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Cultural Values and Mass Communications

S. M. Mazharul Haque
University of Southern Mississippi, USA

I. II. III. IV. V.

Culture and Values Media and Values Values and Lifestyles Values in the News 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 good competitive 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.

and values and norms, on the one hand, and the role of various idea- and value-producing institutions, such as the mass media, on the other. The American media system makes value assumptions about the nature of people, society, and government. This article also discusses how values have been dened and understood in the context of various functions they serve for individuals, culture, and society. It identies the cultural premises, basic values, and ideological demands in the media. It also examines the emergence and proliferation of a lifestyles symbolic system that contains value judgments about culture and reality. Finally, the article discusses what values are identiable in the news content of the mass media.

I. CULTURE AND VALUES


Culture is a very broad and elusive concept. The listing of 164 denitions of culture by Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn in their 1952 book Culture suggests that it is not prudent to approach it from a narrow perspective. That is why social scientists have focused on different facets and dimensions of culture in their denitions. A simple denition of culture, such as that given by Jon Shepard in his 1974 book Basic Sociology, includes all manmade patterns for feeling, thinking, and behaving that are transmitted to an entire society or to a segment of the society. To understand culture, one needs to examine both material tangible products of human creation (e.g., technology) and nonmaterial intangible elements (e.g., norms, values). Through culture, people not only create and deal with ideas but also group and apply specic systems of symbolic meaning. Humans internalize an established system of meanings and symbols to dene their world, express their feelings, and make value judgments. A cultural tradition is internalized through a conscious and unconscious

his article denes culture as a multifaceted and multidimensional 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 standards for thinking and behaving, and norms are specic rules that lead a person to preferred modes of conduct to achieve what is regarded as a desirable state of existence in a society. This article discusses the intertwining relationship between the concepts of culture

Encyclopedia of International Media and Communications, Volume 1 Copyright 2003, Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.

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process of enculturation in which people learn through interaction with others and observation of their behavior in accordance with the norms and values of the society. Values are broad and general cultural principles embodying standards for thinking and behaving, while norms refer to specic rules that may guide a persons thoughts and behavior in terms of what is considered desirable and acceptable in the culture. In addition to the patterns of human interaction and behaviors, culture is materialized in the artifacts and rituals. But culture manifests itself in the meaning systems observed in the values, ideas, and beliefs expressed through the various symbolic forms of representations generally found in the multiplicity of idea-producing institutions in the society but more particularly found in the institutions of mass communication. Basic to a culture is its distinct value system, which is revealed in the interaction and behavioral patterns, social relationships, and rituals, among others. However, it is the cultural artifacts, such as the media content, that provide a cultural analyst with opportunities to study values that often lie embedded in them. The term values is an emotive term, and the depiction of values in the media often generates highly emotional responses among the media viewers and readers, probably because values always involve deep commitment and psychic investment. Portrayal of values in the media in an undesirable way from one perspective or another is viewed as deeply offensive and threatening by segments of the population that believe that their values have been violated or undermined. The terms enculturation and socialization refer to the process of learning or internalizing by young people the basic social roles, traditions, behaviors, and values in a culture. The system of communication, including the mass media and the language in a culture, provides an important means of socialization. Other social institutions function in tandem with the means of mass communication both in the socialization process and in providing a means of social control. Media content, by and large, helps to maintain the existing political, social, and economic systems by refusing to question basic American assumptions and values about social arrangements leading to the overtly stated or implicit view that these arrangements represent the most natural order of life. However, some conservative cultural critics have pointed out that much of the content in the contemporary media seems to undermine the basic American institutions and the value systems on which they are based. Sociologists have categorized signicant social institutions that not only provide for transmission of

cultural values but also contribute to the survival of societies by allowing for an organized way of accomplishing socially recognized needs and systems of social control. These important institutions, including media, perform traditional activities in areas that relate to the family, 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 a consensual view of social goals that are regarded as desirable. Important social goals may come into conict with each other. The need to have free, autonomous media institutions with freedom to propagate ideas and values and their propensity to invade peoples privacy, injure their reputation, and disseminate obscene or indecent materials that would offend peoples sensibilities and harm children may come into conict. Media, through a variety of news, entertainment, and editorial content, can contribute to value clarication in the society and help to establish appropriate regulatory systems to balance conicting values in light of a societys scale of priorities. The study of history is designed to provide a sense of continuity and cohesion of social institutions as they grow and evolve. Media, by examining current and historical roles of important institutions in the society, not only help to maintain the contemporary institutional structures but also reinforce the underlying value systems. In addition to these values of continuity and cohesion, media, in their diverse content, may sustain and promote values that are associated with desirable and normative behavior of the individual and the group. Much of cultural and ideological analysis of the media is concerned with the generation and circulation of meanings in the society by media messages. Meanings are produced in a dynamic process by the interactions between text and audience because meanings are not located in the text itself. Stuart Hall suggested that television programs are often texts, capable of being read in different ways by different people. In his theory of preferred reading, Hall projected that readers may use three broad reading strategiesthe dominant, the negotiated, and the oppositional depending on the social positions of the reader in relation to the dominant ideology and values. If the reader/ viewer is socially situated to agree with the dominant ideology in general in the media text, then he or she is likely to draw meanings as desired by the producer of the text. The negotiated reading is produced by a reader when the dominant ideology is generally consistent

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with the readers viewpoint but needs some inection to bypass the conicts that exist between his or her social position and the ideology. The oppositional reading is produced by a reader whose social situation puts him or her in conict with the dominant ideology and, therefore, the reader would draw meanings negating the dominant ideology and associated value system. Halls preferred reading theory holds that television programs generally prefer a set of meanings that are designed to maintain the dominant ideologies, but the meanings cannot be imposed on the reader. The overarching dominant ideology may be the patriarchal capitalism that includes masculinity, individualism, competition, and the related value systems. Writers have used the term ideology to mean different things depending on the context. At a basic level, it refers to a system of beliefs, values, and behavior that have a dominant position in the society. But Raymond Williams, in his 1977 book Marxism and Literature, pointed out that, rst, ideology may be seen as a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular group or class; second, in the classical Marxist sense, ideology is a system of illusory beliefs, false ideas, or false consciousness; and third, ideology is a general process of the production of meanings and ideas. The Marxist concept of ideology as a false consciousness is important because it means that ideas of the ruling classes become accepted as natural and normal. Knowledge is believed to be class based, and members of the working class understand their social experiences and relationships in terms of a set of ideas that come from a class whose interests not only differ from theirs but are opposed by them. Peoples consciousness is produced by the society, not by their individual psychology or biology. Louis Althusser rened the Marxist theory of ideology in that he viewed it not as a static set of ideas imposed by the dominant classes on the subordinate classes but rather as a dynamic process in which all classes participate. Ideology, in this view, is more effective because it is being constantly reproduced in the social and cultural practices, that is, in the way people think, act, and understand themselves in relation to society. Ideological state apparatuses (ISAs), which include social institutions such as family, educational system, political system, language, and media, play a central role in the ideological work. They produce in people the values and the tendencies to think and act in ways that are socially acceptable and normative in their day-to-day workings. Each institution, according to Althussers theory of overdetermination, is relatively autonomous. An ideological institution presents itself as socially neutralnot overtly favoring one class over another yet all of the institutions perform similar ideological

work, and each institution is related to all of the others by a web of ideological interconnections. Therefore, the operation of any one of them is overdetermined by a network of interrelationships with the others. Althusser maintained that individuals in a society are socially constructed as subjects through the workings of the ISAs because individuals develop a sense of their identitya sense of the world and their relationship to it through ideological practices that are deeply inscribed ways of thinking and behaving. Therefore, a biological female may develop a masculine subjectivity, and a person of color may have a white subjectivity. Media and language play a central role in the construction of the subject and the reproduction of ideology in individuals. Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci introduces the term hegemony. Douglas Kellner pointed out that hegemonic ideology tries to legitimate the existing society, its institutions, and its ways of life. Ideology becomes hegemonic when the majority of the people in a society accept the existing order of things as natural or logical, giving consent to the existence and continuation of the dominant institutions and practices. According to Kellner, hegemony requires the transmission of certain preconceptions, assumptions, notions, beliefs, and values that construct a worldview among different groups in a society. The hegemonic process involves contestation, resistance, and instability. hegemony theory suggests that the dominant ideology, consisting of beliefs and values propagated through media and other ideological institutions in their discursive and linguistic practices, meets resistance and is subjected to political contestation. The resistance may be overcome, but hegemony is never established permanently. The ideological victory is subject to challenge, and ideological battles have to be fought repeatedly because contesting groups are engaged in their efforts to produce counter hegemony. According to Kellner, the hegemony model views media and culture as a terrain of an ever-shifting and evolving hegemony in which consensus is forged around competing ruling-class political positions, values, and views of the world. Hegemony theories of society, culture, and media have been contrasted with instrumentalist theories. The instrumentalist theories hold that the state and media are instruments of capital that are used to advance the interests of the ruling class and to control the subjugated classes. The instrumentalist position can be viewed as ahistorical and overly simplistic because the proponents of this theory assume a two-class capitalist society consisting of a unied ruling class and a working class and do not seem to recognize the conicts

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that almost always exist among the state, media, and capital. The hegemony model takes a much more sophisticated view of the society and its class structure because it recognizes divisions within both the working and ruling classes, leading to struggle and formation of coalitions and alliances. The hegemony model points out that media take on different forms and ideological positions at different historical junctures depending on the balance of power among contesting groups. The history of television in the United States provides a good example of a contested ideological terrain where conservatives, liberals, and radicals have struggled for predominance and where each group has gained ascendancy over the others during one time period or another.

II. MEDIA AND VALUES


Milton Rokeach, in his 1973 book The Nature of Human Values, dened value as an enduring belief that a specic mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence. A value system assumes an organization of values according to an implicit evaluation of the enduring beliefs on some scale of their relative importance. Values are generally enduring; however, they cannot be completely stable or unstable. Complete stability of values would make social change impossible, but instability would 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 out that some beliefs are descriptive or existential in nature and capable of being true or false, while some others are evaluative because they involve a judgment of good or bad. The third kind is a prescriptive or proscriptive belief in which some means or end of action is judged to be desirable or undesirable. Attitudes are also related to values, but they hold a less central position in the personality makeup and cognitive system. An attitude may be conceptualized as an organization of several beliefs focused on a given subject or situation. Values are determinants of both attitudes and behavior. Similarly, some scholars regard values and needs as equivalent. They should not be treated as such because all animals have needs but not values. According to Rokeach, values are cognitive representations and transformations of needs, and man is the only animal capable of these. Values are the cognitive representation of both individual needs and societal and institutional demands. Rokeach also made a distinction between two kinds of values, namely

instrumental and terminal, with the former relating to the means or the idealized modes of conduct and the latter referring to the idealized end state of existence. Rokeach identied 36 values through a national survey of Americans, with 18 in each category. The 18 terminal values are a comfortable life, an exciting life, a sense of accomplishment, a world at peace, a world of beauty, equality, family security, freedom, happiness, inner harmony, mature love, national security, pleasure, salvation, self-respect, social recognition, true friendship, and wisdom. The three terminal values with the highest rankings among those identied are a world at peace, family security, and freedom. The four values with the lowest rankings are an exciting life, pleasure, social recognition, and a world of beauty. In the instrumental category, the values are ambitious, broad-minded, capable, cheerful, clean, courageous, forgiving, helpful, honest, imaginative, independent, intellectual, logical, loving, obedient, polite, responsible, and selfcontrolled. The three top-ranking values in the category are honest, ambitious, and responsible, while the four ranking at the bottom are imaginative, obedient, intellectual, and logical. American men and women both seem to have a similar pattern of emphasis with regard to these values. However, the survey showed considerable gender differences on certain values. For example, in the terminal category, men ranked a comfortable life 4th, while women ranked it 13th. Men also placed a much higher value on an exciting life, a sense of accomplishment, freedom, pleasure, social recognition, ambitious, capable, imaginative, and logical. Women valued a world at peace, happiness, inner harmony, salvation, self-respect, wisdom, cheerful, clean, forgiving, and loving. Values conceived as standards can serve a range of functions. They can inuence a persons positions on social, political, or religious issues or ideologies. They can serve as standards for judging morality or competence of individual or collective actions, but more important, they can serve as standards for rationalizing action or behavior to sustain a sense of morality, competence, and self-esteem. Avalue system, by giving some rules and principles, can give an individual the means to choose among alternatives, resolve conicts, and make decisions. Values also have adjustive and knowledge functions. Values are motivational and ego defensive because it is assumed that behavior prescribed by instrumental values can lead to attainment of desirable terminal values, such as family security, social recognition, a world at peace, beauty, and harmony. Most media messages, regardless of whether they are entertainment/fantasy oriented or for purposes of

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information, are inscribed with values and therefore can be identied through deconstructive methods of analysis of media text. As a matter of fact, during the past century, the mass media clearly have emerged as a major agent of socialization and value learning in most developed societies. Both electronic and print media play a very important role in inuencing and forming peoples values. Media assist people in making value judgments when they make editorial or gatekeeping decisions with regard to which stories to select, which topics or viewpoints to give editorial attention, and what kinds of people are the heroes and villains in the society. Politics in any society is about allocation of scarce resources. How resources of a society are allocated to different segments provides an indication of a cultures value system. Media focus attention on and provide information concerning the allocation of the national budget to the different government priorities, such as social security and welfare, national defense, environmental protection, health care, community development and public housing, education and manpower, space research, and agriculture. In their examination of these issues and topics, media personnel use not only their own value judgments but also their perceptions of the majority view of the societys value priorities. Some of the best indicators of popular values can be found by examining popular culture and the media, especially if one asks questions such as the following. How does society allocate its money? What kinds of positions have popular status? How do people use their time and money? Which media reach the most people? Media portrayals of lifestyles, recreation activities, and peoples use of various cultural artifacts can also indicate a cultures popular values. It is for this reason that analysis of media texts for values can be a very productive enterprise. Malcolm Sillars, in his 1991 book Messages, Meanings, and Culture, suggested that analysis of media text for values may be based on some specic assumptions. First, humans make sense of the world by identifying values because valuing an object, a person, or an idea is a cultural process in human lives. Examining a basic document, such as the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution, can reveal the fundamental values of the society. For example, the Declaration of Independence, which includes expressions such as all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is clearly an important value statement that contains enduring American values. Second, all statements can be interpreted for values. In some of these statements, the

values might be clearly discernible because they are explicitly stated, but in most statements, values are likely to be implied. Third, an analyst, in examining a media text such as a television show, a lm, a news program, or a presidential speech on television, may identify a system of values in which the values are linked to one another and interact with each other to provide a particular cognitive system. So, a particular type of mass medium with a narrow focus on given topics and issues will produce message systems that will contain subcultural values related to these areas. Even though values have an enduring quality about them, their salience may change from time to time depending on the larger cultural context in which the value hierarchy operates. For example, most Americans ranked a world at peace as the top terminal value during the Vietnam war, but subsequently it was ranked much lower in the hierarchy when the immediacy of war was not present. Examination of political, philosophical, and media texts may lead to identication of various value systems. Scholars have thus identied a number of value systems in America. The value systems may be labeled as the puritanpioneer, the enlightenment, the progressive, the transcendental, the personal success, and the collectivist. The puritanpioneer value system will require a person to work hard as part of his or her religious duty but also because a person has an obligation to himself or herself and other people to try in the face of an uncertain future and the possibility of failure. Some of the positive values associated with the system are dedication, dependability, dignity, duty, morality, righteousness, selessness, thrift, and temperance. Conversely, some of the negative values in the system would be dereliction of duty, disgrace, indelity, immorality, vanity, and waste. The United States is believed to be an enlightenment nation, and the Declaration of Independence is a quintessential enlightenment document. The foundation of the value system is in the belief that the world is an orderly place governed by natural laws that can be discovered by the power of reason. Humans are capable of nding answers to problems if they are allowed to use reason in an unfettered way. The basic function of the government is to protectnot abridgethe inalienable rights of the people. The notion of academic freedom the unrestricted right to conduct scientic inquiry or pursue knowledgeis based on this value system. But more important, the libertarian system of the press that has existed since the American Revolution has been informed by the rationalist values of the 18th century. According to Fred Siebert, Theodore Peterson, and Wilbur Schramms 1956 book Four Theories of the

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Press, since the beginning of mass communication in the Renaissance, there have been only two basic theories of the press, namely authoritarianism and libertarianism. The subsequent development of press theories may be viewed as extensions of these two themes. The authoritarian press was born into the authoritarian climate of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, characterized by a set of beliefs and values with regard to the nature of knowledge, truth, people, society, and state, on the one hand, and the relationship to the state, on the other. In this society, the truth was believed to be the possession of only a few wise individuals who should direct and guide the masses. Knowledge was attainable through mental effort, but people differed widely in their ability to exercise the effort and acquire knowledge. Therefore, the differences were recognized in the social structure. The rulers of the time reserved the right to inform the people what they needed to know. The press was obligated to support the rulers policies. Private ownership of the press was permitted only by special permission, and hence it could be withdrawn at the displeasure of rulers for infractions on the part of publishers. The rulers had the right to set policy, license, and censor. In this system, which was universally prevalent during the 16th and 17th centuries, the press served as the servant of the state rather than as the watchdog of the government, with the latter being a notion that arose later in the West. A whole series of developments, ranging from the growth of political democracy, religious freedom, the acceptance of laissez-fare economics, and the philosophical climate of enlightenment, undermined authoritarianism and replaced it with libertarianism. Libertarianism took root during the 18th century but owered during the 19th century. Under this theory, people were seen as rational beings who were able to discern not only between truth and falsehood but also between better and worse alternatives, but it was their inalienable right to search for the truth. The press in this system is not an instrument of government but rather a check on it. It was believed that a free market place of ideas was needed for the truth to emerge through unfettered competition of all ideas. In the face of conglomeration and oligopolistic conditions of the press during the 20th century, many began to question the validity of the notion of a free market place of ideas associated with libertarianism. The market was really being controlled by a few who decided which persons and which facts, as well as which versions of these facts, should reach the public. In this condition, the social responsibility theory emerged and emphasized the need for the press to be socially responsible by at least fairly presenting all sides

of an issue. The Commission on the Freedom of the Press, popularly known as the Hutchins Commission, listed several requirements of the press in the contemporary society that reected important press and societal values. The rst was to provide a truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the days events in a context that gives them meaning. The second requirement for the press was to serve as a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism. The press was also required to project a representative picture of the constituent groups in society. The commission also believed that the press was responsible for presentation and clarication of the goals and values of the society. Finally, the commission emphasized the need for the press to provide full access to the days intelligence. Siebert and his colleagues suggested that Soviet Communist theory of the press was really an extension of the older authoritarianism. The press in this system was state owned and was used as an instrument of the state and the Communist Party for propaganda and agitation. The press was free to speak the pre-established MarxistLeninistStalinist truth free from the compulsion of the prot motive. It is notable that authoritarian theory was rooted in authoritarian political thought and an authoritarian value system; the libertarian theory was grounded in the political thoughts propounded by Milton, Locke, and Mill and the enlightenment value system; the social responsibility theory emerged because of the vast changes in the information marketplace; and the Soviet Communist theory was based on the political thoughts of Hegel, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin and a collectivist value system. Subsequently, however, there have been further developments. For example, during recent years, some scholars have used the term communitarianism in place of Marxism. In the United States, a commitment to shared communities has generated political movements. During the 1990s, American philosopher Amitai Etzioni led a communitarian movement that sought to promote a communitarian perspective aimed at strengthening families, even through he avoided promoting specic policies. Some see communitarianism as a concept that promotes use of the press as an instrument of propaganda. Central to the idea of communitarianism is the notion that institutions ought to be structured to serve the interests of a seless collective rather than egoistic, personally motivated individuals. In the communitarian system, the individual is required to yield his or her selsh freedom for the benet of the community. There are many variations of communitarianism, with Marxism being just one of them. The developing countries of the world, during the past

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half-century or so, tried to develop their own press systems, which have variously emphasized a type of communication called development communication or development support journalism. Development communication employs modern mass media as an instrument that could be used to mobilize the masses for participation in an accelerating program of socioeconomic development of the poor countries. Borrowing ideas from communication researchers and scholars in the West and in socialist countries, the Third World policymakers attempted to generate a set of values among their tradition-bound, often illiterate peoples that would be conducive to fast-paced modernization programs for their societies. Unfortunately, the faith placed in the efcacy of the media in the socioeconomic transformation generally proved to be unrealistically optimistic or utopian. But early theories of development communication emphasized the need for creating value systems in the society that allowed the developed nations to achieve a high standard of living and hightech growth. Interestingly, proponents of these theories also believed that it was possible for the developing nations to replicate the sequential stages of development that the advanced nations had experienced through transfer of technologies and production and modernization-oriented attitudes and value systems. This basic approach to solving the problems of socioeconomic development of societies and collectivities of people through extensive use of mass media depended on a nationalist philosophy that is associated partly with enlightenment values and partly with progressive and collectivist value systems. However, the enlightenment value system associates positive words such as freedom, individualism, knowledge, liberty, nationality, natural right, and democracy. Negative words associated with this value system include dictatorship, fascism, ignorance, irrationality, and thoughtlessness. The progressive value system is inextricably linked with enlightenment. Knowledgeand rationality-based enlightenment leads to progress. Progress is also associated with positive words such as change, evolution, improvement, modernity, pragmatism, and technology. Negative values would be associated with, for example, backward-looking and regressive perspectives, pessimism, un-inventiveness, and inefciency. The transcendental value system emphasizes intuition as a method of knowing the universe that is governed by natural laws. It also emphasizes the need for kindness, love, and humanitarianism. Some of the associated words 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 system has been identied as a personal success value system. The system places emphasis on values that are focused on the individualhis or her happiness, sense of self-respect, and freedom of choice. Some of the words emphasizing positive values associated with the system include sincerity, dignity, economic security, enjoyment, family, friends, recreation, and fair play. Words such as coercion, disgrace, dullness, and routine are associated with negative values in the system. The collectivist value system probably runs contrary to the personal success value system in general, and it does not seem to dene the American society. It often seems to be part of a subcultures discourse. However, it is also an undeniable fact that there are elements in the society who have recognized the need to control the excesses of greed and extreme individualism and to emphasize cooperative action and communitarian interests. The collectivist value system emphasizes brotherhood, cooperation, equity, social good, joint action, and unity, among others. Some of the negative qualities in the value system are disorganization, inequity, selshness, and personal greed.

III. VALUES AND LIFESTYLES


Even though scholars have identied these broad value systems in this culture, quite clearly, these value systems have overlapping characteristics. The distinctiveness of a value system is really a matter of locus of emphasis, and in this multicultural, multiethnic society, one can see how different segments of the society can subscribe to different sets of values. As a matter of fact, in a multicultural society, such as the United States, value acquisition and abandonment do often take place. Some people may abandon values that they have adhered to, and the mass media may have an inuence in the decision-making process. Value redistribution may occur when minority values, such as tolerance for unconventional lifestyles and ethnic and cultural diversity, may become the values of a society, and the media, through their depiction of themes and their portrayals of 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 t into three categories: need-driven, outer-oriented, and inner-oriented lifestyles. Needdriven groups include people who are poverty stricken and struggling to make ends meet. Outer-oriented lifestyles account for the majority of Americans. They

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are middle class, traditional, and conforming as well as ambitious and achievers (e.g., gifted, hard-working, self-reliant, status seeking). The inner-oriented lifestyles include people with personality characteristics such as maturity and a sense of belonging. Social class and socioeconomic status are believed to inuence lifestyles. The basic lifestyles are property dominated, occupation dominated, and income or poverty dominated. This means that they roughly correspond to the upper class, the upper-middle through working classes, and the lower class or poor. Even though lifestyle is believed to relate to social class and status, tastes and preferences are believed to be determined by ones wealth and prestige as well as individual choice based on education and experience. Some have attempted to explain the proliferation of lifestyles in the United States during recent decades by suggesting that the growth of different lifestyles occurs during a transitional phase when one cultural tradition has broken down but another tradition has not yet emerged and when the society has sufcient wealth to create leisure time for people to try alternative standards of value and alternative lifestyles. Media have a major role in the creation of lifestyles because they provide symbols and objects for sharing values and because they legitimize the sharing. Because media use occupies a signicant portion of peoples lives, media themselves become a major factor in peoples lives. It is possible to get a sense of the proliferation of lifestyles and the associated change in values from the multiplicity of contemporary television shows in the United States. Early television shows, such as Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, are believed to portray strong traditional family values, such as selfresponsibility, family unity within a nuclear family, and caring for others. Some popular programs during the past decade, such as The Cosby Show, seem to have retained those traditional themes and cultural values. Tony DeMars, in his 1996 doctoral dissertation examining some popular situation comedies, youth appeal programs, and daytime talk shows, identied a type of disrespectful discourse that includes children speaking to adults without recognition of rank, children speaking of sexual activities not accepted by the dominant value system, and use of unwarranted verbal or physical aggression and hateful or abusive interaction style. The frequent use of disrespectful discourse not only indicates a tolerance of the society for a greater range of lifestyle changes that would have been considered unacceptable and deviant during earlier times but also is symptomatic of value change in the culture. The negative values portrayed in the television shows are individualism, sexual promiscuity, hedonism,

sexism, and absence of childhood innocence. Individualism was regarded as a negative value because it was not portrayed in its conventional sense that called for equality of opportunity for individuals, reliance on selfdevelopment, and faith in the dignity and worth of every individual. Rather, this form of individualism is dysfunctional because it meant extreme freedom for young people to speak as they pleased and be nonconformist. DeMars also suggested that, despite the predominance of negative values in the television shows, some positive values, such as honesty, family unity, control of aggression, and self-reliance, might also be present in these shows with a potential for positive inuence on young viewers behaviors. In a conservative critique of popular culture produced by Hollywood, Michael Medved in 1992 bemoaned the tendency of Hollywood producers to undermine traditional 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 popular music has become inuential in the creation of values, morals, and behavior patterns. As a powerful medium of socialization, popular music does allow youth to integrate its values and themes into their everyday lives. In an analysis of popular country music videos on television, Holgate listed a number of terminal 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 at peace, a world of beauty, family security, freedom, happiness, mature love, and pleasure. His list of instrumental values includes ambitious, capable, cheerful, clean, courageous, forgiving, helpful, imaginative, independent, loving, polite, and self-controlled. Advertising researchers using psychographic research methods grouped American consumers in terms of their values and lifestyles. The values and lifestyle analysis (VALS) research has gone through several versions. The latest version groups American consumers into strivers and strugglers. The actualizers are politically active, informed, and socially concerned people who value personal growth. Achievers are politically conservative upscale individuals who may emphasize work at the expense of recreation and may focus on career and family but value personal growth. Believers are also politically conservative informed Americans who enjoy a comfortable predictable existence, respect rules, and trust authority gures. Makers are those who enjoy hands-on activities but distrust politicians, foreigners, and big business. They also avoid joining organizationsexcept unionsand spend leisure time with family and friends. Fullleds are those who are

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tolerant and politically moderate and are also active in community and politics. They value education and travel. Experiencers are politically apathetic but are concerned about their image and are unconforming. They like the offbeat, the new, and the risky. The two downscale groups are the strivers and the strugglers, who are politically apathetic, are generally concerned about safety and security, and have limited interests and traditional religious values. So, the American consumers are grouped according to their values and lifestyle preferences, but the advertisers also make appeals to them with their persuasive messages that are based on 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 media disseminate information that people want, need, and should know, news organizations both circulate and shape knowledge, according to Gaye Tuchmans 1978 book Making News. Some scholars point out that news is the product of a social institution that is allied with other legitimate institutions and that the news personnel produce stories according to cultural and institutional practices of storytelling. Some suggest that news media have several biases that reect medias ideological leanings and values. For example, media fail to explain power structure and political processes underneath the issues that are featured in news; instead, they personalize news by focusing on individuals engaged in political battles over the issues. Personalization, through excessive use of emotional appeals to people, leads to an egocentric rather than socially concerned view of political problems. News media also tend to dramatize events emphasizing crisis, overlooking continuing and persistent problems facing the society, such as inequality, resource waste, high levels of military spending, hunger, and poverty. They also tend to present stories in isolation from each other, blurring the linkages across issues and thus making it difcult for a coherent global view to emerge. The process of fragmentation is heightened by their attention to individual actors in dramas without providing an adequate political context. The news media also attempt to provide reassurance to the public by seeking out authoritative ofcial voices that offer normalized interpretations of the otherwise threatening and confusing events in the news. The important thing to note is that ofcial versions of events, as well as the news accounts of them by the mainstream media, essentially reect judgments

made on the basis of values and norms that are dominant and hence generally accepted as natural in a culture. Some scholars view news as narratives that t into an enduring symbolic system in which the names of actors and the specic facts and details may vary on a day-today basis but the overall narrative is the same and has a mythical quality. News narratives, like myths, dene for people what is right and wrong and offer them a sense of values. One may argue that all of the crime stories reported by the news media are designed not only to appeal to the morbid interest of the readers and viewers but also to provide a normative contour of a society. These slants have an important symbolic signicance because they tell us about the parameters of acceptable and desirable modes of behavior. Each news narrative, whether it is a crime or political story, draws on all of the stories that have gone before and becomes part of the mythical narrative that reects a cultures enduring values with regard to its concept of preferred mode of conduct or desired goals of life. The power of myth is generated by the fact that it is told and retold generation after generation, and the news stories also have their power because they draw on the inventory 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 and consonance factors. The resonance is produced by a sense that one has encountered the same story many times in the past, while the consonance factor suggests that a news story is preferred by the media because it is consonant with the preferred values and standards of the society. News personnel use news values in constructing narratives. These news values lead to culturally specic storytelling codes that evolved from ancient ways of telling stories. The most commonly used codes emphasize certain news elements that reect time-tested news practices, such as emphasizing the unusual, the novel, or the dramatic, but they also reect the deeply ingrained cultural values. Even though news personnel do not deliberately or explicitly insert values into the news, the job of news personnel requires them to make reality judgments, and these judgments are never really divorced from values. Herbert Gans, in his 1980 book Deciding Whats News, distinguished between topical values and enduring values. The topical values may be found in the expressed opinions about specic actions and activities of the moment, whereas the enduring values may be discerned in different types of stories over a period of time. Gans identied eight value clusters in the news content of the mainstream media: ethnocentrism, altruistic democracy, responsible capitalism, small-town

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pastoralism, individualism, moderatism, social order, and national leadership. Gans opined that news, by and large, reects ethnocentric values both in the United States and in other countries. In the United States, news values its own nation above all others, even though mainstream media avoid Jingoism. Ethnocentrism is most explicit in foreign news because a countrys image depends on the extent to which it conforms to American values and practices. Many stories critical of domestic conditions are presented, but they are almost always treated as aberrant cases. In the Watergate coverage, the scandal was usually attributed to a small group of powerhungry politicians, and hence, the implicit message was that the system was fundamentally sound and only needed minor reforms. The clearest expression of ethnocentrism may be found in Vietnam war news. Casualty stories reported the number of Americans killed, but the casualties on the other side were given in impersonal terms, such as the Communist death toll and the body count. Atrocities committed by the American troops, such as the My Lai massacre, did not get in the news until the end of the war. News media stress altruistic democracy, an unstated ideal, and they do so by paying frequent attention to stories about competition, conict, protest, and bureaucratic malfunctioning. Ideals of democracy are implied or suggested in news. A friendly dictatorship in a foreign country is viewed as benign authoritarianism, while an unfriendly one is viewed as an oppressive dictatorship. News treats politics as a contest between winners 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 democratic practice. News keeps track of ofcial norms. News is concerned with violations of the freedom of the press and civil liberties. Attempts to censor books by school boards, or to keep the press out of city council meetings, draw news attention, but violations of civil liberties and constitutional protections of radicals and criminals have not been a cause for concern. News tends to treat campaign promises and government statements of goals as ofcial values. Therefore, deviations are reported. Financial competition and nepotism are considered news, but economic power is usually seen separately from political power. The problem of access to power by the poor is not considered newsworthy. The issue of racial integration draws the attention of the news media. Activists for the cause of the realization of democratic norms are often described as extremists or militants, but activists supporting racial integration are not given that label; they are called moderates. Conversely, Black Power

activists rejecting integration were in the past called extremists. Gans also identied a value cluster in the news that he called responsible capitalism. According to Gans, news reects an optimistic faith that a good competitive capitalist system exists in which the businesspersons compete fairly with each other and refrain from exploiting the workers and customers. In this system, bigness either in business or in governmentis bad. Monopoly is also undesirable, but the existing oligopolistic control of the economy is not subjected to criticism. Unions and consumer organizations are accepted, but unions are judged negatively if they strike and inconvenience the public. Economic growth is always considered good if it does not bring ination and environmental pollution. Although government is viewed as a bureaucracy, big business bureaucracy is ignored. The news media also celebrate the entrepreneurs and innovators. News accepts the need for the welfare state because it realizes that the market cannot solve all problems, but the term welfare state is reserved for foreign countries in view of the pejorative meaning that the term evokes in the United States. Public welfare agencies are kept under close watch by the news media. Income inequality is not newsworthy, although the dangers of socialism are. The dangers of socialism, according to Gans, are cultural homogeneity, the erosion of political liberties, and the burgeoning bureaucracy. Gans cited small-town pastoralism as a value cluster in the news. He stated that rural anti-industrial values associated with Thomas Jefferson are found in the news. Because big cities have been in the news for racial conict, crime, and a whole range of other problems, the news media tended to take a nostalgic and romantic view of increasingly disappearing small-town life that provided cohesiveness, friendliness, and a quiet slowpaced life. Small-town pastoralism is also associated with two other values: closeness to nature and smallness. Both values are linked with preservation of nature, reassuring familiar lifestyles in the face of despoiling development and uncontrolled growth of new technology threatening both ecology and older, more stable industrial production. This value cluster may be rooted in the respect for tradition that provided predictability, continuity, coherence, and order in life except those values that entrenched racial, gender, and other forms of discrimination. Preservation of the freedom of the individuals against the encroachments of government and society is believed to be an important news value. News media look for individuals who act heroically in adversity and who overcome powerful antagonistic forces. They also pay attention to individuals such as the explorers, mountain

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climbers, astronauts, and scientists who conquer nature without harming it. News also deals with those forces that emasculate individuals. Technology also raises concern for that reason. Socialism and communism are viewed negatively because of denial of opportunities to individuals. Individualism is lauded as a source of economic, social, and cultural productivity. It can help to achieve cultural variety by working against forces of bigness and conformity. News also discourages extremism in behavior. Therefore, the possibility that individualism could encourage deviant or rebellious behavior is neutralized by news medias emphasis of the value of moderatism. Individualism that leads to violation of the law and the accepted values of the society is criticized. In most spheres of activity, extremist solutions are questioned and moderation is preferred. Atheists are treated as extremists, as are religious fanatics. Conspicuous consumption is frowned on, as is shunning all consumer goods. Political ideologues are suspect, as are demagogues and unprincipled politicians. Politicians regularly toeing the party line are seen as hacks, and those not following it at all are called mavericks or loners, but successful loners are seen as heroes. News media report what Gans called disorder stories. Some stories relate to threats to order and measures taken to restore order. Other stories relate to activities of the top public ofcialstheir discussions, their policy proposals, their political arguments, and election or appointment of new ofcials. These stories are rooted in important values, such as the desirability of social order and the need for national leadership to maintain and protect the order. Gans classied disorder stories as natural, technological, social, or moral. The notion of what is order and disorder and the judgment of reality is, of necessity, based on values. News personnel, particularly those practicing investigative journalism, have been called custodians of public conscience, even though the news personnel themselves like to assume a posture of moral disengagement by avoiding explicit moral judgments in the news. Clearly, they select and interpret the standards by which the public is invited to evaluate and judge the breakdown of social and moral systems. Of course, news media, in their editorial function, feel free to make overt moral judgments, explicitly denouncing transgressors, and recommend appropriate actions for members of the public and other institutions to undertake actions that would enforce the social norms and strengthen the values. This is done within the sphere of consensus. A key function of the media is to maintain boundaries in a culture. Media have the ability to dene a situation, and they derive their ideological power from

this. By dening situations, views, and values in relation to what is within and outside the bounds of acceptability and legitimacy, media serve their social control and integration functions. Therefore, media continually dene deviance. News judgment and selection are based on dimensions of deviance, such as the controversial, the sensational, the unusual, and the prominent. In the coverage of events both within the United States and abroad, media tend to focus more on the deviant events that would threaten the status quo, the consensus, and the consensus values. Daniel Hallin, in his 1994 book We Keep America on Top of the World, suggested that the news world may be divided into three spheres: legitimate controversy, consensus, and deviance. The sphere of legitimate controversy is where electoral contests, legislative debates, ideological discussions, and debates among the major political actors take place. Media are expected to provide fair, balanced, and neutral coverage of the issues. The sphere of consensus consists of motherhood and apple pie issues. In this realm, media do not feel compelled to maintain a detached or disinterested stance; rather, they feel free to celebrate the consensus values. In the realm of deviance, the press plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda those who violate or challenge the political consensus. It marks out and defends the limits of acceptable conict.

V. CONCLUSION
Humans make sense of their world by the narratives that circulate within their culture. Media and popular culture are saturated in narratives, and these contain promises and recurrent themes that are rooted in basic values. Some scholars mention a number of themes that have a mythical quality and have historically predominated in American narratives. For example, the Daniel Boone tales, the inventiveness of Paul Bunyan, and many of the Abraham Lincoln stories are based on the premise of wisdom of the rustic. The simple, commonsense anti-intellectual approach to solving problems seems to have great persuasive appeal. Aspirants to high political ofce feel the need to emphasize their humble origins, and if they are lacking, then they try to nd emotional suffering or physical handicaps as symbolic substitutes. The many stories of Horatio Alger during the 19th centuryabout a person making it to the top through optimism, hard work, sincerity, honesty, and gutsy risk takingand countless others since then have used the basic theme of the possibility of success for the individual. This suggests that forward-looking optimism is an important instrumental

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value cherished in the culture. Americans have also used conspiracy as an explanation for difcult problems. The basic premise has been that America stands alone in the world as the last best remaining hope for a good moral and afuent life in a world that is lled with possibilities and perils. The tendency to believe that there are forces both within and outside the country ready to undermine the American system has been characterized by what Richard Hofstadter called a paranoid style of politics and what Robert Reich called mob at the gates. Therefore, Americans seem to have always felt the need to have messiahs who are actionoriented charismatic leaders, usually having the predilection to offer simple answers to complex problems. Many stories also are rooted in the basic premise that there is wisdom and maturity to be gained through meeting difcult challenges in life. So, characters in stories and leaders in political life are valued for being tested and being found equal to the tests. One of the basic functions of mass media is the enforcement of social norms and the reinforcement of cultural values. Media do that by initiating social action through exposing conditions and behavior that violates public morality and cherished values. Media publicity can exert pressure on the society to close the gap between private attitudes and public morality and to afrm the social norm. This is why most people recognize the signicance of implicit or explicit depiction of values through themes, characters, and personalities in ctional and reality-based media content. It is notable that the less developed nations of the world have been complaining about being inundated with media content carrying foreign cultural values with the potential to overwhelm their traditional value systems. By the same token, carefully crafted media messages are believed to possess great power to clarify and change peoples values. In a remarkable social experiment, Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Milton Rokeach, and Joel Grube developed a television program and aired it to audiences in the state of Washington. They succeeded in establishing the proposition that people change their values, attitudes, and ultimately their behaviors when they are forced to confront inconsistencies in their belief systems. The ability of researchers to achieve dramatic results 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 AND THE MEDIA . PUBLIC OPINION AND THE MEDIA . TALK SHOW CULTURE . TRADITIONAL CULTURES, IMPACT OF MEDIA ON

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