Maletzke’s model of the mass communication process, 1963A B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZW(Oxford University Press, 2000) comments that
in the British National Corpus of 1995, ‘I found
the following usages: lady doctor (125 times),
woman doctor (20 times), female doctor (10
times), compared to male doctor (14 times)’.
Other terms used for male-as-norm in relation
to language are androcentralism (male centred)
and masculist, as well as patriarchal. See topic
guide under gender matters.
★Maletzke’s model of the mass communi-
cation process, 1963 What is so useful about
the model constructed by German Maletzke and
presented in Th e Psychology of Mass Communi-
cations (Verlag Hans Bredow-Institut, 1963) is
the comprehensiveness of the factors operating
upon the participants in the mass communica-
tion process, and at the same time of the complex
interaction of such factors.
Th e self-image of the communicator corre-
sponds with that of the receiver: both act upon
and are influenced by the message, which is
itself constrained by the dictates of the medium
chosen. To add to the complexity, the message is
infl uenced by the communicator’s image of the
receiver and the receiver’s image of the commu-
nicator. Maltetzke’s is a model suggesting that in
the communication process many shoulders are
being looked over: the more shoulders, the more
compromises, the more adjustments.
Thus not only is the communicator taking
into due regard the medium and the nature of
audience, and perceiving these things through
the fi lter of self-image and personality structure,
he/she is also keenly responsive to other factors- the communication team, with its own special
set of values (see news values) and profes-
sional practices. Beyond the team, there is the
organization, which in turn has to look over its
shoulder towards government or the general
public (see impartiality).
Just as the communicator is a member of a
team within an organizational environment, so
the receiver is part of a larger context of recep-
tion: he/she is subject to infl uences other than
the media message. Th ose infl uences may start in
the living room of a family home, and the infl u-
encers might be the viewer’s or reader’s family,
but there are contextual infl uences beyond that
in the pub, at work, in the community.
Maletzke’s model provides students of the
media with a structure for analysis. By its
complexity, by suggesting an almost limitless
interaction of variables, it also indicates the
enormous diffi culty faced by research into the
effects of the mass media. See topic guide
under communication models.
traditional assumptions.’ Th e three Bs referred to
in Gerbner’s article are the processes by which
television brings about mainstreaming. First,
television blurs traditional social distinctions;
second, it blends otherwise divergent groups
into the mainstream; and thirdly it bends ‘the
mainstream in the direction of the medium’s
interests in profi t, populist politics, and power’.
In a study conducted in the UK in 1987,
researchers from the Portsmouth Media
Research Group, Anthony Piepe, Peter Charlton
and Judy Morey (see their article ‘Politics and
television viewing in England: hegemony or
pluralism?’ in the Winter 1990 edition of the
Journal of Communication) found that British
television ‘does not cultivate a single main-
stream around which a heterogenous audience
converges’, as in the US, but that it contains two
message systems and constructs two audiences:
that for essentially news-related programmes,
which keep pluralist options open, and that for
soaps which do, the researchers confi rm, hasten
a mainstreaming tendency, particularly when
heavy viewing is involved.
In 1994 a study of TV infl uence on political
attitudes in Italy was published by Luca Ricolfi
of the University of Turin. According to his
findings summarized in ‘Elections and mass
media. How many votes has television moved?’
(Il Mulino, 356), TV, public and commercial, had
infl uenced 10 per cent of the Italian electorate
and the commercial channels had signifi cantly
assisted the shift of voters from the Left and
Centre to the Right. See cultivation; effects
of the mass media; glasgow unversity
media group; machinery of representa-
tion; mean world syndrome; resonance;
showbusiness, age of; violence on tv: the
defence.
Male-as-norm In her introduction to Man Made
Language (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) Dale
Spender says, ‘One semantic rule which we
can see in operation in the language is that of
the male-as-norm. At the onset it may appear
to be a relatively innocuous rule for classifying
the objects and events of the world, but closer
examination exposes it as one of the most perva-
sive and pernicious rules that has been encoded.’
Th e rules of society are man-made, and so,
Spender argues, is the language we use – the
‘edification of male supremacy’. Thus women
are allotted a negative semantic space, illustrated
by the way in which women are often referred
to when they occupy a role traditionally the
preserve of men. Suzanne Romaine in Language
and Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics