I recently reread Stuart Hall’s 1982 article “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies.” In it, he describes the role of the media in the re/production of dominant, hegemonic ideologies. When reading the following passage I had to think about how much the media landscape has changed in the last 30 years:
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 aquired 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.
I wonder whether this is still accurate. It might be in Europe, but in the age of FOX News, the US news media landscape has changed, I’d say. I just wonder what happened: Is it now more acceptable to be partisan? Do the opinions sometimes expressed on FOX News that I would hope to be fringe opinions actually have a consensus? Does FOX News just assume a consensus – and in the process create the consensus/trend/talking point?
I can’t decide which option is scarier.
Thoughts?