Page 116 - Culture Society and the Media

106 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
‘the “passage” of a crisis from its material base in productive life through to the
complex spheres of the superstructures’ (Gramsci, quoted in Hall, 1978).
Beginning from the orchestration by the media of mugging as a ‘moral panic’,
the writers attempt to establish that the mugging panic represents a movement
from a ‘consensual’ to a more ‘coercive’ management of the class struggle which
in itself stems from the declining international competitiveness of the British
economy following the post-war boom. The analysis suggests that there was a
form of hegemonic equilibrium in the immediate post-war period, the erosion of
which led to attempts to secure ‘consent’ by more coercive although ‘legitimate’
means. The immediate post-war period saw the construction of a consensus as
the condition for the stabilization of capitalism in the circumstances of the Cold
War and this provided a period of extensive hegemony in the 1950s. Economic
decline triggered the disintegration of this ‘miracle of spontaneous consent’ and
there was an attempt to put forward a ‘Labourist’ variant of consent to replace it.
The exhaustion of this form of consent, however, combined with the rise of social
and political conflict, the deepening of the economic crisis and the resumption of
a more explicit class struggle culminated in the ‘exceptional’ form of class
domination in the 1970s through the state (Hall et al, 1978, p. 218). (There is a
further discussion of Policing the Crisis in chapter II, pp. 30–55.)
The media appear to play a particularly important part in this analysis. They
are described as ‘a key terrain where “consent” is won or lost’, ‘a field of
ideological struggle’ (Hall et al., 1978, p. 220). The media are also the focal point
for the authors’ conception of the autonomy of the superstructure for, while
rejecting the idea of a ‘set of monolithic interpretations systematically generated
by the ruling class for the explicit purpose of fooling the public’, Policing the
Crisis does contend that the media serve to reproduce—although through their
own ‘constructions and inflections’—‘the interpretations of the crisis subscribed
to by the rulingclass alliance’ (Hall et al., 1978, p. 220). The crisis has its basis in
changes in the economy. Although avoiding a heavily determinist stance and
relying more on a culturalist view of determination, Policing the Crisis retains a
hierarchy of determinations, while at the same time seeking to establish the
specificity and relative autonomy of the media signification system.
The key to the media’s involvement in the construction of consent lies in the
authors’ analysis of news as performing a crucial transformative but secondary
role in defining social events. The primary definers are those to whom the media
turn, their accredited sources in government and other institutions. Although
Policing the Crisis emphasizes the transformative nature of media news-
reporting in the selection and inflection of items and topics, the conception of the
media role is one of ‘structured subordination’ to the primary definers. Further
the ‘creative’ media role serves to reinforce a consensual viewpoint by using public
idioms and by claiming to voice public opinion. Thus in the crisis described the
media have endorsed and enforced primary definitions of industrial militancy,
troublesome youth cultures, mugging, student protest movements as part of a