The Media and Social Problems

The media provide access to and construct social problems for large numbers of audiences in many parts of the world and in turn themselves have become a social problem in view of their multiple and complex effects, many negative. The media have been blamed by a wide spectrum of theorists and critics for promoting violence and sexism, racism, homophobia, ageism, and other oppressive phenomena. Social problems connected with the media also involve allegedly harmful media influence on children and youth, pornography and the degradation of women and sexuality, advertising manipulation, and the promotion of excessive consumerism and materialism.

Empirical research on media effects in these areas has been mixed and highly contested. Many studies have affirmed that media have negative social effects and help reproduce a number of social problems, while other studies assert skepticism toward claims of negative media effects or attempt to confirm positive aspects of the media.1 Empirical studies are often funded by institutions that have interests in escaping or deflecting criticism, or they are constrained by bias and limitations of various kinds. Moreover, dominant theories of the media are equally contested on whether the media promote serious social problems or have a more benign influence.

Conflicting theories and research into media effects have intensified debates globally about media as a social problem. Research into media effects and linking the media with social problems emerged for the most part in the United States following the rise of broadcasting and mass media in the 1920s and 1930s (Czitrom 1983), but now the debate and literature is international in scope (McQuail 1994). Likewise, in an increasingly inter-connected world, there are widespread concerns about the media and national culture and the ways that global media inform politics, economics, and social and everyday life. Some critical research has focused on the political economy and ownership of the media, often perceiving corporate control of the media by ever fewer corporations as a major global social problem. Other studies in the past decades have researched the impact of global media on national cultures, attacking the cultural imperialism of Western media conglomerates or creeping Americanization of global media and consumer culture (Schiller 1971; Tunstall 1977). Other [Page 210]scholars see a growing pluralization of world media sources and hybridization of global and local cultures, with an expanding literature exploring the ways that global media artifacts are received and used in local contexts (García Canclini 1995; Lull 1995). This literature is divided into research into how specific media or artifacts have promoted oppression in local or national contexts, or even globally, and studies that celebrate the democratizing or pluralizing effects of global media.

In this chapter, I sort out a vast literature on the media and social problems, delineate what I consider key issues and positions, and indicate some of the ways in which the media construct and address social problems and can be seen themselves as a social problem. This will involve, first, analysis of the media, morality, and violence, followed by a section on the politics of representation and debates over how the media contribute to class, race, gender, sexual, and other forms of oppression. Then, I take up media and democracy, setting out the position that corporate ownership and the political economy of the media constitute a social problem in which corporate media undermine democracy. I explore this latter issue with a study of the media in the United States over the past two decades and how corporate media have failed to address crucial social problems and have themselves become a social problem. Finally, I discuss how the Internet and new media can provide alternatives to the corporate media, and attempt to provide some hope that more democratic media and societies can be produced that will address social problems being ignored and intensified in the current era of corporate and conservative hegemony.

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