“…When mass culture is viewed as ideologically 197 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH COHEN competitive, social change becomes a possibility that the critic must confront (Becker, 1984;Fiske, 1986Fiske, , 1988aFiske, , 1988bHall, 1980a;Newcomb and Hirsch, 1983). In spite of these efforts to provide more complex accounts of dominance and plurality, scholars are steadily uncovering the problematic assumptions that proponents of Cultural Studies make about the process of mass-mediated meaning (Allor, 1988;Lembo and Tucker, 1990;Lull, 1988;Morley, 1981Morley, , 1989Streeter, 1989;Wren-Lewis, 1983). Most critiques of the Cultural Studies perspective revolve around interpretations of Stuart Hall's (1980b) rendering of the encoding/decoding model of mediated communication, or its conterminous metaphors that separate meaning into moments of production/consumption, text/audience, dominance/ resistance, the social/the individual, and the monolithic/the pluralistic.…”