Explaining media content

There is a mildly provocative little story in The Guardian on the escalating antics in one of those so-called "reality" shows (you know these: film clips showing tiny portions of the interactions between carefully chosen people under heavily controlled conditions).

Journalists Lorna Martin and James Robinson ask the inevitable question, "Has TV become too sexually permissive?" You'll find their tentative answer if you read the story, but what may be more important is who is giving the answers. They come from three types of sources: 1) the personalities who appear in the shows, 2) the producers of these programs, and 3) the agency that regulates the programs. So two out of three from employees of the media industries, and the third from an organization closely associated with them. The criteria for giving answers seem to be: 1) does it contribute to the internal honesty of the text, and 2) is it likely to attract an audience.

The text in question is a newspaper article rather than a research study, but it will not be hard to appreciate the difference between the journalists' approach and the one used in the Payne Fund Studies conducted between 1929 and 1932, the first major effort to produce an empirical account of media effects. Their questions were built around the effects of popular films on the behavior of children. The equivalency between the Payne researchers several decades ago and the Guardian reporters does not have to be so strong for it to be clear how different levels of analysis lead to different answers.