Page 79 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

and imperfect democracy typical of even the most advanced
capitalist societies. When society is stratified along class, gender,
ethnic and age lines (to name but four status criteria); when, as
Bobbio notes, levels of education and rates of democratic
participation are substantially lower than the theory of liberal
democracy would seem to demand; and when, as many argue,
political pluralism is limited to deciding how best to administer
free markets, popular 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withdrawn.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 whose
work on US media coverage of the Vietnam War we will return in
Chapter 8, ‘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 hegemony 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
manufacture 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).

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