Media studies: it's tough!

Degrees in this subject have been derided as an easy option. Not any more, says Nicholas Pyke

There can be few degree subjects that are so frequently seen in the academic pillory. Want to make a cheap point? Reach for media studies. A dimwitted subject for dimwitted undergraduates? That would be media studies. No one, commentator or comedian, seems immune from the temptation to scoff. So overwhelming is the consensus that the subject is unworthy - a sign of intellectual decline, even - that only a defence by an institution of unimpeachable seriousness could turn back the tide of derision. And this is what the London School of Economics and Political Science has chosen to do, decisively.

Not only has it set up an MSc in Media Studies and Communication, but it has also just established an entire department to look after the masters students and a burgeoning number of PhDs in the field. No other top-flight college or university has anything similar so, for the moment, the LSE is setting the rules. And rule number one, it appears, is that media studies is not a suitable subject for undergraduates. In fact, Robin Mansell, professor of new media and the head of the course (or "convenor" as the LSE likes to describe it), feels that the ubiquitous presence of media studies at first-degree level might well be responsible for its poor reputation - a reputation she is determined to rescue.

Even informed opinion believes that media studies constitute a bit of popular psychology, a dose of half-baked sociology and many hours in front of the flickering screen - both telly and net. The MSc at the LSE is somewhat different. It takes a serious look, for example, at the world of regulation. It looks at means and methods of production. Globalisation is an important theme, embracing the reconstruction of eastern Europe and the means of mass communication in the Third World. It is highbrow stuff and its graduates have gone on to high-powered jobs in government and TV.

The MSc has been going for eight years, but Professor Mansell arrived from the University of Sussex a year ago to work on setting up the new department. Her area of expertise - the growth and regulation of telecommunications - is significant because it marks an immediate departure from the standard undergraduate approach to the subject, which, she says, is often dominated by cultural studies and content analysis to the exclusion of much else. The LSE, on the other hand, covers analysis of the industry, of production and patterns of consumption. "What we emphasise," she says, "is critical reflection on why the media and communications systems are the way they are."

The department offers a range of specialist MScs alongside the main qualification in media and communications. You can focus on global media, regulation and policy, communications policy, gender in the media, or the new media and society. The course in new media promises to draw on "disciplinary expertise in sociology, social psychology, information systems and institutional analysis".

The MSc concentrating on regulation claims to raise issues "inseparable from the forces of globalisation and market growth. Regulation and policy raises challenging questions, not only about their merits, but also about the purposes of government, the economy and society."

The MSc in gender offers a "rigorous training in theories and issues at a crucial interface in the social scientific analysis of culture and communication. You will examine such questions as how representations in the media reinforce or subvert social roles and ideologies... and how the sexual division of labour impacts on working environments in the different media, and influences content."

The department's eight staff look after 120 masters students and 32 working for doctorates at the Houghton Street headquarters. The fee for a 12-month course is about £11,000. "Why should anyone in the UK choose media and communications studies as compared with any other traditional discipline?" asks Professor Mansell. Her answer is straightforward: the subject confronts many of the hottest topics head on, from democracy, civic dialogue and the public service ethos, to regulation and ethics, globalisation, and literacy in its broader sense. The "digital divide", for example, is less about access to hardware, and more about the confidence and know-how to use it - or ignore it - as suits.

There is no escaping the traditional outlets for information. No media course can avoid television or print. The point about the LSE's course, however, is that you also get a chance to look at the spread of news and information in remote Third World communities - Bangladesh, for example, where there are few laptops and "broadband" is unheard of. The people there do, however, have tape recorders, so villagers will carry cassette recordings many miles to play to friends and wider communities. Professor Mansell has made a study of this phenomenon. The course also takes an interest in alternative media in the seemingly saturated countries of western Europe.

"Nothing is said about the media and the process of globalisation," she explains. "It is almost always described as the result of free market, corporate expansion. Yet there may be more to it than that, and without considering what information other societies are getting, and how they treat it, conclusions are hard to reach."

The viability of the information systems themselves is another topic that fits easily into the LSE's "big bag" approach. So, for example, Professor Mansell has been asked to help analyse how effective or otherwise the systems used by London's emergency health-care services are.

She says that part of the subject's poor reputation can be blamed on misleading claims about what it actually is. "There's been some attempt to claim media and communications as a discipline," she says, with the result that the subject can seem more flaky than it really is.

"I don't think it's a discipline. Media and communication studies is a field of enquiry. It draws on other disciplines and where it does so it can be a really fascinating field of enquiry. Where it's taught at the undergraduate level it can be difficult.People have looked at so-called media studies and seen that they are only about broadcasting, only about the papers, that's a reason to poke fun at them."

Anyone who is interested in applying should ring Graduate Admissions on 020-7955 7160 or go to www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/HowToApply.htm