Cultural Value and Mass Communication

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Cultural Values and Mass

CommunicationsS. M. Mazharul Haque

University of Southern Mississippi, USA

I. Culture and Values

II. Media and Values

III. Values and Lifestyles

IV. Values in the News

V. Conclusion

GLOSSARY

altruistic democracy The ideals of the democratic system as

opposed to actual practices that fall short of the ideals.

hegemony A process by which members of the ruling elite try to

have their ideas, beliefs, and values accepted as the rational order of

things. Hegemonic ideology tries to legitimate the existing society, its

institutions and ways of life.

instrumental values Those values that refer to the means or the

preferred modes of conduct, such as courageousness, forgiveness,

and honesty.

responsible capitalism News media demonstrating faith that a goodcompetitive capitalist system exists in the United States where

businesspeople compete with each other fairly and refrain from

exploiting workers and customers.

small-town pastoralism A nostalgic and romantic view of small-town

life that is cohesive, friendly, and slow paced.

terminal values Those values that relate to an idealized end state of

existence, such as a world of beauty, a world at peace, and inner

harmony.

values Broad and general cultural principles that embody standards

for thinking and behaving.

This article defines culture as a multifaceted and multi-dimensional concept that includes both material

products and nonmaterial elements, such as norms,values, and patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving.Values are general cultural principles embodying stand-ards for thinking and behaving, and norms are specificrules that lead a person to preferred modes of conductto achieve what is regarded as a desirable state ofexistence in a society. This article discusses the inter-twining relationship between the concepts of culture

and values and norms, on the one hand, and the roleof various idea- and value-producing institutions, suchas the mass media, on the other. The American mediasystem makes value assumptions about the nature of

people, society, and government. This article also dis-cusses how values have been defined and understoodin the context of various functions they serve for indi-viduals, culture, and society. It identifies the culturalpremises, basic values, and ideological demands in themedia. It also examines the emergence and prolifer-ation of a lifestyles symbolic system that contains valuejudgments about culture and reality. Finally, the articlediscusses what values are identifiable in the news con-tent of the mass media.

I. CULTURE AND VALUES

Culture is a very broad and elusive concept. The listingof 164 definitions of culture by Alfred Kroeber andClyde Kluckhohn in their 1952 book Culturesuggeststhat it is not prudent to approach it from a narrowperspective. That is why social scientists have focusedon different facets and dimensions of culture in theirdefinitions. A simple definition of culture, such as thatgiven by Jon Shepard in his 1974 bookBasic Sociology,includes all manmade patterns for feeling, thinking,and behaving that are transmitted to an entire societyor to a segment of the society. To understand culture,one needs to examine both material tangible products

of human creation (e.g., technology) and nonmaterialintangible elements (e.g., norms, values). Through cul-ture, people not only create and deal with ideas but alsogroup and apply specific systems of symbolic meaning.Humans internalize an established system of meaningsand symbols to define their world, express their feel-ings, and make value judgments. A cultural traditionis internalized through a conscious and unconscious

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process of enculturation in which people learn throughinteraction with others and observation of their behav-ior in accordance with the norms and values of thesociety.

Values are broad and general cultural principles em-bodying standards for thinking and behaving, while

norms refer to specific rules that may guide a personsthoughts and behavior in terms of what is considereddesirable and acceptable in the culture. In addition tothe patterns of human interaction and behaviors, cul-ture is materialized in the artifacts and rituals. Butculture manifests itself in the meaning systems observedin the values, ideas, and beliefs expressed through thevarious symbolic forms of representations generallyfound in the multiplicity of idea-producing institutionsin the society but more particularly found in the insti-tutions of mass communication.

Basic to a culture is its distinct value system, which isrevealed in the interaction and behavioral patterns,

social relationships, and rituals, among others. How-ever, it is the cultural artifacts, such as the media con-tent, that provide a cultural analyst with opportunitiesto study values that often lie embedded in them. Thetermvaluesis an emotive term, and the depiction ofvalues in the media often generates highly emotionalresponses among the media viewers and readers, prob-ably because values always involve deep commitmentand psychic investment. Portrayal of values in themedia in an undesirable way from one perspective oranother is viewed as deeply offensive and threateningby segments of the population that believe that theirvalues have been violated or undermined.

The terms enculturation and socialization refer to theprocess of learning or internalizing by young people thebasic social roles, traditions, behaviors, and values in aculture. The system of communication, including themass media and the language in a culture, provides animportant means of socialization. Other social institu-tions function in tandem with the means of mass com-munication both in the socialization process and inproviding a means of social control. Media content,by and large, helps to maintain the existing political,social, and economic systems by refusing to questionbasic American assumptions and values about socialarrangements leading to the overtly stated or implicit

view that these arrangements represent the most nat-ural order of life. However, some conservative culturalcritics have pointed out that much of the content in thecontemporary media seems to undermine the basicAmerican institutions and the value systems on whichthey are based.

Sociologists have categorized significant social in-stitutions that not only provide for transmission of

cultural values but also contribute to the survival ofsocieties by allowing for an organized way of accom-plishing socially recognized needs and systems of socialcontrol. These important institutions, including media,perform traditional activities in areas that relate to thefamily, peer group, religion, education, law, politics,

economics, medicine, organization, and aesthetics.The two kinds of values the institutions express are(1) the values of social continuity and cohesion and(2) the values of expected behavior.

Values of social continuity and cohesion require aconsensual view of social goals that are regarded asdesirable. Important social goals may come into con-flict with each other. The need to have free, autono-mous media institutions with freedom to propagateideas and values and their propensity to invade peoplesprivacy, injure their reputation, and disseminate ob-scene or indecent materials that would offend peoplessensibilities and harm children may come into conflict.

Media, through a variety of news, entertainment, andeditorial content, can contribute to value clarificationin the society and help to establish appropriate regula-tory systems to balance conflicting values in light of asocietys scale of priorities.

The study of history is designed to provide a sense ofcontinuity and cohesion of social institutions as theygrow and evolve. Media, by examining current andhistorical roles of important institutions in the society,not only help to maintain the contemporary institu-tional structures but also reinforce the underlying valuesystems. In addition to these values of continuity andcohesion, media, in their diverse content, may sustain

and promote values that are associated with desirableand normative behavior of the individual and thegroup.

Much of cultural and ideological analysis of themedia is concerned with the generation and circulationof meanings in the society by media messages. Mean-ings are produced in a dynamic process by the inter-actions between text and audience because meaningsare not located in the text itself. Stuart Hall suggestedthat television programs are often texts, capable ofbeing read in different ways by different people. In histheory of preferred reading, Hall projected thatreaders may use three broad reading strategiesthe

dominant, the negotiated, and the oppositionaldepending on the social positions of the reader in rela-tion to the dominant ideology and values. If the reader/viewer is socially situated to agree with the dominantideology in general in the media text, then he or she islikely to draw meanings as desired by the producer ofthe text. The negotiated reading is produced by a readerwhen the dominant ideology is generally consistent

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with the readers viewpoint but needs some inflection tobypass the conflicts that exist between his or her socialposition and the ideology. The oppositional reading isproduced by a reader whose social situation puts him orher in conflict with the dominant ideology and, there-fore, the reader would draw meanings negating the

dominant ideology and associated value system. Hallspreferred reading theory holds that television programsgenerally prefer a set of meanings that are designed tomaintain the dominant ideologies, but the meaningscannot be imposed on the reader. The overarchingdominant ideology may be the patriarchal capitalismthat includes masculinity, individualism, competition,and the related value systems.

Writers have used the term ideology to mean differ-ent things depending on the context. At a basic level, itrefers to a system of beliefs, values, and behavior thathave a dominant position in the society. But RaymondWilliams, in his 1977 book Marxism and Literature,

pointed out that, first, ideology may be seen as a systemof beliefs characteristic of a particular group or class;second, in the classical Marxist sense, ideology is asystem of illusory beliefs, false ideas, or false conscious-ness; and third, ideology is a general process of theproduction of meanings and ideas. The Marxist con-cept of ideology as a false consciousness is importantbecause it means that ideas of the ruling classes becomeaccepted as natural and normal. Knowledge is believedto be class based, and members of the working classunderstand their social experiences and relationships interms of a set of ideas that come from a class whoseinterests not only differ from theirs but are opposed by

them. Peoples consciousness is produced by the society,not by their individual psychology or biology. LouisAlthusser refined the Marxist theory of ideology in thathe viewed it not as a static set of ideas imposed by thedominant classes on the subordinate classes but ratheras a dynamic process in which all classes participate.Ideology, in this view, is more effective because it isbeing constantly reproduced in the social and culturalpractices, that is, in the way people think, act, andunderstand themselves in relation to society. Ideo-logical state apparatuses (ISAs), which include socialinstitutions such as family, educational system, politicalsystem, language, and media, play a central role in the

ideological work. They produce in people the valuesand the tendencies to think and act in ways that aresocially acceptable and normative in their day-to-dayworkings. Each institution, according to Althusserstheory of overdetermination, is relatively autonomous.

An ideological institution presents itself as sociallyneutralnot overtly favoring one class over anotheryet all of the institutions perform similar ideological

work, and each institution is related to all of the othersby a web of ideological interconnections. Therefore,the operation of any one of them is overdetermined bya network of interrelationships with the others. Althus-ser maintained that individuals in a society are sociallyconstructed as subjects through the workings of the

ISAs because individuals develop a sense of their iden-titya sense of the world and their relationship to itthrough ideological practices that are deeply inscribedways of thinking and behaving. Therefore, a biologicalfemale may develop a masculine subjectivity, and aperson of color may have a white subjectivity. Mediaand language play a central role in the constructionof the subject and the reproduction of ideology inindividuals.

Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci introducesthe term hegemony. Douglas Kellner pointed out thathegemonic ideology tries to legitimate the existing soci-ety, its institutions, and its ways of life. Ideology be-

comes hegemonic when the majority of the people in asociety accept the existing order of things as natural orlogical, giving consent to the existence and continu-ation of the dominant institutions and practices.According to Kellner, hegemony requires the transmis-sion ofcertain preconceptions, assumptions, notions,beliefs,and values that construct a worldview amongdifferent groups in a society. The hegemonic processinvolves contestation, resistance, and instability. he-gemony theory suggests that the dominant ideology,consisting of beliefs and values propagated throughmedia and other ideological institutions in their discur-sive and linguistic practices, meets resistance and is

subjected to political contestation. The resistance maybe overcome, but hegemony is never established per-manently. The ideological victory is subject to chal-lenge, and ideological battles have to be foughtrepeatedly because contesting groups are engaged intheir efforts to produce counter hegemony. Accordingto Kellner, the hegemony model views media andculture as a terrain of an ever-shifting and evolvinghegemony in which consensus is forged around com-peting ruling-class political positions, values, and viewsof the world.

Hegemony theories of society, culture, and mediahave been contrasted with instrumentalist theories.

The instrumentalist theories hold that the state andmedia are instruments of capital that are used to ad-vance the interests of the ruling class and to control thesubjugated classes. The instrumentalist position can beviewed as ahistorical and overly simplistic because theproponents of this theory assume a two-class capitalistsociety consisting of a unified ruling class and aworking class and do not seem to recognizethe conflicts

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that almost always exist among the state, media, andcapital. The hegemony model takes a much more so-phisticated view of the society and its class structurebecause it recognizes divisions within both the workingand ruling classes, leading to struggle and formation ofcoalitions and alliances. The hegemony model points

out that media take on different forms and ideologicalpositions at different historical junctures depending onthe balance of power among contesting groups. Thehistory of television in the United States provides agood example of a contested ideological terrain whereconservatives, liberals, and radicals have struggled forpredominance and where each group has gained as-cendancy over the others during one time period oranother.

II. MEDIA AND VALUES

Milton Rokeach, in his 1973 book The Nature ofHuman Values, definedvalue as an enduring beliefthata specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence ispersonally or socially preferable to an opposite or con-verse mode of conduct or end-state of existence.A value system assumes an organization of valuesaccording to an implicit evaluation of the enduringbeliefs on some scale of their relative importance. Valuesare generally enduring; however, they cannot be com-pletely stable or unstable. Complete stability of valueswould make social change impossible, but instabilitywould undermine societal continuity and coherence.Even though values involve beliefs, not all beliefs are

values. Rokeach, in his 1968 book Beliefs, Attitudes,and Values, pointed outthat some beliefs are descriptiveor existential in nature and capable of being true orfalse, while some others are evaluative because theyinvolve a judgment of good or bad. The third kind is aprescriptive or proscriptive belief in which some meansor end of action is judged to be desirable or undesirable.

Attitudes are also related to values, but they hold aless central position in the personality makeup andcognitive system. An attitude may be conceptualizedas an organization of several beliefs focused on a givensubject or situation. Values are determinants of bothattitudes and behavior. Similarly, some scholars regard

values and needs as equivalent. They should not betreated as such because all animals have needs but notvalues. According to Rokeach, values are cognitiverepresentations and transformations of needs, andman is the only animal capable of these.Values arethe cognitive representation of both individual needsand societal and institutional demands. Rokeach alsomade a distinction between two kinds of values, namely

instrumental and terminal, with the former relating tothe means or the idealized modes of conduct and thelatter referring to the idealized end state of existence.Rokeach identified 36 values through a national surveyof Americans, with 18 in each category. The 18 ter-minal values are a comfortable life, an exciting life, a

sense of accomplishment, a world at peace, a world ofbeauty, equality, family security, freedom, happiness,inner harmony, mature love, national security, pleas-ure, salvation, self-respect, social recognition, truefriendship, and wisdom.

The three terminal values with the highest rankingsamong those identified are a world at peace, familysecurity, and freedom. The four values with the lowestrankings are an exciting life, pleasure, social recogni-tion, and a world of beauty. In the instrumentalcategory, the values are ambitious, broad-minded,capable, cheerful, clean, courageous, forgiving, help-ful, honest, imaginative, independent, intellectual,

logical, loving, obedient, polite, responsible, and self-controlled. The three top-ranking values in the categoryare honest, ambitious, and responsible, while the fourranking at the bottom are imaginative, obedient, intel-lectual, and logical. American men and women bothseem to have a similar pattern of emphasis with regardto these values. However, the survey showed consider-able gender differences on certain values. For example,in the terminal category, men ranked a comfortable life4th, while women ranked it 13th. Men also placed amuch higher value on an exciting life, a sense of accom-plishment, freedom, pleasure, social recognition, ambi-tious, capable, imaginative, and logical. Women valued

a world at peace, happiness, inner harmony, salvation,self-respect, wisdom, cheerful, clean, forgiving, andloving.

Values conceived as standards can serve a range offunctions. They can influence a persons positions onsocial, political, or religious issues or ideologies. Theycan serve as standards for judging morality or compe-tence of individual or collective actions, but more im-portant, they can serve as standards for rationalizingaction or behavior to sustain a sense of morality, com-petence, andself-esteem. Avaluesystem, by giving somerules and principles, can give an individual the means tochoose among alternatives, resolve conflicts, and make

decisions. Values also have adjustive and knowledgefunctions. Values are motivational and ego defensivebecause it is assumed that behavior prescribed by instru-mental values can lead to attainment of desirable ter-minal values, such as family security, social recognition,a world at peace, beauty, and harmony.

Most media messages, regardless of whether theyare entertainment/fantasy oriented or for purposes of



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Press, since the beginning of mass communication inthe Renaissance, there have been only two basic theor-ies of the press, namely authoritarianism and libertar-ianism. The subsequent development of press theoriesmay be viewed as extensions of these two themes. Theauthoritarian press was born into the authoritarian

climate of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, char-acterized by a set of beliefs and values with regard tothe nature of knowledge, truth, people, society, andstate, on the one hand, and the relationship to the state,on the other. In this society, the truth was believed to bethe possession of only a few wise individuals whoshould direct and guide the masses. Knowledge wasattainable through mental effort, but people differedwidely in their ability to exercise the effort and acquireknowledge. Therefore, the differences were recognizedin the social structure. The rulers of the time reservedthe right to inform the people what they needed toknow. The press was obligated to support the rulers

policies. Private ownership of the press was permittedonly by special permission, and hence it could be with-drawn at the displeasure of rulers for infractions on thepart of publishers. The rulers had the right to set policy,license, and censor. In this system, which was univer-sally prevalent during the 16th and 17th centuries, thepress served as the servant of the state rather than as thewatchdog of the government, with the latter being anotion that arose later in the West.

A whole series of developments, ranging from thegrowth of political democracy, religious freedom, theacceptance of laissez-fare economics, and the philo-sophical climate of enlightenment, undermined au-

thoritarianism and replaced it with libertarianism.Libertarianism took root during the 18th century butflowered during the 19th century. Under this theory,people were seen as rational beings who were able todiscern not only between truth and falsehood but alsobetween better and worse alternatives, but it was theirinalienable right to search for the truth. The press inthis system is not an instrument of government butrather a check on it. It was believed that a free marketplace of ideas was needed for the truth to emergethrough unfettered competition of all ideas.

In the face of conglomeration and oligopolistic con-ditions of the press during the 20th century, many

began to question the validity of the notion of a freemarket place of ideas associated with libertarianism.The market was really being controlled by a few whodecided which persons and which facts, as well aswhich versions of these facts, should reach the public.In this condition, the social responsibility theoryemerged and emphasized the need for the press to besocially responsible by at least fairly presenting all sides

of an issue. The Commission on the Freedom of thePress, popularly known as the Hutchins Commission,listed several requirements of the press in the contem-porary society that reflected important press and soci-etal values. The first was to provide a truthful,comprehensive, and intelligent account of the days

events in a context that gives them meaning. Thesecond requirement for the press was to serve as aforum for the exchange of comment and criticism.The press was also required to project a representativepicture of the constituent groups in society.The com-mission also believed that the press was responsible forpresentation and clarification of the goals and valuesof the society.Finally, the commission emphasized theneed for the press to provide full access to the daysintelligence.

Siebert and his colleagues suggested that Soviet Com-munist theory of the press was really an extension of theolder authoritarianism. The press in this system was

state owned and was used as an instrument of the stateand the Communist Party for propaganda and agita-tion. The press was free to speak the pre-establishedMarxistLeninistStalinisttruthfree from the com-pulsion of the profit motive. It is notable that authori-tarian theory was rooted in authoritarian politicalthought and an authoritarian value system; the libertar-ian theory was grounded in the political thoughtspropounded by Milton, Locke, and Mill and the en-lightenment value system; the social responsibilitytheory emerged because of the vast changes in the infor-mation marketplace; and the Soviet Communist theorywas based on the political thoughts of Hegel, Marx,

Lenin, and Stalin and a collectivist value system.Subsequently, however, there have been further de-

velopments. For example, during recent years, somescholars have used the term communitarianism inplace of Marxism. In the United States, a commitmentto shared communities has generated political move-ments. During the 1990s, American philosopher Ami-tai Etzioni led a communitarian movement that soughtto promote a communitarian perspective aimed atstrengthening families, even through he avoided pro-moting specific policies. Some see communitarianismas a concept that promotes use of the press as an instru-ment of propaganda. Central to the idea of communi-

tarianism is the notion that institutions ought to bestructured to serve the interests of a selfless collectiverather than egoistic, personally motivated individuals.In the communitarian system, the individual is requiredto yield his or her selfish freedom for the benefit of thecommunity. There are many variations of communitar-ianism, with Marxism being just one of them. Thedeveloping countries of the world, during the past



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half-century or so, tried to develop their own presssystems, which have variously emphasized a type ofcommunication called development communication ordevelopment support journalism. Development com-munication employs modern mass media as an instru-ment that could be used to mobilize the masses for

participation in an accelerating program of socioeco-nomic development of the poor countries. Borrowingideas from communication researchers and scholars inthe West and in socialist countries, the Third Worldpolicymakers attempted to generate a set of valuesamong their tradition-bound, often illiterate peoplesthat would be conducive to fast-paced modernizationprograms for their societies. Unfortunately, the faithplaced in the efficacy of the media in the socioeconomictransformation generally proved to be unrealisticallyoptimistic or utopian. But early theories of develop-ment communication emphasized the need for creatingvalue systems in the society that allowed the developed

nations to achieve a high standard of living and high-tech growth. Interestingly, proponents of these theoriesalso believed that it was possible for the developingnations to replicate the sequential stages of develop-ment that the advanced nations had experiencedthrough transfer of technologies and production andmodernization-oriented attitudes and value systems.This basic approach to solving the problems of socio-economic development of societies and collectivities ofpeople through extensive use of mass media dependedon a nationalist philosophy that is associated partlywith enlightenment values and partly with progressiveand collectivist value systems.

However, the enlightenment value system associatespositive words such as freedom, individualism, know-ledge, liberty, nationality, natural right, and democracy.Negative words associated with this value system in-clude dictatorship, fascism, ignorance, irrationality,and thoughtlessness. The progressive value system isinextricably linked with enlightenment. Knowledge-and rationality-based enlightenment leads to progress.Progress is also associated with positive words suchas change, evolution, improvement, modernity, prag-matism, and technology. Negative values would beassociated with, for example, backward-looking andregressive perspectives, pessimism, un-inventiveness,

and inefficiency.Thetranscendental valuesystem emphasizesintuition

as a method of knowing the universe that is governed bynatural laws. It also emphasizes the need for kindness,love, and humanitarianism. Some of the associatedwords that indicate positive values are brotherhood,compassion, equity, mysteriousness, respect, sympathy,sensitivity, intuition, and truth. Some negative words

in this value system include hate, insensitivity, anger,mechanical, and war. A major American value systemhas been identified as a personal success valuesystem. The system places emphasis on values that arefocused on theindividualhisorherhappiness,senseofself-respect, and freedom of choice. Some of the words

emphasizing positive values associated with the systeminclude sincerity, dignity, economic security, enjoyment,family, friends, recreation, and fair play. Words such ascoercion, disgrace, dullness, and routine are associatedwith negative values in the system.

The collectivist value system probably runs contraryto the personal success value system in general, and itdoes not seem to define the American society. It oftenseems to be part of a subcultures discourse. However, itis also an undeniable fact that there are elements in thesociety who have recognized the need to control theexcesses of greed and extreme individualism and toemphasize cooperative action and communitarian

interests. The collectivist value system emphasizesbrotherhood, cooperation, equity, social good, jointaction, and unity, among others. Some of the negativequalities in the value system are disorganization, in-equity, selfishness, and personal greed.

III. VALUES AND LIFESTYLES

Even though scholars have identified these broad valuesystems in this culture, quite clearly, these value systemshave overlapping characteristics. The distinctiveness ofa value system is really a matter of locus of emphasis,

and in this multicultural, multiethnic society, one cansee how different segments of the society can subscribeto different sets of values. As a matter of fact, in amulticultural society, such as the United States, valueacquisition and abandonment do often take place.Some people may abandon values that they have ad-hered to, and the mass media may have an influence inthe decision-making process. Value redistribution mayoccur when minority values, such as tolerance for un-conventional lifestyles and ethnic and cultural diversity,may become the values of a society, and the media,through their depiction of themes and their portrayalsof characters, may make the process of redistribution

possible or easier.American lifestyles have been conceptualized in

terms of Maslows hierarchy of needs. For example,the lifestyles fit into three categories: need-driven,outer-oriented, and inner-oriented lifestyles. Need-driven groups include people who are poverty strickenand struggling to make ends meet. Outer-orientedlifestyles account for the majority of Americans. They



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are middle class, traditional, and conforming as well asambitious and achievers (e.g., gifted, hard-working,self-reliant, status seeking). The inner-oriented life-styles include people with personality characteristicssuch as maturity and a sense of belonging. Social classand socioeconomic status are believed to influence life-

styles. The basic lifestyles are property dominated,occupation dominated, and income or poverty domin-ated. This means that they roughly correspond to theupper class, the upper-middle through working classes,and the lower class or poor. Even though lifestyle isbelieved to relate to social class and status, tastes andpreferences are believed to be determined by oneswealth and prestige as well as individual choice basedon education and experience. Some have attempted toexplain the proliferation of lifestyles in the UnitedStates during recent decades by suggesting that thegrowth of different lifestyles occurs during a transi-tional phase when one cultural tradition has broken

down but another tradition has not yet emerged andwhen the society has sufficient wealth to create leisuretime for people to try alternative standards of value andalternative lifestyles. Media have a major role in thecreation of lifestyles because they provide symbols andobjects for sharing values and because they legitimizethe sharing. Because media use occupies a significantportion of peoples lives, media themselves become amajor factor in peoples lives.

It is possible to get a sense of the proliferation oflifestyles and the associated change in values from themultiplicity of contemporary television shows in theUnited States. Early television shows, such as Leave It

to Beaverand Father Knows Best, are believed to por-tray strong traditional family values, such as self-responsibility, family unity within a nuclear family,and caring for others. Some popular programs duringthe past decade, such asThe Cosby Show, seem to haveretained those traditional themes and cultural values.Tony DeMars, in his 1996 doctoral dissertation exam-ining some popular situation comedies, youth appealprograms, and daytime talk shows, identified a type ofdisrespectful discourse that includes children speakingto adults without recognition of rank, children speak-ing of sexual activities not accepted by the dominantvalue system, and use of unwarranted verbal or phys-

ical aggression and hateful or abusive interaction style.The frequent use of disrespectful discourse not onlyindicates a tolerance of the society for a greater rangeof lifestyle changes that would have been consideredunacceptable and deviant during earlier times but alsois symptomatic of value change in the culture.

The negative values portrayed in the televisionshows are individualism, sexual promiscuity, hedonism,

sexism, and absence of childhood innocence. Individu-alism was regarded as a negative value because it wasnot portrayed in its conventional sense that called forequality of opportunity for individuals, reliance on self-development, and faith in the dignity and worth ofevery individual. Rather, this form of individualism is

dysfunctional because it meant extreme freedom foryoung people to speak as they pleased and be noncon-formist. DeMars also suggested that, despite the pre-dominance of negative values in the television shows,some positive values, such as honesty, family unity,control of aggression, and self-reliance, might also bepresent in these shows with a potential for positiveinfluence on young viewers behaviors. In a conserva-tive critique of popular culture produced by Holly-wood, Michael Medved in 1992 bemoaned thetendency of Hollywood producers to undermine trad-itional values and lifestyles by attacking religion,promoting promiscuity, maligning the institution of

marriage, and encouraging illegitimacy. Jack Holgate,in a 1997 doctoral dissertation, pointed out that popu-lar music has become influential in the creation ofvalues, morals, and behavior patterns. As a powerfulmedium of socialization, popular music does allowyouth to integrate its values and themes into theireveryday lives. In an analysis of popular country musicvideos on television, Holgate listed a number of ter-minal and instrumental values that are quite positive.His list of terminal values includes a comfortable life,an exciting life, a sense of accomplishment, a world atpeace, a world of beauty, family security, freedom,happiness, mature love, and pleasure. His list of instru-

mental values includes ambitious, capable, cheerful,clean, courageous, forgiving, helpful, imaginative, in-dependent, loving, polite, and self-controlled.

Advertising researchers using psychographic re-search methods grouped American consumers in termsof their values and lifestyles. The values and lifestyleanalysis (VALS) research has gone through several ver-sions. The latest version groups American consumersinto strivers and strugglers. The actualizers are politic-ally active, informed, and socially concerned peoplewho value personal growth. Achievers are politicallyconservative upscale individuals who may emphasizework at the expense of recreation and may focus on

career and family but value personal growth. Believersare also politically conservative informed Americanswho enjoy a comfortable predictable existence, respectrules, and trust authority figures. Makers are those whoenjoy hands-on activities but distrust politicians, for-eigners, and big business. They also avoid joining or-ganizationsexcept unionsand spend leisure timewith family and friends. Fulfilleds are those who are



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tolerant and politically moderate and are also active incommunity and politics. They value education andtravel. Experiencers are politically apathetic but areconcerned about their image and are unconforming.They like the offbeat, the new, and the risky. The twodownscale groups are the strivers and the strugglers,

who are politically apathetic, are generally concernedabout safety and security, and have limited interests andtraditional religious values. So, the American con-sumers are grouped according to their values and life-style preferences, but the advertisers also make appealsto them with their persuasive messages that are basedon deeply entrenched American values.

IV. VALUES IN THE NEWS

News is a social construction of occurrences, policies,and programs in the nation or the world that are

rendered into narratives. Because news mediadissem-inate information that people want, need, and shouldknow, news organizations both circulate and shapeknowledge,according to Gaye Tuchmans 1978 bookMaking News. Some scholars point out that news is theproduct of a social institution that is allied with otherlegitimate institutions and that the news personnel pro-duce stories according to cultural and institutionalpractices of storytelling. Some suggest that news mediahave several biases that reflect medias ideological lean-ings and values. For example, media fail to explainpower structure and political processes underneaththe issues that are featured in news; instead, they

personalize news by focusing on individuals engagedin political battles over the issues. Personalization,through excessive use of emotional appeals to people,leads to an egocentric rather than socially concernedview of political problems. News media also tend todramatize events emphasizing crisis, overlooking con-tinuing and persistent problems facing the society, suchas inequality, resource waste, high levels of militaryspending, hunger, and poverty. They also tend to pre-sent stories in isolation from each other, blurring thelinkages across issues and thus making it difficult for acoherent global view to emerge. The process of frag-mentation is heightened by their attention to individual

actors in dramas without providing an adequate polit-ical context. The news media also attempt to providereassurance to the public by seeking out authoritativeofficial voices that offer normalized interpretations ofthe otherwise threatening and confusing events in thenews. The important thing to note is that official ver-sions of events, as well as the news accounts of them bythe mainstream media, essentially reflect judgments

made on the basis of values and norms that are domin-ant and hence generally accepted as natural in a culture.

Some scholars view news as narratives that fit into anenduring symbolic system in which the names of actorsand the specific facts and details may vary on a day-to-day basis but the overall narrative is the same and has a

mythical quality. News narratives, like myths, definefor people what is right and wrong and offer them asense of values. One may argue that all of the crimestories reported by the news media are designed notonly to appeal to the morbid interest of the readers andviewers but also to provide a normative contour of asociety. These slants have an important symbolic sig-nificance because they tell us about the parameters ofacceptable and desirable modes of behavior.

Each news narrative, whether it is a crime or politicalstory, draws on all of the stories that have gone beforeand becomes part of the mythical narrative that reflectsa cultures enduring values with regard to its concept of

preferred mode of conduct or desired goals of life. Thepower of myth is generated by the fact that itis told andretold generation after generation, and the news storiesalso have their power because they draw on the inven-tory of discourse that has been established over time.The mythical quality of news is generated by what

J. Gultung and Mari Ruge called the resonance andconsonance factors. The resonance is produced by asense that one has encountered the same story manytimes in the past, while the consonance factor suggeststhat a news story is preferred by the media because it isconsonant with the preferred values and standards ofthe society.

News personnel use news values in constructing nar-ratives. These news values lead to culturally specificstorytelling codes that evolved from ancient ways oftelling stories. The most commonly used codes empha-size certain news elements that reflect time-tested newspractices, such as emphasizing the unusual, the novel,or the dramatic, but they also reflect the deeply in-grained cultural values.

Even though news personnel do not deliberately orexplicitly insert values into the news, the job of newspersonnel requires them to make reality judgments, andthese judgments are never really divorced from values.Herbert Gans, in his 1980 book Deciding Whats

News, distinguished between topical values and endur-ing values. The topical values may be found in theexpressed opinions about specific actions and activitiesof the moment, whereas the enduring values maybe discerned in different types of stories over a periodof time. Gans identified eight value clusters in the newscontent of the mainstream media: ethnocentrism, altru-istic democracy, responsible capitalism, small-town



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pastoralism, individualism, moderatism, social order,and national leadership.

Gans opined that news, by and large, reflects ethno-centric values both in the United States and in othercountries. In the United States, news values its ownnation above all others, even though mainstream media

avoid Jingoism. Ethnocentrism is most explicit inforeign news because a countrys image depends onthe extent to which it conforms to American valuesand practices. Many stories critical of domestic condi-tions are presented, but they are almost always treatedas aberrant cases. In the Watergate coverage, the scan-dal was usually attributed to a small group of power-hungry politicians, and hence, the implicit message wasthat the system was fundamentally sound and onlyneeded minor reforms. The clearest expression ofethnocentrism may be found in Vietnam war news.Casualty stories reported the number of Americanskilled, but the casualties on the other side were given

in impersonal terms, such as the Communist death tolland the body count. Atrocities committed by theAmerican troops, such as the My Lai massacre, didnot get in the news until the end of the war.

News media stress altruistic democracy, an unstatedideal, and they do so by paying frequent attention tostories about competition, conflict, protest, and bur-eaucratic malfunctioning. Ideals of democracy are im-plied or suggested in news. A friendly dictatorship in aforeign country is viewed as benign authoritarianism,while an unfriendly one is viewed as an oppressivedictatorship. News treats politics as a contest betweenwinners and losers, but regardless of who wins or loses,

it is suggested that both should act in the public interest.It defends democratic theory against an inferior demo-cratic practice. News keeps track of official norms.News is concerned with violations of the freedom ofthe press and civil liberties. Attempts to censor booksby school boards, or to keep the press out of city councilmeetings, draw news attention, but violations of civilliberties and constitutional protections of radicals andcriminals have not been a cause for concern. Newstends to treat campaign promises and governmentstatements of goals as official values. Therefore, devi-ations are reported. Financial competition and nepo-tism are considered news, but economic power is

usually seen separately from political power. The prob-lem of access to power by the poor is not considerednewsworthy. The issue of racial integration drawsthe attention of the news media. Activists for the causeof the realization of democratic norms are oftendescribed as extremists or militants, but activists sup-porting racial integration are not given that label;they are called moderates. Conversely, Black Power

activists rejecting integration were in the past calledextremists.

Gans also identified a value cluster in the news that hecalled responsible capitalism. According to Gans, newsreflects an optimistic faith that a good competitive cap-italist system exists in which the businesspersons com-

pete fairly with each other and refrain from exploitingthe workers and customers. In this system, bignesseither in business or in governmentis bad. Monopolyis also undesirable, but the existing oligopolistic controlof the economy is not subjected to criticism. Unions andconsumer organizations are accepted, but unions arejudged negatively if they strike and inconvenience thepublic. Economic growth is always considered good if itdoes not bring inflation and environmental pollution.Although government is viewed as a bureaucracy, bigbusiness bureaucracy is ignored. The news media alsocelebrate the entrepreneurs and innovators.

News accepts the need for the welfare state because it

realizes that the market cannot solve all problems, butthe term welfare state is reserved for foreign countriesin view of the pejorative meaning that the term evokesin the United States. Public welfare agencies are keptunder close watch by the news media. Income inequal-ity is not newsworthy, although the dangers of social-ism are. The dangers of socialism, according to Gans,are cultural homogeneity, the erosion of political liber-ties, and the burgeoning bureaucracy.

Gans cited small-town pastoralism as a value clusterin the news. He stated that rural anti-industrial valuesassociated with Thomas Jefferson are found in thenews. Because big cities have been in the news for racial

conflict, crime, and a whole range of other problems,the news media tended to take a nostalgic and romanticview of increasingly disappearing small-town life thatprovided cohesiveness, friendliness, and a quiet slow-paced life. Small-town pastoralism is also associatedwith two other values: closeness to nature and small-ness. Both values are linked with preservation ofnature, reassuring familiar lifestyles in the face of de-spoiling development and uncontrolled growth of newtechnology threatening both ecology and older, morestable industrial production. This value cluster may berooted in the respect for tradition that provided pre-dictability, continuity, coherence, and order in life

except those values that entrenched racial, gender, andother forms of discrimination.

Preservation of the freedom of the individuals againstthe encroachments of government and society is be-lieved to be an important news value. News media lookfor individuals who act heroically in adversity and whoovercome powerful antagonistic forces. They also payattention to individuals such as the explorers, mountain



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climbers, astronauts, and scientists who conquer naturewithout harming it. News also deals with those forcesthat emasculate individuals. Technology also raisesconcern for that reason. Socialism and communismare viewed negatively because of denial of opportun-ities to individuals. Individualism is lauded as a source

of economic, social, and cultural productivity. It canhelp to achieve cultural variety by working againstforces of bigness and conformity.

News also discourages extremism in behavior. There-fore, the possibility that individualism could encouragedeviant or rebellious behavior is neutralized by newsmedias emphasis of the value of moderatism. Individu-alism that leads to violation of the law and the acceptedvalues of the society is criticized. In most spheres ofactivity, extremist solutions are questioned and moder-ation is preferred. Atheists are treated as extremists,as are religious fanatics. Conspicuous consumption isfrowned on, as is shunning all consumer goods. Polit-

ical ideologues are suspect, as are demagogues andunprincipled politicians. Politicians regularly toeingthe party line are seen as hacks, and those not followingit at all are called mavericks or loners, but successfulloners are seen as heroes.

News media report what Gans called disorder stor-ies. Some stories relate to threats to order and measurestaken to restore order. Other stories relate to activitiesof the top public officialstheir discussions, theirpolicy proposals, their political arguments, and electionor appointment of new officials. These stories arerooted in important values, such as the desirability ofsocial order and the need for national leadership to

maintain and protect the order. Gans classified disorderstories as natural, technological, social, or moral. Thenotion of what is order and disorder and the judgmentof reality is, of necessity, based on values. News person-nel, particularly those practicing investigative journal-ism, have been called custodians of public conscience,even though the news personnel themselves like toassume a posture of moral disengagement by avoidingexplicit moral judgments in the news. Clearly, theyselect and interpret the standards by which the publicis invited to evaluate and judge the breakdown of socialand moral systems. Of course, news media, in theireditorial function, feel free to make overt moral judg-

ments, explicitly denouncing transgressors, and recom-mend appropriate actions for members of the publicand other institutions to undertake actions that wouldenforce the social norms and strengthen the values. Thisis done within the sphere of consensus.

A key function of the media is to maintain boundar-ies in a culture. Media have the ability to define asituation, and they derive their ideological power from

this.By defining situations, views, and values in relationto what is within and outside the bounds of acceptabil-ity and legitimacy, media serve their social control andintegration functions. Therefore, media continuallydefine deviance. News judgment andselectionare basedon dimensions of deviance, such as the controversial,

the sensational, the unusual, and the prominent. In thecoverage of events both within the United States andabroad, media tend to focus more on the deviant eventsthat would threaten the status quo, the consensus, andthe consensus values. Daniel Hallin, in his 1994 bookWe Keep America on Top of the World, suggested thatthe news world may be divided into three spheres: legit-imate controversy, consensus, and deviance. The sphereof legitimate controversy is where electoral contests,legislative debates, ideological discussions, and debatesamong the major political actors take place. Media areexpected to provide fair, balanced, and neutral coverageof the issues. The sphere of consensus consists of

motherhood andapple pie issues. In this realm, mediado notfeel compelledto maintain a detached or disinter-ested stance; rather, they feel free to celebrate the con-sensus values. In the realm of deviance, the pressplaystherole of exposing,condemning,or excludingfrom thepublic agenda those who violate or challenge the polit-ical consensus. It marks out and defends the limits ofacceptable conflict.

V. CONCLUSION

Humans make sense of their world by the narratives

that circulate within their culture. Media and popularculture are saturated in narratives, and these containpromises and recurrent themes that are rooted in basicvalues. Some scholars mention a number of themes thathave a mythical quality and have historically predom-inated in American narratives. For example, the DanielBoone tales, the inventiveness of Paul Bunyan, andmany of the Abraham Lincoln stories are based on thepremise of wisdom of the rustic. The simple, common-sense anti-intellectual approach to solving problemsseems to have great persuasive appeal. Aspirants tohigh political office feel the need to emphasize theirhumble origins, and if they are lacking, then they try to

find emotional suffering or physical handicaps as sym-bolic substitutes. The many stories of Horatio Algerduring the 19th centuryabout a person making it tothe top through optimism, hard work, sincerity, hon-esty, and gutsy risk takingand countless others sincethen have used the basic theme of the possibil-ity of success for the individual. This suggests that for-ward-looking optimism is an important instrumental



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value cherished in the culture. Americans have alsoused conspiracy as an explanation for difficult prob-lems. The basic premise has been that America standsalone in the world as the last best remaining hope for agood moral and affluent life ina world that is filled withpossibilities and perils. The tendency to believe that

there are forces both within and outside the countryready to undermine the American system has beencharacterized by what Richard Hofstadter called aparanoid style of politics and what Robert Reich calledmob at the gates. Therefore, Americans seem to havealways felt the need to have messiahs who are action-oriented charismatic leaders, usually having the predi-lection to offer simple answers to complex problems.Many stories also are rooted in the basic premise thatthere is wisdom and maturity to be gained throughmeeting difficult challenges in life. So, characters instories and leaders in political life are valued for beingtested and being found equal to the tests.

One of the basic functions of mass media is the en-forcement of social norms and the reinforcement ofcultural values. Media do that by initiating social actionthrough exposing conditions and behavior that violatespublic morality and cherished values. Media publicitycan exert pressure on the society to close the gap be-tween private attitudes and public morality and toaffirm the social norm. This is why most people recog-nize the significance of implicit or explicit depiction ofvalues through themes, characters, and personalities infictional and reality-based media content. It is notablethat the less developed nations of the world have beencomplaining about being inundated with media content

carrying foreign cultural values with the potential tooverwhelm their traditional value systems. By the sametoken, carefully crafted media messages are believed topossess great power to clarify and change peoplesvalues. In a remarkable social experiment, SandraBall-Rokeach, Milton Rokeach, and Joel Grube de-veloped a television program and aired it to audiencesin the state of Washington. They succeeded in establish-ing the proposition that people change their values,attitudes, and ultimately their behaviors when they areforced to confront inconsistencies in their beliefsystems. The ability of researchers to achieve dramaticresults through persuasive television messages points to

the great power of the mass media to clarify, upgrade,downgrade, implement, and retarget values.

See Also the Following Articles

CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION . DAYTIME

TELEVISION, CULTURE OF . DEMOCRACY AND THE

MEDIA . ETHNIC AND GENDER STEREOTYPING .

HOLLYWOOD, CULTURE AND INFLUENCE OF . MINORITIES,

MEDIA DEPICTION OF . NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURE ANDTHE MEDIA . PUBLIC OPINION AND THE MEDIA . TALK

SHOW CULTURE . TRADITIONAL CULTURES, IMPACT OFMEDIA ON

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Documents

Cultural Value and Mass Communication