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As the years passed, media and cultural studies also began a move toward focusing on media’s role in relation to race, class, gender, and other issues of social difference. The whole issue of media and identity is somewhat beyond the scope of this book, as it has become a voluminous discourse with an attendantly huge literature. Some of these issues had been dealt with in the effects tradition (studies of the demography of television for instance), but not with the foreground attention that came to dominate critical work. In these studies, media are most often seen as vehicles for constructing views of marginalized classes of people that serve the interests of a more dominant group (Gross, 1991, provides a summary of this type of outlook in relation to sexual minorities). While the presumed power of media is still strong, these studies also include ways to look at how marginalized groups negotiate identity within a power-defined media system.

While the critical/ideological perspective has often couched itself as opposed to strong views of effects, those working from the “political economy” perspective were most direct in arguing that media exerted a propagandistic effect on audiences. Herman and Chomsky’s “propaganda” model (1988) of media argues that media are directly controlled by economic elites, and that their messages serve these elites equally directly. It’s an ironic return to the propaganda concern that started effects research in the first place. Other writers in the tradition (e.g., Smythe, 1981) were effective in noting how modern media structures could essentially commodify the time of workers, turning all human experience into an activity determined by and relevant to a capitalist mode of production (see also Jhally & Livant, 1986).

Down the line from these concerns, critical approaches exploded in multiple directions and variants. Critical theory and media studies, in their own way, followed a similar trajectory to the communication effects research tradition. An initial statement implied very strong media effects, motivated by social conditions and the experience of the time. However, a simplistic view proves to be unsuitable to explain all phenomena, and theoretical specifications occur that moderate the view of media power. In the case of critical theory, postmodern theory and cultural relativisms became much more influential, leading to a situation in which almost any statement of theory could be critiqued from a relatively radical position. A dominant metaphor was offered which viewed media as a key player in the “social construction” of reality. But the postmodern moment led to many different offshoots, some with stronger views of media effect than others.