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126 ENCODING/DECODING

operating inside the dominant code. This is the ideal-typical case of ‘perfectly
transparent communication’—or as close as we are likely to come to it ‘for all
practical purposes’. Within this we can distinguish the positions produced by the
professional code. This is the position (produced by what we perhaps ought to
identify as the operation of a ‘metacode’) which the professional broadcasters
assume when encoding a message which has already been signified in a
hegemonic manner. The professional code is ‘relatively independent’ of the
dominant code, in that it applies criteria and transformational operations of its
own, especially those of a technico-practical nature. The professional code,
however, operates within the ‘hegemony’ of the dominant code. Indeed, it serves
to reproduce the dominant definitions precisely by bracketing their hegemonic
quality and operating instead with displaced professional codings which
foreground such apparently neutral-technical questions as visual quality, news
and presentational values, televisual quality, ‘professionalism’ and so on. The
hegemonic interpretations of, say, the politics of Northern Ireland, or the Chilean
coup or the Industrial Relations Bill are principally generated by political and
military elites: the particular choice of presentational occasions and formats, the
selection of personnel, the choice of images, the staging of debates are selected
and combined through the operation of the professional code. How the
broadcasting professionals are able both to operate with ‘relatively autonomous’
codes of their own and to act in such a way as to reproduce (not without
contradiction) the hegemonic signification of events is a complex matter which
cannot be further spelled out here. It must suffice to say that the professionals are
linked with the defining elites not only by the institutional position of
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broadcasting itself as an ‘ideological apparatus’, but also by the structure of
access (that is, the systematic ‘over-accessing’ of selective elite personnel and
their ‘definition of the situation’ in television). It may even be said that the
professional codes serve to reproduce hegemonic definitions specifically by not
overtly biasing their operations in a dominant direction: ideological reproduction
therefore takes place here inadvertently, unconsciously, ‘behind men’s backs’. 16
Of course, conflicts, contradictions and even misunderstandings regularly arise
between the dominant and the professional significations and their signifying
agencies.
The second position we would identify is that of the negotiated code or
position. Majority audiences probably understand quite adequately what has been
dominantly defined and professionally signified. The dominant definitions,
however, are hegemonic precisely because they represent definitions of
situations and events which are ‘in dominance’, (global). Dominant definitions
connect events, implicitly or explicitly, to grand totalizations, to the great
syntagmatic views-of-the-world: they take ‘large views’ of issues: they relate
events to the ‘national interest’ or to the level of geo-politics, even if they make
these connections in truncated, inverted or mystified ways. The definition of a
hegemonic viewpoint is (a) that it defines within its terms the mental horizon, the
universe, of possible meanings, of a whole sector of relations in a society or