This article examines a selected body of knowledge concerned with issues of how media texts influence their audiences and of how audiences read media texts. It draws on Kuhn's concept of paradigm to structure the analysis of a number of different theoretical perspectives, articulations of key research problems and modes of inquiry that have been most influential in media and cultural studies since the 1930s. The analysis suggests that this relatively diverse research history can be thought of as series of shifts between two major paradigmatic positions: one that is organised around the idea of definitional power of the text, and the other that is essentially concerned with aspects of reading practices. The article concludes by evaluating the explanatory power of some major conceptual constructs produced by these paradigms in an attempt to propose a theoretical framework (inspired by Foucault's understanding of power and social technology) that would account for a much grater interdependence of the factors operating within the text-audience relationship.