By Wayne Mellinger
Instructor, Antioch University
A “dominant
ideology” is a way of looking at and
understanding the social world that reflects the perspectives of the rich and
powerful. British sociologist John B.
Thompson aptly describes ideology as
“meaning in the service of power.”
Because dominant ideologies are meaning-laden events, social
scientists have developed approaches to studying them that are highly attuned
to the details of discourse and the interpretation of texts—that is, how
ordinary people make sense of these symbolic events in everyday life.
Today media scholars have uncovered four essential ways to research
ideologies-as-texts and how they pervade our background understandings,
practical reasoning and generally accepted truths—“what everybody knows to be
the case”.
First, the political economy of news organizations greatly shapes the
“angle” of news contents. As more and
more media sources become in the hands of fewer and fewer massive corporations
and conglomerates, this has greatly impacted what becomes news and the
perspective taken on recent occurrences. In his 2004 book The New Media Monopoly , UC-Berkeley media critic Ben Bagdikian documents the corporatization of news
organizations.
The “propaganda
model” of Edward S. Herman and Noam
Chomsky posits that because mainstream media outlets are large corporations or
part of conglomerates, the news that is presented is biased with respect to
these interests. Consider how
Westinghouse or General Electrics have extensive financial interests in
numerous economic sectors and how these interests might shape their reporting. If
you think that there is no censorship of news articles by American corporate
media, check out the yearly list of the 25 most important news article censored
by the press and collected by Project
Censored at Sonoma State University.
The second way media scholars research how dominant
ideologies become common sense is through close observation of the work
routines of professional journalists. Ethnographers such as Gaye Tuchman and Mark Fishman have
gone under cover to examine the specific occupational practices of news workers
in the everyday work lives.
For example, many news departments have specified “beats” in
which official bureaucratic information from various “trustworthy” official
sources provides the basis for the news.
A crime beat depends upon information provided by law enforcement
agencies, which typically already has a law-and-order spin to it.
Or consider the routine journalistic practice of seeking to
balance opposing viewpoints in the news by giving equal space to divergent
ideas, thereby achieving “objectivity.”
In the case of news concerning climate change, this resulted in
Americans believing that there was no widespread consensus among climate
scientists, when, in fact there is.
A third way media scholars have investigated ideology in the
news is by studying the language of news stories as found on television, in
traditional newspapers, or in online news reports. Ideologies are often subtly inserted into
news stories in nuanced ways.
Scholars, such as Dutch
discourse analyst Teun van Dijk, have examined the details of talk and text
in news stories, including the use of narrative structure, lexical choices,
metaphors and rhetoric. At each point in
the news story, these scholars ask Why that now? Why this descriptive term and
now some other? What this verb and not
some other?
Detailed analysis of the words, images and sounds contained
in published and broadcast news stories highlights how the persuasive use of
language and symbols is used by journalists to achieve specific ends, namely to
advance the perspective of rich and powerful players.
The sequential unfolding of any particular story necessitates
that some elements are included and others are excluded. The choices about what to incorporate always
involve a point of view. The assemblage
of words used to describe people, places and activities equally represent
strategic choices, as things could always have been presented otherwise. Persuasive rhetorical flourishes, emotional
appeals, and misleading logic are as much a part of modern journalism as they
were of ancient Roman oratory.
For example, in
studying the word choices involved in news stories about the “gang problem”
in the Los Angeles Times, I found
that innocent victims were frequently portrayed as though they had angelic
qualities, like the story of the “church-going Little League baseball player”
who was to testify in a gang-related murder trial. In contrast, journalists often drew attention
to specific features of the victimizers, including describing them as “youth,”
released convicts, non-white people, refugees and immigrants.
The fourth major way media scholars research ideology in the
news, and how it becomes common sense, concerns studying the interpretive
practices actual readers and audiences of news stories draw upon to make sense
of the news. Clearly, the messages that
‘senders’ of news stories intend are not always the same as the messages that
are received.
For example, the documentary
method of interpretation, made famous by sociologists Karl Mannheim and Harold Garfinkel ,
means that consumers of the news make sense of things by treating their actual
appearance as revealing an underlying pattern.
Journalists draw upon pre-existing narratives and maps of
meaning taken from our cultural myths and then assign them to a new reality so
that the new reality conforms to that cultural myth. For example, people draw upon background
knowledge about the “gang problem” to make sense of any particular gang murder. The new “reality” is pasted onto the cultural
myth so that we do not forget that myth.
The Italian cultural theorists and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci referred to the social processes through which
dominant ideologies become common sense as hegemony,
emphasizing how cultural domination happens through these practices. As
persuasive ideas become accepted as simply “the way things really are”, ruling
elites gain the consent of the populace.