How Media Production Can Help Explain the Media's Failure to Represent Working-Class People Adequately

Social class is a major and often neglected dimension of inequality in modern societies, and so it should be of interest to anyone concerned with contemporary media, culture and society. There is evidence that the media have contributed to the immiseration and marginalisation of working-class people by failing to adequately represent the complexity and richness of their lives and values. This is the case across many different societies, and many different media and genres, including journalism, reality television and film. Sometimes this failure is a result of a lack of attention to working-class people, to their attitudes and values: a failure of under-representation. Sometimes it derives from other causes such as stigmatisation, sensationalism and even demonization: a failure of mis-representation. This paper considers what the study of media production, or media production analysis (MPA), might contribute to understanding such a representational failure. However, MPA in general, and specifically when explaining a phenomenon such as the failure of class representation, needs also to pay heed to a wider set of factors. These would include the degree to which political-economic systems and government policy might push producers to pursue commercial goals rather than producing content that might have more general social and cultural benefits, and the contemporary political status of the working class. The general field of media and cultural studies and, within it, the specific sub-field of MPA, needs to go beyond even this wider set of economic, political and cultural contexts, to consider how the subjective experience of class shapes production. Here the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu offers important though potentially problematic resources.

David Hesmondhalgh is Professor of Media, Music and Culture at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds. He is the author of several books examining media and cultural production and policy, including Why Music Matters (2013) and The Cultural Industries (3rd edition, 2012).