Page 93 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 83
of the majority can be so shaped that it squares with the will of the powerful,
then particular (class) interests can be represented as identical with the consensus
will of the people. This, however, requires the shaping, the education and
tutoring of consent: it also involves all those processes of representation which we
outlined earlier.
Now consider the media—the means of representation. To be impartial and
independent in their daily operations, they cannot be seen to take directives from
the powerful, or consciously to be bending their accounts of the world to square
with dominant definitions. But they must be sensitive to, and can only survive
legitimately by operating within, the general boundaries or framework of ‘what
everyone agrees’ to: the consensus. When the late Director General of the BBC,
Sir Charles Curran remarked that ‘the BBC could not exist outside the terms of
parliamentary democracy’, what he was pointing to was the fact that
broadcasting, like every other institution of state in Britain, must subscribe to the
fundamental form of political regime of the society, since it is the foundation of
society itself and has been legitimated by the will of the majority. Indeed, the
independence and impartiality on which broadcasters pride themselves depends
on this broader coincidence between the formal protocols of broadcasting and the
form of state and political system which licenses them. But, in orienting
themselves in ‘the consensus’ and, at the same time, attempting to shape up the
consensus, operating on it in a formative fashion, the media become part and
parcel of that dialectical process of the ‘production of consent’—shaping the
consensus while reflecting it—which orientates them within the field of force of
the dominant social interests represented within the state.
Notice that we have said ‘the state’, not particular political parties or economic
interests. The media, in dealing with contentious public or political issues, would
be rightly held to be partisan if they systematically adopted the point of view of a
particular political party or of a particular section of capitalist interests. It is only
in so far as (a) these parties or interests have acquired legitimate ascendancy in
the state, and (b) that ascendancy has been legitimately secured through the
formal exercise of the ‘will of the majority’ that their strategies can be
represented as coincident with the ‘national interest’—and therefore form the
legitimate basis or framework which the media can assume. The ‘impartiality’ of
the media thus requires the mediation of the state—that set of processes through
which particular interests become generalized, and, having secured the consent
of ‘the nation’, carry the stamp of legitimacy. In this way a particular interest is
represented as ‘the general interest’ and ‘the general interest as “ruling”’. This is
an important point, since some critics have read the argument that the operations
of the media depend on the mediation of the state in too literal a way—as if it were
merely a matter of whether the institution is state-controlled or not. The argument
is then said to ‘work better for the BBC than for ITV’. But it should be clear that
the connections which make the operations of the media in political matters
legitimate and ‘impartial’ are not institutional matters, but a wider question of
the role of the State in the mediation of social conflicts. It is at this level that the