These notes look at what is meant by Hegomony, Chomsyk's model of propaganda, how dominant / hegemonic ideologies and discourses remain dominant, and hegemonic media representations including that of race. Culture jamming and parody is also explained, and Adam Haupt's piece on culture jamming is su...
Hegemony
“The heavy, saturating omnipresence of the way things are. It refers to the most everyday facts of
life as these are lived within the forms and structures we like to think we have freely chosen.” (Inglis,
1990:81).
Hegemony is not given and permanent. It has to be actively struggled for and won.
Winning consent and legitimacy is a continuous process of formation.
The interests of the dominant group tend to prevail but only to a certain point.
Claim that their word = truth.
Chomsky propaganda model
Easy to see how media serves elites in a repressive state.
Harder to do so where the media are private and formal censorship is absent.
Traces routes by which money and power filter out news, marginalize dissent and get government
and dominant private interests to get their message to the public.
Shows how public opinion becomes shaped in a democratic society by getting the public to buy into
dominant / hegemonic ideologies.
Dominant ideas about the world are internalised.
Key factors:
1. Size, ownership and profit orientation of the mass media
Size of news carrier affects operational expenditure- staffing and sourcing news
Corporate-owned news carriers are less likely to compromise holding companies’ interests
Accountability to shareholders and not to the public
Key objectives: increase profits and market shares; lower staffing and operational costs
Freelance culture: journalists often don’t get employee benefits
2. The Advertising License to do business
Need to subsidise high operating costs.
Advertisers’ choices, not consumers, determine media’s survival.
Focus on audiences with buying power.
Reduction of media to a 1-way-avenue for marketing
Censorship without state intervention
Corporate interests held above the public interest
3. Sourcing of mass-media news
Syndicated news: circulation of narrow news perspectives
, News is often sold to other news stations
Reliance on government and corporate sources
Lower operational costs
Need for ‘accuracy’- danger of lawsuits
Leads to agenda being small
4. Flak and the Enforcers
Coverage may respond flak / negative responses
May be costly (withdrawal of advertisers’ patronage)
5. Anticommunism as a control mechanism
Construct binaries to fragment critical voices / dissent
Islamophobia: the war on terror
Bush 9/11 invoked language of the Crusades: racialised the discourse
Discourse of crisis and war makes infringement of liberties possible: surveillance, invasion of
nations, detention etc
How do dominant / hegemonic ideologies and discourses
remain dominant?
1. Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs)
Institutions of force used to control people
Police, courts, army, repressive laws, censorship. Threat of violence.
Disadvantages: coercion is high maintenance and breeds further dissent (the holding or expression
of opinions at variance with those commonly or officially held.).
2. Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)
No real coercion needed; relies on persuasion / consensus / consent
Institutions of socialisation and persuasion used to control people: religion, education, media, family
Make us of key sites of socialisation: religious institutions, educational institutions, the family, the
media.
ISAs belong to the private domain and refer to private institutions.
Interpellation works at this level: describes the process by which ideology, embodied in major social
and political institutions (ISAs and RSAs), constitutes the very nature of individual subjects'
identities through the process of "hailing" them in social interactions
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