Western
significant others. See also topic guide
under communication models.
Western Hollywood’s most popularly successful
transformation of the past into myth, with the
enshrining of heroic values: self-help, individu-
alism, the legitimization of violence in the name
of timeless (though rarely analysed) notions of
Law and Order, and of human rights equated
with access to and possession of the earth. Th e
Western has held a fi rm grip on the imagination
of every generation of film-goer since 1903,
when Edwin S. Porter’s Th e Great Train Robbery
set the genre off at a brisk gallop.
Much of the fascination in studying the genre
of the Western lies in relating its ideological
shifts to cultural and political changes taking
place in America. Several commentators see the
Western as a metaphor for American values, or
‘Americanness’: confi gurations of the lone hero,
the community threatened by lawlessness, the
appeal of the frontier and the sense of old values
and lifestyles being overtaken by the urban
and the corporate, continue to prompt serious
research and analysis. Writing in Westerns:
Aspects of Movie Genre (Secker & Warburg,
1973), Philip French says of the Western that it
is it is among the most didactic of fi lm genres;
as he memorably puts it, ‘For every Showdown
at Wichita there’s a little teach-in in Dodge City.’
Westernization of Media Studies See media
studies: the internationalization of
media studies.
★Westerstähl and Johansson’s model of
news factors in foreign news, 1994 A useful
complement to galtung and ruge’s model of
selective gatekeeping, 1965 and the rogers
and dearing’s agenda-setting model, 1987,
this model is featured in an article, ‘Foreignfunctions – the process of deciding what and
how to communicate.
Newcomb’s model represented chiefl y inter-
personal communication; it was a triangular
formation, with A, B and X interacting equilater-
ally. Wesley and MacLean indicate that the mass
media process crucially shifts the balance, bring-
ing A (in this case the would-be communicator)
and C (the mass communication organization
and its agents who control the channel) closer
together. C is both channel and mediator of A’s
transmission of X to B (now classifi able as audi-
ence), and B’s contact with X is more remote
than in the Newcomb model, if it exists at all
save through the combined ‘processing’ of AC.
feedback is represented by f.
It can be seen from the model that X need not
go through to B via A and C but can go via C
alone. Th e role of C as intermediary has a dual
character, purposive when the process involves
conveying a message through C from an ‘advo-
cate’, a politician for example, and non-purposive
when it is a matter of conveying the unplanned
events of the world to an audience.
Th e main thrust of the model appears to be
emphasizing the dependency of B upon A and C.
What is missing from the model, and what later
thinking about mass media processes insists
upon, are the numerous message sources and
infl uences that work upon B other than AC, and
counter-balance the infl uence of AC – family,
friends, members of peer groups, workmates,
colleagues, or wider infl uences such as school,
church, trade unions, etc. An interesting analyti-
cal variant would be to ‘splice’ C into two parts,
one traditional mass communication, the other,
the internet. See intervening variables
(ivs); networking: social networking;Wesley and MacLean’s model of communication, 1957