Cape Peninsula University of Technology

Topic Essay: Morley and Hall Reception Theory Analysis

Postgraduate Diploma in Media Leadership and Innovation

Market and Audience Studies

Member

Thina Sam

Submission Date: 20 June 2024

As Ann Gray pointed out Morley's Nationwide study sought to combine textual construction
and interpretation, it granted viewers interpretative status and developed ways of conceiving
the audience as socially structured, suggesting that decoding is not homogeneous. Thus, the
text and audience are conceptualized within and as part of the social structure organized in and
across power relations of dominant and subordinate groups, of which the media were seen to
be occupying a crucial position and role. Gray, 1999. Morley suggested that audience research
would be more effective if it was a genre-based hypothesis of interface thus focusing on the
kinds of literary competencies that would be learned as a corollary of social formations. The
analysis of the two distinct types of constraints on meaning production i.e. interior structure of
the text which promotes definite readings and barricades others; and the socioeconomic and
edifying contexts of the viewers which must be explained sociologically. The aim was to
explore the positive parts of televisual texts and their functions surrounded by a fastidious
chronological conjuncture, in exacting institutional spaces, and concerning particular
audiences. The investigation was performed in which different audiences interpreted the
program. Two episodes were shown to about 12-18 groups from diverse social backgrounds
and interviews were conducted with them. The groups were chosen on the base so that they
might be expected to diverge in their decoding from dominant to negotiate to oppositional.
Further Morley analysed the various findings in terms of Hall's typology of decoding and tried
to relate them to the socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds of the viewers. Morley’s research
exposed that there were effects of over fortitude of various social conditions such as class,
gender, race, and age.

The first moment of this communication model involves the practices and technical
infrastructure needed to produce a television program. Each institution will have its
professional values and the people behind the project will be informed by their frameworks of
knowledge and cultural assumptions. For instance, the BBC is a public service broadcaster that
is heavily dependent on license fee money to support its output. Although the corporation is
independent of direct government control, it is regulated by Ofcom and it needs to fulfill certain
obligations, such as sustaining citizenship and civil society and promoting education and
learning. Therefore, its news programs are supposed to offer an unbiased look at the main
stories of the day. The BBC is also the world’s largest national broadcaster with a
huge infrastructure, such as cameras, studio space, lighting rigs, and portable production units
situated across the country. It certainly has the necessary means of production to investigate
the issues and debates hitting the headlines so editorial decisions must be made on which stories
should feature in the news program. The relations of production refer to the different crews
involved in the program. Hall is drawing our attention to how messages are encoded by the
producer, newscaster, content editor, camera operator, and other technicians who help
broadcast the news. According to Hall’s reception theory, the production process will influence
the messages being encoded and the signs used to deliver this information. In terms of
television and photography, the theorist believed the visual and aural codes were iconic signs,
borrowing from Charles Peirce’s definition that this category “possesses some of the properties
of the thing being represented”. To demonstrate this relationship between the signifier and
signified, Hall offered the wonderful example of a dog’s ability to bark loudly on television,
but its inability to bite the audience. For our worked example, consider the following headlines
in response to Donald Trump testing positive for Covid-19 and decide which one comes from
the BBC and which one was posted by Fox News, an institution that firmly supports the
Republican party in America.

Everyone will have their interpretation of a television program because we decode the meaning
through our frameworks of knowledge. Our understanding of the media text is shaped by our
age, social class, ethnicity, geography, and a myriad of other factors. Of course, the wider social
and political context will also influence our reactions. Stuart Hall offered three hypothetical
decoding positions to describe this range of possible interpretations. A couple of examples will
help illustrate the different readings. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse, his
reception theory describes how producers use various signs to encode a program’s meaning,
according to their ideologies and resources, which is then decoded by the viewers, who must
interpret the message through their framework of knowledge.

Encoding and Decoding’ arise primarily from Hall’s reservations about the theories of
communication underpinning mass communications research. Encoding and decoding opens
with an account of the conventional model of communication to be found within mass
communications research. This model moves linearly from the ‘sender’ through the ‘message’
to the ‘receiver’. According to this model, the sender creates the message and fixes its meaning,
which is then communicated directly and transparently to the recipient. For Hall, this
communication process is too neat: The only distortion in it is that the receiver might not be up
to the business of getting the message he or she ought to get RED: 253. As we will see, Hall is
especially interested in the way different audiences generate rather than discover meaning.
Hall’s essay challenges all three components of the mass communications model, arguing that
meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender; the message is never transparent; and
the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning. Just because a documentary on asylum
seekers aims to provide a sympathetic account of their plight, does not guarantee its audience
will view them sympathetically. For all its ‘realism’ and emphasis on ‘the facts’, the
documentary form still must communicate through a sign system (the aural-visual signs of TV)
that both distorts the intentions of producers and evokes contradictory feelings in the audience.
Distortion is built into the system here, rather than being a ‘failure’ of the producer or viewer.
There is a ‘lack of fit’ Hall suggests ‘between the two sides in the communicative exchange’
E/D: 131, between the moment of the production of the message (‘encoding’) and the moment
of its reception (‘decoding’). This ‘lack of fit’ is crucial to Hall’s argument. It occurs because
communication has no choice but to take place within sign systems. We communicate via
narrative- we must narrativize history to make sense of it. Meaning that certain agreed-upon
codes must be inserted to make it comprehensible. In forming that narrative, we use dominant
codes. Thus, the form the message takes or the dominant mode it is in is not something we can
just ignore or a random moment. Production is predominant because it is the point of departure.
However, encoding must yield to decoding. Messages must pass through rules of language and
societal-institutional relations for the product or intended message to be realized. The first
position that he discusses is the dominant hegemonic code. This code or position is one where
the consumer takes the actual meaning directly and decodes it exactly the way it was encoded.
The dominant code involves taking the meaning of a message in the exact way a sender
intended a message to be interpreted (decoded).

This position is a mixture of accepting and rejecting elements. Readers acknowledge the
dominant message but are unwilling to completely accept the message the way the encoder
intended. To a certain extent, the reader shares the text's code and generally accepts the
preferred meaning, but simultaneously resists and modifies it in a way that reflects their own
experiences and interests. Where a viewer can understand the literal (denotative) and
connotative meanings of a message while decoding a message in a contrary way. This means
that a person recognizes that their meaning is not the dominant meaning, or what was intended,
but alters the message in their mind to fit an "alternative framework of reference Thus, readers'
or viewers' social situation has placed them in a directly oppositional relationship to the
dominant code, and although they understand the intended meaning they do not share the text's
code and end up rejecting it.

Dominant or hegemonic reading: The viewer accepts the programmed code, its meaning,
ethics, philosophy, and assumptions and accepts the programmed as ‘preferred reading'.
Negotiated reading: Here the viewer partly shares the programmed code and generally accepts
the favoured reading. But at the same time, having accepted the reading, modifications are
done. Oppositional or counter-hegemonic reading: Here we find total rejection with the
programmed code as well as rejection with the preferred reading as well. This results in an
exchange frame of construal. Morley found, for instance, that bank managers occasionally
remarked on the actual content of the program. It looked as though they possessed the
commonsense scaffold of supercilious within which Nationwide operated. While for the other
groups, the aspects of the program were much more prominent. The group of management
trainees saw the program on trade unions as being biased towards the unions, while on the other
hand, a group viewed the same item on trade as rabidly anti-union. University art students were
conscious of the methods deployed by the program unit in constructing the discourse of
Nationwide. The group of apprentices showed cynicism and alienation thus rejecting the whole
system but agreeing with the assumptions made by the program unit.
References

1. Encoding and decoding in the television discourse (bham.ac.uk) University of Deicester

September 1973 date accessed (12 June 2024)
2. Stuart Hall's Reception Theory | Encoding and Decoding the Media (media-
studies.com) date accessed (10 June 2024)
3. Peter Cardon, October 2008, A critique of Halls contexting Model A Meta- Analysis of
Literature on intercultural and Technical communications, date accessed ( 16 June
2024)
4. Nasrullah Mambrol November 7, 2020, Analysis of Stuart Hall, date accessed ( 19 June
2024)
5. Hall and Morley Reading Slides by Dr Mvuzo ( 7 June 2024)