Methods, metaphors, and media messages: the uses of television in conversations about the environment

Abstract

A cornerstone of media studies is that the content of communication, and the understanding derived from it, cannot be divorced from the medium through which it is transmitted: in the extreme, the media is the message. In this paper we use this insight once removed: not only as a way of thinking about the media, but also as a way of thinking about how we study the media. More specifically, we argue that the methods we use as researchers are "our media," the means by which we observe, make sense of, and communicate about, media and politics. These methods, therefore, are intertwined, often in unexamined ways, with our assumptions about politics, participation, communications, and so forth. They are also intertwined with what we find, and how we interpret those findings. In short, the method is the message.Our purpose in this paper is threefold: to make explicit the implicit "metaphors" underlying mainstream media research and their relationships to the methodologies employed; to offer an alternative metaphor for the relationship between television and politics; and to present some findings from our initial attempts to empirically investigate this relationship. In the first section we examine the relationship between methods and interpretation, focusing on the dominance of survey research in mainstream media studies. We argue that this dominance both results from, and reinforces, the implicit metaphors of citizens as "political consumers," and media messages as "hypodermic injections." We then present an alternative metaphor for television and politics, one that emphasizes the role of discourse in the formation of public opinions, and that conceptualizes television and viewers as participants in an ongoing "conversation." The third section is a discussion of focus group methodology, pointing out its strengths (and weaknesses) as a means of observing the ways in which citizens and television "converse." We then describe our own focus group project, and present some initial findings. These findings, while tentative, support the utility both of focus groups as a method of inquiry, and of our "conversational" metaphor. We conclude with a brief summary, and an appeal for a more self-consciously multimethod approach to the study of media and politics.ethods, metaphors, and media messages: the uses of television in conversations about the environment M

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A Typology for the Study of Entertainment Television and Politics

“…150-151). These researchers presented findings based on focus group data stemming from viewings of fictional entertainment-based docudramas as well as more traditional public affairs content (e.g., Delli Carpini & Williams, 1994aWilliams, , 1994bWilliams, , 1994c. Their studies reveal that the distinctions between entertainment and public affairs content are not clear-cut and that there is strong evidence for "the political relevance of fictional media" (Delli Carpini & Williams, 1996, p. 160).…”