Page 83 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF MEDIATION

change. As we noted in Chapter 2, democratic politics are founded
on the existence of agreed rules and procedures for running the
political process. There must be consent from the governed, and
political power must have authority in the eyes of those over whom
it is wielded. An influential strand in twentieth-century political
sociology, originating with Italian Marxist intellectual Antonio
Gramsci in the 1920s, has been concerned with how this consent
and authority can be mobilised, in the conditions of social
inequality 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markets, popular consent is perpetually at risk of being withdrawn.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)

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