Mediation

For decades, media theorists have extolled Marshall McLuhan's statement that “the medium is the message.” Humanistic scholars of media studies interpreted McLuhan to mean that the personal and social consequences of any medium or technology in a culture alter the way members of that culture communicate with their world. Karl Marx defined mediation as the reconciliation of two opposing forces within a given society by a mediating object, which can be cultural or material (such as print materials). Therefore, many media thinkers combine McLuhan and Marx and say that media mediates the message, especially from cultural, economic, political, and sociological perspectives. After considering both Marx and McLuhan, other media thinkers defined mediation as a process of cultural production and gatekeeping by media institutions that intervene in the relationship between people's everyday experience and a “true” view of reality or false consciousness.

Marxist cultural analysis emphasizes that the masses are manipulated and exploited by the ruling class. The Marxist method seeks to explicate the manifest and latent reflections of modes of material production, ideological values, class relations, and structures of social power—racial or gender as well as politicoeconomic or the state of consciousness of people in a historical or socioeconomic situation. The Marxist method provides an analytic tool for studying the political signification in every facet of contemporary culture, including popular entertainment in television and films, music, mass-circulation [Page 224]books, newspaper and magazine features, and comics, as well as acculturating institutions, whether educational, religious, familial, societal, or cultural. The most prevalent theme in Marxist cultural criticism is the way the mode of production and the ideology dominate in American culture, along with the way the rest of the world and American business and culture have colonized. This domination is perpetuated both through overt propaganda in news reporting, advertising, and public relations and through the often unconscious absorption of capitalistic values by creators and consumers in all aspects of the culture of everyday life.

The mass media and popular culture are centrally important in the spread of false consciousness, in leading people to believe that “whatever is, is right.” From this perspective, the mass media and popular culture constitute a crucial link between the institutions of society and individual consciousness. Marxist media analysis reasons that media are tools of mediation. There is no such thing as unmanipulated writing, filming, or broadcasting. The question is therefore not whether the media are mediated, but who mediates them.