follow from a specific encoded message. As audiences, we tend to take what we want
from the media text and ignore everything else. We “misread” it. We create meanings
that producers might never have intended. For example, soap operas and romance nov-
els are formulas often said to reproduce gender stereotypes that are oppressive to
women. Yet scholars such as Radway (1984) and Ang and Hermes (1991) have found
that women audiences read and use these media in a variety of independent and self-
affirming ways. The writer of the classic television comedy M*A*S*H,Larry Gelbart,
left his own hit show after only a few seasons because the message he thought he had
encoded was not what audiences decoded when they watched. A chronicle of the daily
life of a surgical unit during the Korean War, Gelbart wanted the show’s message to be
that war was futile. But fans kept writing to say the show made war look like fun and
that they couldn’t wait to sign up for the army. Gelbart’s content intentions were defeated
by his active viewing audiences.
Multicultural and global viewers of mainstream media can be particularly active
audiences. Katz and Liebes (1990) studied international audiences for the hit Amer-
ican prime-time drama Dallasand discovered that groups from different cultural back-
grounds produced a variety of different ways of relating to the series and retelling
stories from it. They may find their own ways into media texts that would seem to
marginalize them. Gillespie (1995) found young Punjabis living in London who
watched Australian soap operas; they identified with personal and familial struggles
and used them to explore and resolve related tensions in their own lives and commu-
nities. Shively (1992) found that Native American viewers of classic John Wayne west-
erns identified not with the “Red Indian” characters, but with Wayne, because it was
he who represented preservation of autonomy. Gay men and lesbians tend to be par-
ticularly skilled at taking and making their own messages from mainstream media,
probably as a result of the pervasiveness of heterosexual norms in media messages
(see Eldridge, Kitzinger, and Williams, 1997).Multicultural Voices
The Mohawk, one of the “Five Civilized Tribes,” once occupied a huge area of
Quebec, Ontario, and New York. Today there are only about 3,000 speakers of
Mohawk left, mostly older people. Children are rapidly losing sight of their ethnic iden-
tity because Native Americans are invisible in the mass media of the United States and
Canada. So what did the tribal elders do? They started a website where you can learn
some common Mohawk words and phrases, listen to traditional songs, learn about
tribal traditions, and order many different CDs not avail-
able on amazon.com: Music from Turtle Island, Yazzie Girl.
Gay adolescents used to be stuck in limbo. They rarely
knew any other gay people, teenagers or adults. Their
teachers and parents assumed that everyone in the world
was straight. No organizations existed in their small
towns, or they were afraid to contact them. So while their
friends were happily planning dates and proms, they were
doomed to years of loneliness and silence. Not anymore.
An Internet search for “LGBT youth” yields hundreds
of websites: Gay Youth UK, OutProud, the Gay Youth
Corner, Toronto Coalition for LGBT Youth. Then there is
XY,a glossy magazine with articles on sports, fashion,
music, and celebrities.
Thus, mass media can be more democratic, spreading
ownership and consumption of media to more and more600 CHAPTER 18MASS MEDIAMass media can allow access
to more and more people and
enable previously voiceless
minorities access to connec-
tion and visibility. Univision,
the leading Spanish-language
media conglomerate in the
United States, creates its
audience as it caters to it. n