CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Media Professionals and Media Production

Organisers: Eoin Devereux, Michael Breen and Marcus Free

Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin (Cardiff University, United Kingdom) THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING CIVIL IN A MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR AS A CASE-STUDY IN PUBLIC DEBATE
This paper, based on 23 in-depth interviews with editors at San Francisco Bay newspapers, looks at letters-to-the-editor as a case study in the difficulties of creating a civil debate in the public sphere. It investigates how editors make decisions about which letters to publish, based on their propriety and civility. Editors apply a set of standard civility criteria: Letters that involve personal attacks, or are potentially libellous, are rejected outright. So are letters that draw on religious argumentation, and openly racist, sexist or homophobic letters. However, editors are often faced with letters that challenge norms of propriety and make important interventions into debates central to living together in a multicultural society -- debates about issues as disparate as inner-city renewal, bilingual road signs, and rural development. In these cases, editors justify their decisions in common-sense theories sympathetic to deliberative democracy and informed by newsroom practices.

Devereux, Eoin and Haynes, Amanda (University of Limerick, Ireland) PERCEPTION IS POWER: IRISH MEDIA PROFESSIONALS AND THE COVERAGE OF SOCIAL EXCLUSION
This paper discusses the main findings of a unique research project involving a group of eleven Irish media professionals from the print and broadcast media. The Integra Media Forum presented us with an opportunity to gather data on how Irish media professionals perceive of issues pertaining to social exclusion. It was the first time that research of this kind was undertaken in the Republic of Ireland. Data was gathered through the use of interviews, a questionnaire and a workshop where the professionals debated the issues. Focusing on the concepts of structure and agency we examine the many forces that shape media coverage of the poor and socially excluded.

Teurlings, Jan (Free University of Brussels, Belgium) PRODUCTION VALUES AND THE AUDIENCE: A DOUBLE STRUCTURE OF MISRECOGNITION
In this paper I would like to elaborate the thesis that (commercial) television is characterised by a relationship of misrecognition towards its audiences, and vice versa, that audiences sometimes misrecognise the power dynamics at work in the making of television shows. By drawing on data from my research project on Blind Date (interviews with both members of the production team and people that regularly watch the show) I will argue that there is a two-way relationship of misrecognition between production team and audiences. Therefore the conclusion of this paper will be that both the audience and the production team more or less “know” each other, but that there is also a structure of misrecognition at work for both parties involved, which raises some interesting questions about the visibility of “media power.

Graffman, Katarina (Uppsala University, Sweden) MEDIATING WITH THE UNKNOWN MASSES: HOW TELEVISION PRODUCERS CONSTRUCT THEIR VIEWERS
The construction of the viewer is one element of several in the production process within the commercial media culture. This paper's findings are the result of a one-year fieldwork period at a commercial television production company in Sweden. Producers (agents) produce their programs in a continuously ongoing mediation entering into relations with unknown masses (audience). It is not enough to be able to talk about the audience, they must talk to them, creating relationships. This relation is partially dependent on a "discursive construct" providing the producing institution with adequate knowledge to define the audiences as target groups. My study illuminates several strategies used by producers to construct their audience. Within the TV-institutions' code, the "ordinary person" labels an audience, while the "reference person" is someone embodying this model, someone that the producer knows, for example a neighbor at the summer cottage. The ratings will confirm if the prefiguring through the use of the reference person was correct. The knowledge about and experience from the TV-institution constitute the producers' habitus enabling them to "feel what is right" as finally, they become the viewers functioning as surrogate audience members. The separation made between viewers and producers is not as clear-cut as mass communications scholarship has argued. The producers do share some cultural interpretative frameworks with their viewers. These strategies form the construction of the viewer; a viewer that after mediation goes from a statistical figure to a "real" person with characteristics reminiscent of the arina producer.

Roudakova, Natalia (Stanford University, USA) JOURNALISTS AND ADVERTISEMENT; POINTS OF CONTACT
An abrupt change of media landscape with the collapse of the USSR quickly taught Russian journalists that their labor is a commodity to be bought and sold on media markets. Many Russian and Western commentators have condemned the practices of hidden advertisement or "black PR" as it is known in Russia. This paper, however, will focus on the advertisement texts Russian journalists produce within the existing legal boundaries, based on the data collected at a private business weekly in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. Two prominent cases I will discuss are a) when journalists write advertisement texts for added pay and mark it as commercial publications; and b) when journalists take on the role of advertising agents and partake in the collection of commercial "modules" to accompany their texts. I will conclude by pointing out the socio-historical circumstances that lead to this interpenetration of roles.