive, gentle, timid and the like, closer study suggests the continued impact of gender stereotypes and a preference for males. For instance, research on portrayal of women’s sports in Sweden shows that female athletes and their pursuits are implicitly derogated in comparison to males—over 90 percent of the time devoted to sports in a sample of Swedish television programming covered male athletics (Koivula 1999). Beyond this, women still drive the plot in far fewer movies and television programs than men, and still serve as sex objects more often than males. Women’s sexuality indeed appears more than ever to be pictured in unrealizable body types that have been linked to an increase in anorexia and other eating disorders. Thus a study of Australian adolescent girls finds a strong influence of media consumption on tendencies to aspire toward unhealthily thin body types, findings replicated in other countries (Wertheim et al. 1997). The studies of female body images typically find that many audience members absorb the preferred meanings and integrate them into their own self-images. These findings challenge any claim that mass audiences always engage in subversive readings of media representations.

On the other hand, Fiske (1992) argues that despite the traditional patriarchal and commercial values inherent in the pop star Madonna’s representations of femininity, young women frequently found reinforcement for nontraditional roles and values through their own counter-readings of Madonna’s music and videos. Certainly the growth in sheer numerical representation of blacks, women, and other traditionally lessempowered groups in nontraditional roles in Hollywood movies, music videos, and television dramas has both reflected and reinforced a degree of movement toward a more egalitarian status hierarchy.

Looking at status on the dimension of sexual orientation, Joshua Gamson (1999) argues that although the confessional talk shows that became popular in the US during the 1990s, such as ‘Jerry Springer’ and ‘Maury Povich,’ seem on the surface to belittle anyone who deviates from the middle class, heterosexual norm, the programs actually offer a more complex ideological brew. Sometimes the shows construct morality plays that censure gay, lesbian, or transsexual guests, but other times the intolerant snob, ivory tower expert, or sexual bigot assumes the role of villain. Arguably, says Gamson, gays and others living outside the bounds of dominant cultural values find a more welcoming home for self-representation in the ‘trash’ talk shows than in the rest of the mainstream media. In this sense, tabloid TV, driven as it may be by crass commercial goals, debasing as it may appear to public discourse, may open up new space in the public sphere for persons, ideas, and values previously denied much representation in either entertainment or news.

3. Media Representation and Political and Policy Disputes

Moving along a continuum from media representation’s impacts on mass publics to impacts on the political linkages between them and elites, we turn now to representation in news coverage of current policy and political contests. Here too the research suggests media most often operate to reinforce structures of power that privilege native born white men.

Thus, for example, female political candidates have been shown to face disadvantages against male candidates. They often receive less news coverage than males, and the news agenda seems to follow male candidates’ issue choices most closely. On the other hand, women candidates may benefit from being associated with positive sex-role stereotypes (Kahn 1994). With a black candidate in the race, campaign news tends to emphasize candidates’ racial identities and to frame elections as contingent on bloc voting by whites and blacks (Reeves 1997), and this demonstrably handicaps African American candidates.

The representation of nonelectoral dissent against powerful institutions has also received careful scrutiny. Research reveals a tendency for media to accept moderate, polite dissidents who work within the system and make conventional, incremental demands, but to slant decisively against groups that seek more radical objectives, undermining their legitimacy with the public and thus reducing the need for elites to respond positively to their goals (Gitlin 1980).

A subject of much dispute in the US has been representations of parties and candidates in national elections, with some scholars alleging systematic biases favoring one party and others denying these exist. Additional studies explore other kinds of bias than partisanship, suggesting the possible impacts on voting turnout or civic orientations. For example, US journalists increasingly infused their representations of candidates and campaigns with cynicism during the latter decades of the twentieth century, and this appeared to encourage political distrust and withdrawal among audiences.

Alongside such research there also arose theoretical essays that challenged the notion of bias by questioning the legitimacy of its presumed opposite, ‘objectivity.’ The notion that media can represent people and events in comprehensively accurate and politically neutral ways appears to be a powerful professional ideal for journalists. Nonetheless, scholarship almost universally denies the proposition and asserts that in the course of manufacturing the news, individuals and media institutions must inevitably embed certain kinds of biases (that is, preferred meanings or politically consequential omissions) into their reports. Although US studies, at least, fail to uncover systematic partisan biases, other forms of bias have been analyzed extensively, such as a bias for reporting political conflict over agreement, and political process over policy substance.

4. Elite Impacts

The newest and least developed area of research examines the impacts of media representations on elites. In democratic systems, elites are under pressure to respond to ‘public opinion,’ but it turns out they have few reliable ways to discover what it is on any given issue under debate in the legislature. Surveys are only sporadically useful in trying to gauge the sentiments of a legislator’s constituency. Thus, media representations of ‘public opinion’ to officials become highly consequential. Political elites can only respond to the public thinking that they perceive, and they get much of their data on this from media reports. Moreover, these reports can become self-fulfilling, because they also may influence the public itself. In this view the media become a representative vehicle in the more specific political sense of forging ties (imperfect to be sure) between mass public and elites, by representing ‘public opinion’ to elites—by making abstractions, here the public’s purported preferences and priorities, perceivable so elites can act on that information.

The process becomes even more complicated because elites contending to control the outcome of policy disputes frequently resort to manipulating the media. This may help create impressions of public support or opposition, impressions that augment or derail the momentum of policy proposals. Yet another twist is that media representations have themselves become a contentious political issue—an issue that is itself subject to biased representation. In the US, surveys clearly reveal that increasing majorities over the last few election cycles of the twentieth century came to believe that the media exhibit a liberal bias (Watts et al. 1999). Yet, as noted earlier, empirical studies fail to demonstrate a systematic ideological slant in the news. The public’s perception of bias appears rooted in news coverage of news-making itself, and in stories quoting politicians, party elites, and think tank intellectuals who have made purported media bias a theme of their speeches and writings. Watts et al. (1999, p. 144) find that in campaign coverage, ‘conservative candidates, party officials, and supporters have dominated the discourse with allegations of liberally slanted news content.’ The claims of left-leaning bias ‘overwhelmingly’ outnumber those of conservative bias—in the 1996 campaign by 91 percent to 9 percent. Thus there appears to have been a bias in the media’s representation of points of view about the media’s ideological representations—ironically, conservatives may have succeeded in biasing the US media’s representations of media bias. The topic of media representation has itself entered the arena of political contestation and strategy, although the effects on the media, or on power in politics and society, are not yet clear.

5. Conclusion

The spread of new media and many new sources of mediated information and images raises questions about the nature of the system of media representation and scholars’ ability to generalize about it. The Internet is freely open to almost any representation one might imagine, and its images are readily and simultaneously available to audiences around the globe. The impact of this wider circulation of more diverse images and words could be profound, disrupting the past ability of mainstream media representations to set agendas and shape dominant interpretations. On the one hand, the Internet puts more potential power over individuals’ internal representations and thoughts into the hands of each individual, at least those who devote sufficient time to surfing the Web and seeking new views. The seemingly significant media effects discussed here—on group status, on the outcome of elections and other disputes, or on elite behavior—could diminish. On the other hand, this very decline of a homogenizing mass media has some scholars worried that the public sphere will dissipate, only to be replaced by a cacophonous set of specialized subpublics that communicate not with each other but only within their own boundaries. In the future, the very notion of common culture and nationhood forged by public attention to common media of mass communication could come under pressure.

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