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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 61
public consideration of only those issues which are comparatively innocuous to
A’ (Bachrach and Baratz, 1970, p. 7),—a modest way of putting the ideological
question. Lukes puts this twodimensional model even more clearly when he
refers to that power exercised ‘by influencing, shaping and determining [an
individual’s] very wants’ (Lukes, 1975, p. 16). In fact, this is a very different
order of question altogether—a three-dimensional model, which has thoroughly
broken with the behaviourist and pluralist assumptions. It is the power which
arises from ‘shaping perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that
they [i.e. social agents] accept their role in the existing order of things, either
because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as
natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained or
beneficial’ (Lukes, 1975, p. 24). This is an ‘ideological’ model of power, by
whatever other name it is called. The move from the pluralist to the critical model
of media research centrally involved a shift from a one-to the two-and three-
dimensional models of power in modern societies. From the viewpoint of the
media, what was at issue was no longer specific message-injunctions, by A to B,
to do this or that, but a shaping of the whole ideological environment: a way of
representing the order of things which endowed its limiting perspectives with that
natural or divine inevitability which makes them appear universal, natural and
coterminous with ‘reality’ itself. This movement—towards the winning of a
universal validity and legitimacy for accounts of the world which are partial and
particular, and towards the grounding of these particular constructions in the
taken-for-grantedness of ‘the real’—is indeed the characteristic and defining
mechanism of ‘the ideological’.

THE CRITICAL PARADIGM

It is around the rediscovery of the ideological dimension that the critical
paradigm in media studies turned. Two aspects were involved: each is dealt with
separately below. How does the ideological process work and what are its
mechanisms? How is ‘the ideological’ to be conceived in relation to other
practices within a social formation? The debate developed on both these fronts,
simultaneously. The first, which concerned the production and transformation of
ideological discourses, was powerfully shaped by theories concerning the
symbolic and linguistic character of ideological discourses—the notion that the
elaboration of ideology found in language (broadly conceived) its proper and
privileged sphere of articulation. The second, which concerned how to
conceptualize the ideological instance within a social formation, also became the
site of an extensive theoretical and empirical development.
In our discussion of these two supporting elements of the critical paradigm, I
shall not be concerned with identifying in detail the specific theoretical inputs of
particular disciplines—linguistics, phenomenology, semiotics, psychoanalysis,
for example—nor with the detailed internal arguments between these different
approaches. Nor shall I attempt to offer a strict chronological account of how the