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Media sociology in the early 1980s was "rediscovered" by sociologists and political scientists. It was a discipline whose time had arrived. In much of the work in the field at this time the level of analysis dealt with individuals working within organizations. Since that time, media sociology has gone through paradigm debates, expanded theoretical horizons, and begun to hike levels of analysis higher than the individual-and-organization level. Where should media sociology be going? It will proceed best by systematic investigation of the organizational-institutional nexus, and it can do so by turning to studies of the audience. Media sociology should emphasize the socio-cultural dynamics of the process by which the media attempt to create, maintain--and profit from--their connections to audience. Its goal should be to explore the theoretical linkages between industrial or institutional studies of the media and cultural studies which now constitute a central focus of communication research. Specifically, this means 3 areas of inquiry: (1) critical reviews of where the field is and what is known; (2) images of audience at the organizational-institutional level; and (3) examinations of audience technology. (Twenty-eight references are attached.) (SR)

This paper explores an alternative way of studying journalism in the classroom by focusing on contemporary journalists' ironic treatment of morality. The paper examines the performative character of the language of news, when the words investigative journalists use are of interest not so much for what they say but for what they do. The paper establishes an appropriate framework of irony as a rhetorical device, with emphasis on its evaluative role and the implications of that role for journalists who, as a matter of professional obligation, must eschew explicit evaluation. The paper presents detailed examination of how irony works in the work of several distinguished reporters. (Twenty references are attached.) (KEH)

Journalists' knowledge of news is finally reducible to their commonsensical understanding of it, which is to say that common sense is not still another way of dealing with how journalists know news but instead the very foundation on which that knowledge rests. Common sense does not simply entail some shared cognitive facility that enables people to perceive the world in similar ways; it entails a learned and considered response to the world. Taking common sense seriously means that young journalists should come to appreciate the fundamental "immethodicalness", as Geertz called it, of humanity's unassuming efforts to make sense of the world. Accepting common sense as a legitimate and viable system of thought can reclaim epistemology from its reduction to methodology and can therefore honor what inevitably shapes everyday knowledge, including journalists' knowledge of news: social practice. Treating news and journalists' knowledge of it in terms of common sense can recapture the realities of journalism and present those realities in a historical and cultural context that can bring to reporting and newswriting courses the kind of intellectual adventure they seldom engender. (Twenty notes are included.) (RS)

If there is a dominant theme in the research on the "production of culture," it is the tension between creativity and constraint. Constraints are imposed by the structures and processes of culture-producing industries and organizations in the attempt to cope with the uncertainties of generating and marketing cultural products. Yet the possibility, indeed necessity, of creativity still exists within these constraints. Even within situations of corporate creativity, the act of creation is seen primarily to be the work of individuals or small groups of collaborators who are able to acquire enough power to exercise some creative control. The research conducted within the production of culture perspective does offer insight into how this tension between creativity and constraint plays itself out to produce cultural materials. However this research offers much less insight into what is produced. Finally, meaning cannot be reduced to industrial, organizational, or psychological processes and yet meaning in media content cannot exist without those processes. It is only in the convergence of cultural criticism and cultural sociology--a fusion of text and process--that we can hope to account for meaning in popular culture. (Author/DF)

In the spirit of the postmodern movement, this paper mixes the genres of survey research, in-depth interviews, and textual analysis to comment on governance in the media age. Using these methods, the paper traces the movement of a particular issue, international child abductions, on the agendas of the press, the public, and policy elites. Ultimately, the agenda-history of this issue is found to be a case study in cultural constraints on mass-mediated political power. Results of the study reported in the paper suggest that media logic--the epistemology of the vivid instance and the dramatic case--contains within it the counterpoised tendencies toward both the imposition of meaning and the dissipation of meaning--that normalization can be frustrated by fragmentation--and that it is impossible to predict how these tendencies will "play out" in any particular situation. The paper concludes that politics is, then, a game played under the rules of postmodern media culture, a "game of truth effects" as Baudrillard maintains, but also a game of power that is still real enough to matter. Two tables of data are included and 30 references are attached. (RS)

War as blood sacrifice that ritually renews nationhood provides the interpretive lens for analyzing network news documentaries produced during the run-up to war in Vietnam. While that war was doomed to an ignominious conclusion, broadcast journalism gave it a ceremonially proper start with a reading of the liturgy for the most solemn of all mass-mediated rituals. But instead of socially foundational and culturally essential is the ritual actually an example of "the myth of the mediated centre?" [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]