Page 58 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

42 Ideologies

Ideology also refers to mistaken cognition that helps secure the subor-
dination of poor people to a wealthy and politically powerful economic
elite. The elite, as part of their economic power, control the mechanisms
of cultural production such as television and newspapers that provide the

filters and frames through which many people view the world. The owners
of the filters control what will be seen or how reality will be perceived. This

sense of the word ideology places more emphasis on the way poor people
who often lack training in critical - thinking skills as a result of underfunded
education are led to perceive the world in ways that go against their own
economic interests and serve the interests of those with wealth and power
in a society. During the 2008 presidential election campaign in the US, for
example, it was noteworthy that poor uneducated voters had their thinking
easily changed by rumors and advertisements that were clearly false (asser-
tions that Barack Obama was a Muslim) or that sought to distract attention
from issues dangerous to the agenda of the wealthy (the persistence of
extreme economic inequality, for example) by labeling any discussion of
such issues as socialism . The ideological discourse also shifted attention to
pre - rational issues such as “ blood - lines. ” At the same time, CNN, a network
that generally fosters ideology rather than critical - thinking skills, sought to
convince its audience that immigrants were the cause of the economic crisis
facing the country – not extreme economic inequality or an unregulated
fi nancial sector. By picturing the world in a certain way for audiences, the
culture industries shape what will and what will not be seen. They construct
reality for their consumers, and that picture of reality is usually inaccurate.
It treats essential structural problems such as economic inequality as acci-
dental side effects of otherwise rational social, economic, and political
processes.
Cultural ideas are clearly not just ideas. They have force, and they can
change how we think about the world. Our ideas are not all our own. We
learn ideas in school, from our family culture, from our peers, from books
that we read, and from the media. Culture courses through our brains as
the ideas that flash upon he screens of our consciousness. Some of those

thoughts we fabricate ourselves, but some of them follow forms and
formats given to us by our culture. Those ideas can color how we perceive
the world. It has become almost routine in the US, for example, for Arab
and terrorist to be joined in the popular imagination. Seldom do Americans
see in the media fully rounded characters of Arab descent who are not
portrayed as dangers. Too, because of a successful cultural campaign by

those who benefit from strict free market capitalism over the past several