Page 311 - Culture Society and the Media

MEDIA, ‘REALITY’, SIGNIFICATION 301
unsatisfactory coupling that the study seeks to effect between a wide range of
extraordinarily diverse bodies of theory. Policing the Crisis is, indeed, extremely
confusing in this respect and, at times, has the appearance of a huge melting-pot
into which virtually every available tradition of analysis has been poured with
insufficient attention being paid to the problems involved in thus combining
them. This constant elision of theoretical difficulties results in the often
superficial and misleading grafting of one tradition of analysis on to another in
what can only be regarded as an overhasty quest for synthesis. It is thus
noticeable that, although the stress that is placed on the articulating role of the
ideology of law and order is ultimately derived from the work of Antonio
Gramsci and Ernesto Laclau, the route through which this perspective is reached
is supplied by previous studies of the role played by the media, construed as
definers of social reality, in the orchestration of moral panics. It is in the
disparity between these two perspectives and the languages appropriate to them
that the central tensions of the book are located.

THE IDEOLOGY OF TELEVISION NEWS

The fourth and most important filter [Richard Hoggart has argued,
speaking of the processes by which the news is constructed]—since it
partly contains the others—is the cultural air we breathe, the whole
ideological atmosphere of our society, which tells us that some things can
be said and that other had best not be said. It is that whole and almost
unconscious pressure towards implicitly affirming the status quo, towards
confirming ‘the ordinary man’ in his existing attitudes, that atmosphere
which comes from the morning radio news-and-chat programmes as much
as from the whole pattern of reader-visual background-and-words which is
the context of television news. (Glasgow University Media Group, p. X)
The level of analysis which Hoggart introduces here is concerned with the much
less visible ideological pressures which, inherited by reflex from the dominant
political culture and embodied in the codes and conventions of the working
practices of professional journalists, give to the news—the journalistic form in
which the ‘facts’ are said to be represented free from bias or comment—its
distinctive ideological skew. This level is, in many senses, the most important
aspect of the reality-defining practices of the media if only because its
ideological underpinnings are the least visible. We expect the editorial columns
of our daily newspapers to relay certain party lines and may thus interpret what
they have to say with due caution, whilst most readers display a certain degree of
scepticism in relation to media sensationalism. ‘The news’, by contrast, presents
itself and is widely taken to be an impartial record of the key events of the day. It
presents itself as ‘truth’, as raw, unprocessed reality; as the world narrating itself.