When I started doctoral school, I had the pleasure of having a friend in the program who had just come from the media...he (the illustrious Jack Vitek) had been working as a journalist for some English-language paper in Spain and had, in his past, written for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, some defunct Washington DC paper, and The Weekly World News...in addition to being a best-selling author.
Anyway, after one too many "the media is poisoning our culture" articles in a theory class, he commented how weird academics was, because when he was working in the media, they spent all their time trying to figure out what the public wanted, not manipulating the public's taste as many theorists seemed to believe.
This struck a chord with me. I thought that the relationship between people and the media had to be much more complex than most critics were making it. The closest anyone ever really got was Stuart Hall's model of encoding/decoding, but that still seemed to depict a flat vision of the media.
The critics seemed to be all over the decoding side of the equation. They love focusing on how people view the media. That's good. That's important.
They never got the media production side with the same level of verve and insight. I want to correct that.
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