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112 THE IDEOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF MEDIA MESSAGES

recognizes ideological systems. From this point of view, then, and at this
level of analysis, an ‘ideology’ may be defined as a system of semantic
rules to generate messages. 6

In many ways this perspective coincides with Eco’s. Eco understands ideology to
be the ‘universe of knowledge of the receiver and of the group to which he
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belongs’. He thus makes ideology more or less coterminous with ‘culture in the
anthropological sense’. Before this universe of knowledge is communicated,
semiological analysis will not be able to detect it; it will therefore be necessary
for it first to be ‘reduced to a system of communicative conventions’. ‘However,
to achieve this, it is necessary that the system of knowledge becomes a system of
signs: the ideology is recognizable when, once socialized, it becomes a code.’ 8
From this observation Veron develops his argument:

Ideology is not a particular type of message, or a class of social discourses,
but it is one of the many levels of organization of the messages, from the
point of view of its semantic properties. Ideology is therefore a level of
signification which can be present in any type of message, even in the
scientific discourse. Any material of social communication is susceptible to
an ideological reading. 9

For Veron this ideological reading ‘consists in the discovery of the implicit or
nonmanifest organization of the message’. For the analysis of this latent
organization it would be necessary to study the mechanisms of that organization
—that is, the rules of selection and combination. ‘From this perspective we can
define ideology…as a system of semantic rules which express a certain level of
organization of messages.’ It would be only through the disentangling of these
semantic rules that we can get to the core of a message. However, in the analysis
of the ideological meanings the ‘core’ does not refer only to the content of the
message or its ‘non-manifest organization’. When a message is emitted it is not
only what is said that has a significance but also the way it is said, and what is
not said but could be said. The significations in a message are established by
means of a code, and it is this code which permits the message to be organized
(permits, that is, the selections and combination of the signs which actually
constitute the message). The coding and decoding of a message implies the usage
of the same code; that is, in cases where a message is organized and emitted in
one code to a group which receives it and decodes it using a different code, the
meaning of the message will differ completely. This is what Eco calls ‘aberrant
decoding’. These assertions refer to the denotative meanings which are the ones
that are defined by the code most widely in use, while the connotative meanings
are given by sub-codes or lexicons, limited to certain groups and not to others.
Barthes, in Elements of Semiology, referring to Hjelmslev, observes that
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signification consists of a plane of expression (also called ‘signifier’) and a plane
of content (or ‘signified’), and that the signification is the relation of the two