Page 72 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Paradigms of media power 51

Postmodernism is a reaction against the notion that there are underlying
rationalities that order social relationships and which can be identified and
regarded as truths (Balnaves et al. 2009: 101). Foucault’s analysis of power
emphasises multiple forms and modalities of power maintained through discursive
practices. In contrast to theories of power as an inherently repressive force, Foucault
conceives power as productive and constitutive. One consequence of this is that
emancipation can shift from tackling inequality to epistemic struggles over
meaning. Such a move connects with broader shifts from class conflict politics
towards more plural, identity-based struggles over incorporation/marginality/
dissent. There is no singular politics or political orientation in postmodernism.
However, influential versions offered an analysis that was congruent with liberal
pluralism, marking a ‘revival of pluralism in a new form’ (Curran 2002: 141).
For Baudrillard, postmodern societies generate simulations, where signs refer to
themselves and not representations (where signs are taken as referring to external
reality). Everything has become hyper-real where the real is irretrievable.
According to this approach, cherished liberal readings of media are demolished.
But so too are any radical emancipatory claims.

News and news sources
A critic of the PM as ‘unidirectional’ is Daniel Hallin. Influenced by Gramsci,
Hallin adopted a modified account of elite domination. For Hallin (1994: 12)
‘cultural institutions like the media are part of a process by which a world-view
compatible with the existing structure of power in society is reproduced, a process
which is decentralized, open to contradiction and conflict, but generally very
effective’. In his classic study The Uncensored War (1986), Hallin found that critical
news media coverage occurred only after sections of the Washington political
elite had turned against the Vietnam war. Change in media coverage ‘seems best
explained as a reflection of and response to a collapse of consensus – especially
of elite consensus – on foreign policy’ (Hallin 1994: 53). Hallin put forward a model
of overlapping spheres of media discourse: consensus, legitimate controversy and
deviance. Media will often promote (elite) values and institutions but beyond this
sphere of consensus is a sphere of legitimate controversy. This broadly corre-
sponds to the bounded debate that the PM critiques, while a further sphere of
deviance corresponds with communications outside mainstream media/politics
that are excluded or denigrated. Hallin’s model identifies gradations in each
sphere and some dynamic movement of actors, institutions and the framing of
topics between them. It also encourages focus on instances of change, crisis and
the management and communication of dissent.
Gramsci also influenced a British alternative to the propaganda model by
Stuart Hall et al. in Policing the Crisis (1978), which focused on processes by which
consent was achieved and contested (see Hesmondhalgh 2006). The book
advanced an influential theory of media–source relations in an avowed ‘structural–
culturalist’ approach. Journalists operating within a professional framework of