Jalbert, Paul L. (Ed.). Media Studies: Ethnomethodological Approaches.

McAnany, Emile G.

Jalbert, Paul L. (Ed.). Media Studies: Ethnomethodological Approaches. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 1999 Pp. xx, 284. ISBN 0-7618-1286-5 (hb.) $57.00; 0-7618-1287-3 (pb.) $38.50.

The first chapter of this collection seeks to distinguish ethnomethodology from media sociology or from sociology in general. It spends a good deal of time dissecting David Morley's well known Nationwide study in order to make the point. At the end of a somewhat repetitious chapter, the authors manage to put the distinction succinctly: "Sociologists and ethnomethodologists both address themselves to 'social structures' yet each conceives of them very differently. The difference can be seen as one of description (ethnomethodology) versus explanation (sociology)" (p. 29). In short, the specific responses given by media audiences in media studies are taken as explanations of class, power, gender, etc. by media sociologists like Morley but as simple descriptions of how people respond to media texts by ethnomedologists. This does not capture the whole thrust of the book as subsequent chapters make clear, but it is a good beginning.

Paul Jalbert, the editor of this volume, has a chapter that seems to belie the assertion of "ethnomethodological indifference" asserted in the first chapter, i.e., that the communication scholar is committed to analyze texts "without any commitment to their adequacy, correctness, or otherwise" (p. 34). In other words, ethnomethodologists should not be advocates or bring their own biases to their work, yet Jalbert uses his chapter to show that his analysis of the U.S. television treatment of the 1982 Lebanon/Israeli war was not pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel as some of his critics have argued. He contends that he was just being perfectly logical in his analysis of the media texts while one of his critics was reading the same texts in a biased way to show that television treatment was anti-Israel. The argument illustrates how difficult to grasp are some of the distinctions that enthnomethodology makes in applying its approach to media texts. Looking carefully to Jalbert's argument, one finds so many fine distinctions between the validity of his conclusions and the bias of his opponent's that we often lose the thread.

All of the eight chapters, including the first chapter's critical re-examination of Morley's study, contain media texts that are analyzed using ethnomethology's approach to media. To get a better basic grasp of the method, Lynch and Bogen in the first chapter refer back to the origin of the approach by Garfinkel. In the late 1950s Garfinkel was studying jury behavior in sorting out how jurors would go about their work. To his surprise he found that they followed a "common sense" process or method (everyman's approach or "ethno"-methodology) and came up with a method that was useful for handling the carrying out of an ordinary activity. Thus was born the method that was later elaborated into a more scientific version of the everyday activity displayed by the jurors in Garfinkel's study. This book applies the method to the study of media texts that shows a consistency with its origins. Though media study is only a minor topic in a much larger field for ethnomethodology, its analytical approach that eschews explanation and sticks with description fits nicely with media textual analysis. Some examples from other chapters will illustrate both its strengths and weaknesses.

Stetson, using a newspaper story from Japan about a drunk man's death under a train because a woman he was harassing on a loading platform pushed him away, shows how multiple are the categories of people and their relation to each other that a seemingly simple story holds. He points out that for this method, one must look for not only the category but the action that is implied in the social relationships among people. The story goes through a number of sequences as the details are brought out in a subsequent trial of the woman and her eventual acquittal. What one is reminded of by the author is that rules help him do an analysis of the moral action and not a causal explanation of the happenings. Many of the authors in this book are careful to make their analyses on the basis of a variety of axiological rules that look at a given text in order to make clear how the story is told and not what it means or what it says about the actors in the text or the world at large.

The remaining chapters take journalistic practices with sports organizations, ethnographic film making, radio talk show methods of organizing an audience, and a print story of a Montreal massacre to illustrate the variety of ways that ethnomethodology can elucidate a text. But all of these approaches carefully stick to a descriptive analysis of how the texts produce their particular stories. They are not interested in theory that may explain the behavior or event in a larger, sociological or communicative sense, but rather in how the text works. In a few cases, the authors try to show consequences but more in a logical or linguistic sense and not to explain anything about what were the motives for actions of people in the texts nor the meaning that audiences may make.

The last chapter by Bjelic is an interesting contrast in that the author reports about a media encounter he had with a television news story. Here he is able to recount his own actions and motivations, but the analysis has quite another purpose. He is intent to refute the assertion of Baudrillard and later of Virilio that the media has emptied all meaning of what is real or unreal since all has been reduced to a simple simulacrum that has no relation to the real world. He cites Baudrillard's essay that denies that the 1991 Gulf War ever took place. Bjelic gives examples of how television news often uses stock footage to illustrate different stories not at all related to the footage as it was originally intended. This seems to reinforce the Buadrillard assertion that the news is the story that the media or a government or a corporation wants told and is unrelated to the reality of the event on the ground. But the author asserts that even in a seeming stretch of the truth in a news story, there is some relation to the broader reality being reported. He illustrates this by an example of his own media experience: Acting as a translator from Serbian to English for a refugee mother newly arrived from Bosnia with a sick son who was to be given care in a U.S. hospital, the author made up a response for the woman when asked how she felt about her arrival. The woman was simply not willing to say anything so the translator made up an appropriate grateful response. With considerable analysis and quotes from philosophers about translation, he argues that he was telling the truth in the broad context of the given situation and was not creating an empty media simulacrum. What is clear here and elsewhere is that the limits placed on scholars by ethnomethodology often make analysis of media texts contorted or too detailed for readers to come to more common sense conclusions. Even though the approach stemmed from the work of unsophisticated jurors in working out an everyday "folk" method to accomplish a task, the task of analyzing media texts may have become too complex to make sense to the everyday educated readers!

Emile G. McAnany

Santa Clara University