Pluralist approach✅

Pluralism

  • Sees the exercise of power in society as reflecting a broad range of social interests, with power spread among a wide variety of competing interest groups and individuals, with no single one having a monopoly of power.

Main ideas

  • The manipulative and hegemonic approaches argue that those who own, control and work in the media shape their content, spreading the dominant ideology among media audiences and protecting the interests of powerful groups in society.

  • The pluralist approach takes a very different view.

  • They argue that media content is driven not by a dominant ideology or the political interests of owners, but by the fight for profits through high circulation and audience figures.

  • There is a wide range of competing newspapers, magazines, television channels, websites and other platforms for the delivery of media products, reflecting a huge range of audience interests and ideas, including those which challenge the dominant ideology.

  • The only control over media content is consumer choice, and the media have to be responsive to audience tastes and wishes otherwise they’ll go out of business.

  • This competition for audience prevents any one owner or company from dominating the media, and media regulators, like Ofcom, also act to prevent this happening.

Control and power

  • Pluralists argue that the media are generally free of any government or direct owner control and can present whatever point of view they want.

  • The same goes for journalists, who are not simply pawns of their employers, pumping out the dominant ideology and biased stories to manipulate audiences.

  • They have some professional and editorial honesty and independence, and have to produce stories that offer a wide selection of views, using news values which reflect the wishes and interests which are most relevant to their audiences, if they are to satisfy and maintain their audiences.

  • Audiences too are free to choose in a pick ‘n’ mix approach to whatever interpretation suits them, thanks to the wide range of media fm which they can select.

  • They have the freedom to accept, reject, reinterpret or ignore media content in accordance with their tases and beliefs.

  • The new globalised digital media and social media and the internet, particularly, enable all sorts of vies to be represented through citizen journalism.

  • More people, not just media moguls and large media corporations, have the opportunity to communicate with vast numbers of other people.

  • For example, ordinary people can now public their thoughts on Twitter, attack those in power on Blogger, and report on events excluded from other main-stream media by sending their own news stories and photos to citizen journalism sites like Demotix or YouTube, or posting them on Facebook.

  • This undermines Marxist views of control of media content by media owners.

Criticisms of the pluralist approach

  1. Media owners appoint editors - and have on numerous occasions sacked uncooperative editors - and strongly influence who is appointed on senior levels. Owners, top managers and editors often share a similar outlook on the world.

  2. While managers, journalists and television producers have some independence, they work within constraints placed on them by the owners. News is collected from a few news companies and agencies, often paid for by the media owners themselves.

  3. Not all groups in society have equal influence on editors and journalists to get their views across. The main sources of information for journalists tend to be from those groups that consist of the most powerful and influential members of society, and it is they who are most likely to be interviewed on TV, to appear on chat shows, to be quoted in newspapers, and their views are given greater weight than those of less powerful groups.

  4. Only very rich groups will have the resources required to launch major media companies to get their views across independently, and both governments and rich individuals have brought political or legal pressure to bear to stop programmes, newspaper stories and books which threaten their interests.

  5. The pressure to attract audiences doesn’t increase media choice but limits it. The media decline in quality and news and information get squeezed out or sensationalised and turned into ‘infotainment’ (information wrapped up to entertain) as the media aim to attract large mass audiences with unthreatening, unchallenging and bland content.

  6. Hegemonic theorists argue that people have been socialised by the media into the belief that they are being provided with what they want. The media themselves may have created their tastes, so that what audiences want is really what the media owners want.