Critical media production research is much needed and can benefit society as well as the media industries themselves. But critical production researchers face many barriers and constraints. This chapter discusses practical concerns for undertaking media production research, focusing on the most problematic areas: resources, access, and field relations.

Introduction

Media production research investigates how the organizations and individuals who create our media content operate. It explores the everyday conditions and processes of how media texts come into being and aims to understand how and why media texts take their particular form. This is a notoriously opaque, not to say secretive, subject creating specific challenges for researchers studying media production. Most of the publicly available knowledge about how media are made, stems from information that media institutions publish themselves. In his investigation of the American film and television industry, Caldwell (2008) draws attention to the self-reflexive nature of these industries and the way they expose their production processes. Yet, in most cases, this builds a carefully constructed promotional image rather than exposing problems that could explain critical issues in media representation.

Academically, media production research is now an established field of research, with its own conferences, anthologies, and institutional research groups (Paterson et al., 2016a), alongside numerous methodological reflections on doing research (e.g. Havens et al., 2009; Paterson et al., 2016b). Rather than revisiting this ground, our focus in this chapter is on the challenge of normativity in media research: considering this issue from a historical, political, and methodological perspective. By this, we mean approaches to media production that have a distinctive ethical and moral orientation towards the object of study, rather than neutral, descriptive, or administrative approaches. We focus on the normative in media production studies because not only is the challenge of taking such an approach a relatively undiscussed issue, but also because of the growing political and social necessity for theoretically rigorous, normative approaches to social research.