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What role does news media play in society? This has been debated across social science disciplines and amongst political leaders, legislatures, media executives and even local school officials. While opinions vary as to the extent and type of influence the mass media wields, all sides agree that mass media is a permanent part of modern societies. However, there are different perspectives on the role of media in modern societies. Scholars have debated the complex relationship between capitalism, media and democracy (Habermas 1989; Macintyre 1962; Therbon 1977).

A comprehensive examination of such debates is outside the purview of this essay. Its objective and scope are more limited. It focuses on news media and some of the approaches to its study. The questions it asks are: Is it a norm builder or a norm reinforcer? Is an understanding of media important in studying State-Society relations? This essay looks at the answers which scholarship on news media provides to these questions.

It divides studies on the media into three prominent approaches: functionalist, cultural and power approach. The functionalist approach looks at the information dissemination function of news media. In functionalist studies, media framing would be determined by functional requirements like creating an autonomous public community or fueling conversation that makes democratic action possible (Tarde 1969). The emphasis is on the linkages between news media and the people. On the other hand, cultural studies investigate news media as agents of social construction involved in meaning-making. In these studies, media framing is determined by the values, roles, norms and ethics of news media establishments. The third set of studies is based on power, where the underlying balance of societal or political power determines media framing.

A caveat is in order here. These approaches arose and acquired ascendency in different periods and different approaches. But continue to influence media scholarship today, sometimes directly and sometimes in a mediated fashion.

Functionalist Approaches: News Media and the People

Functionalist approaches look at the role that media performs in creating a robust public sphere and providing information necessary for the vitality of political participation. According to the hypodermic needle model (Lasswell 1927), the media is able to inject its message directly into a passive audience. In response to the lack of agency of the audience in the hypodermic needle, a model emerged the two-step flow of communication model (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944; Katz and Lazarsfeld 1960). First, the media and the people are “opinion leaders” who add their own interpretation of information to actual media content. The media does not directly influence public opinion; rather, the effect is indirectly established through the influence of opinion leaders. Building off these models, research focused on media’s influence on public opinion through “agenda setting” (McCombs and Shaw 1972), structuring reality (Lang and Lang 1983) and closing the knowledge gap (Blumler and McQuail 1968). Normative studies looked at the role of media as a ‘trustee’ (Schudson 1999) meant to create an informed citizenry in a democracy.

The influence of the people on the media has been analysed under models like the ‘market model’ (Schudson 1999), wherein the media serves the people what they want to hear. Joseph Klapper (1957) has argued that the most definitive effect of media exposure was the reinforcement of existing opinions. To say that the media influences public opinion ignores the fact that profit-maximising newspapers understand that reader’s utility from the newspaper is a function of the match between the newspaper’s framing of content and the consumer’s own ideology (Mullainathan and Shleifer 2005). This resulted in studies of media bias or media slant.

Scholarship has looked at media slant (the adoption of specific ideological frames) from the demand-side and the supply-side. The former investigates the relation between media slant and consumer ideology (Mullainathan and Shleifer 2005, Gentzkow and Shapiro 2006). Supply-side drivers of slant consider the role of owner’s ideology (Balan, DeGraba, and Wickelgren 2009), pressure from incumbent politicians (Besley and Prat 2006), and the tastes of reporters and editors (Baron 2006) in impacting media slant. Other approaches have looked at variation in media frames adopted through the lens of product positioning (Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010, Myers 2008) and product differentiation (Dubé, Hitsch, and Manchanda 2005). The underlying assumption in all these studies is that media houses are economic entities competing for consumer share to maximise profit.

Cultural Approaches: Media as an Organisation

Sociological inquiry into the workings of the media has looked at the shared culture between media organisations. Media narrative in these studies was the function of gate-keeping and selectivity processes driven by values (Levy 1981), ethics (Starck 2001), roles (Cohen 1963) and demographics (Willnat and Weaver 2003). Demographic characteristics of media personnel, their role perception as “observer” versus “participant” (Cohen 1963), along with normative and ritualistic codes (Elliott 1980), determined the selection and framing of content in these studies.

Studies looked at organisational settings (Epstein 1973) to examine patterns of interaction among journalists (Bantz 1985), rendering journalism similar to other social settings. Viewing news as a manufactured organisational product, these studies looked at the socialisation of journalists within organisational settings to investigate the nature of news reporting. Studies also focused on ideological questions to better understand the link between news media and the larger sociocultural surroundings (Hall 1982). While some studies investigated the role of ideology of a particular media organisation on its reporting, others located ideology outside of media organisations wherein the media was viewed as an agent of a dominant ideological order external to the news world itself (Gitlin 1980).

Acknowledging the idea that news was a constructed reality shaped by some notion of social power, these approaches emphasised the purposive aspect of news creation (Molotoch and Lester 1974). Normative studies have approached media functioning from what the news media ought to do to fulfil its duties of information dissemination more effectively (Schudson 1999; McQuail, Graber and Norris 1998).

Power Approaches: Media and the State

Research on the interdependency of the state and the media emphasises the closely intertwined relation between media professionals and politicians. From viewing the press as an instrument used by the state to shape public opinion (Tonnies 1923) to its role as a check and balance on the other three institutions of the legislature, executive and judiciary (Cater 1959), the scholarly investigation has shed light on the different mechanisms by which the interdependency between politics and press is brought about. An interesting set of studies look at the role of media in authoritarian regimes by focusing on themes of propaganda and censorship through formal models and/or empirical studies (McMillan and Zoido 2004; Egorov, Guriev and Sonin 2009; King et al. 2013; Gehlbach and Sonin 2014; Lorentzen 2014; Adena et al. 2015; Shadmehr and Bernhardt 2015; Little 2017). Other studies investigate the workings of the news media through newsroom ethnographies (Tuchman 1978; Gans 1979; Fishman 1980).

The micro-level of analysis in the power approach focuses on the sourcing practices of journalists to investigate questions of media autonomy and power (Sigal 1973; Tunstall 1970; Tiffen 1990), placing the media in the context of other institutions of the state. The meso-level of analysis investigates the independence of the press, with the “advocacy model” (Schudson 1999) arguing that the media transmits political party perspectives, reflecting the economic interests of the state rather than the informational needs of the people.

The macro-level of analysis of media’s relation with the surrounding political system creates typologies of the interaction between media and politics under different political systems. Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm (1956) categorise news media’s relation with the political system into the authoritarian approach (media restriction by royal decree), libertarian approach (media to uphold a free marketplace of ideas), Soviet-totalitarian approach (media controlled through surveillance implemented as per Marxist thought) and social responsibility theory (evaluation of journalism in conjunction with professional ethics, community opinion and the ability to air conflict).

Herman and Chomsky’s (1988) work integrated the functional and power approach by investigating the political economy of media functioning. They argue that news media carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces. According to them, the power distribution in society needed maintenance by news media, the latter serving established and recognised powers given the close-knit industry of profit-making corporations that news media is.

Conclusion

The revival of hypodermic needle models with big data analytics-based customisation of news for audiences underscores the dynamic nature of the interaction of news media with consumers as technologies change. With democratic backsliding giving way to informational autocracies (Guriev and Treisman 2019), which rely on manipulation of information to artificially boost their leader’s popularity by convincing the public of their competence, understanding how news media works, and the role it plays in society cannot be emphasised enough.

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Parnika Praleya is currently a graduate student at the University of Chicago.