Page 78 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 57

THE POLITICAL MEDIA
consent is perpetually at risk of being withdrawn. Thus, it has to be
constantly worked for by those who currently constitute the ruling elite of a
society.
When elites were successful in mobilising consent, Gramsci referred to
their hegemonic position, by which he meant that there was no need to
protect the social structure by coercion and force of arms, but that citizens
consented to the system and their place within it. The maintenance of
hegemony was, he argued, a cultural process, in which the media played a
great role. For Daniel Hallin, ‘to say the media play a “hegemonic” role is
to say that they contribute to the maintenance of consent for a system of
power’ (1987, p. 18).
The emphasis here is not on the media’s support for a particular political
party (bias or partisanship in the narrow sense) but the part they play in
reinforcing and reproducing a generalised popular consensus about the
inherent viability of the system as a whole. Gwynn Williams defines hege-
mony as

an order in which a certain way of life and thought is dominant, in
which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society in all its
institutional and private manifestations, informing with its spirit all
taste, morality, customs, religious and political, and all social
relations, particularly in their intellectual and moral connotations.
(Quoted in Miliband, 1973, p. 162)

Ericson et al. suggest that ‘hegemony addresses how superordinates manu-
facture and sustain support for their dominance over subordinates through
dissemination and reproduction of knowledge that favours their interests,
and how subordinates alternatively accept or contest their knowledge’
(1991, p. 12). For these writers, ‘journalists and their news organisations are
key players in hegemonic processes. They do not simply report events, but
participate in them and act as protagonists’ (ibid., p. 16).
The media’s ‘hegemonic’ role, as defined here, may of course be viewed as
wholly benign, if one chooses to accept the self-legitimating ideology of
capitalist societies. From such a perspective (what some would call the
dominant ideological perspective) the media provide the social structure with
an outlet for the expression of shared values (as well as the political functions
of rational information discussed earlier). If, however, one objects to the
system, or parts of it, the hegemonic role of cultural institutions such as the
media is viewed negatively. For Ralph Miliband the media ‘in all capitalist
societies have been consistently and predominantly agencies of conservative
indoctrination’ (1973, p. 200).
How is this agency realised? The broadcasters’ concept of impartiality,
for example, works to contain political debate within a more or less tightly
drawn consensus, which admits only an established political class and often

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