ABSTRACT

Audience study in the late 1980s was fraught with both a sense of mission and a sense that no one had yet got it right. Its sense of mission had to do with the proliferation of work about the audience across various fields and disciplines. The sense that no one had got it right, however, was just as much the result of its dispersal. Qualitative research cultivated a dialogue with critical studies in the humanities. But there remained strong perceptual differences between these fields about each other. The proliferation during the 1980s of critical studies about television could be seen as one consequence of a cross-disciplinary awareness by some in mass communication research and the humanities - though one could argue whether television criticism bridged or exacerbated their disciplinary differences. The tale of television studies during the 1980s was intertwined with the growing impact and tenuous status of "cultural studies".