Telling Stories: Sociology, Journalism and the Informed Citizen

This paper argues that the media have failed to provide for informed citizenship. Despite claims in media occupational ideologies to service the information needs of the public, the accumulated verdict of research is that the media provide an inadequate basis for citizens to fulfil their role. The popular press has become integrated into the entertainment industry, and public service broadcasting is being dismantled in form and purpose. New technologies, far from creating an `information society', are fostering a media society, in which the gaps between rich and poor are enlarging. These failings place a larger obligation on critical social research to act as witness to history, but this mission can only be fulfilled if we escape from the threats to independent inquiry both within and without academia. Research into the media must reconnect with wider questions of social inequality, power and process.