Page 75 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 65
is, where they are unexpected); where they break the frame of our previous
expectations about the world; where powerful social interests are involved; or
where there are starkly opposing or conflicting interests at play. The power
involved here is an ideological power: the power to signify events in a particular
way.
To give an obvious example: suppose that every industrial dispute could be
signified as a threat to the economic life of the country, and therefore against ‘the
national interest’. Then such significations would construct or define issues of
economic and industrial conflict in terms which would consistently favour
current economic strategies, supporting anything which maintains the continuity
of production, whilst stigmatizing anything which breaks the continuity of
production, favouring the general interests of employers and shareholders who
have nothing to gain from production being interrupted, lending credence to the
specific policies of governments which seek to curtail the right to strike or to
weaken the bargaining position and political power of the trade unions. (For
purposes of the later argument, note that such significations depend on taking-
for-granted what the national interest is. They are predicated on an assumption
that we all live in a society where the bonds which bind labour and capital together
are stronger, and more legitimate, than the grievances which divide us into
labour versus capital. That is to say, part of the function of a signification of this
kind is to construct a subject to which the discourse applies: e.g. to translate a
discourse whose subject is ‘workers versus employers’ into a discourse whose
subject is the collective ‘we, the people’). That, on the whole, industrial disputes
are indeed so signified is a conclusion strongly supported by the detailed
analyses subsequently provided by, for example, the Glasgow Media Group
research published in Bad News (1976) and More Bad News (1980). Now, of
course, an industrial dispute has no singular, given meaning. It could,
alternatively, be signified as a necessary feature of all capitalist economies, part
of the inalienable right of workers to withdraw their labour, and a necessary
defence of working-class living standards—the very purpose of the trade unions,
for which they have had to fight a long and bitter historic struggle. So, by what
means is the first set of significations recurrently preferred in the ways industrial
disputes are constructed in our society? By what means are the alternative
definitions which we listed excluded? And how do the media, which are
supposed to be impartial, square their production of definitions of industrial
conflict which systematically favour one side in such disputes, with their claims
to report events in a balanced and impartial manner? What emerges powerfully
from this line of argument is that the power to signify is not a neutral force in
society. Significations enter into controversial and conflicting social issues as a
real and positive social force, affecting their outcomes. The signification of
events is part of what has to be struggled over, for it is the means by which
collective social understandings are created—and thus the means by which
consent for particular outcomes can be effectively mobilized. Ideology,
according to this perspective, has not only become a ‘material force’, to use an