ABSTRACT
According to critical perspectives on commercial culture all discourses, especially those which are promotional in character, share essential qualities, based upon their clear intent to achieve ‘self-advantaging’ ends (Wernick, 1991, 181). Such a proposition runs parallel to descriptions of political propaganda as a mode of communication which serves the interest of the propagandist (Jowett and O’Donnell, 1986, 13). Such views may suggest linear models of uninterrupted process,1 in which a passive observer is placed as the recipient of a cohesive, ‘mass produced’ message (Schiller, 1986, 186). Yet these positions may also be located within a larger critical tradition, often associated with the Frankfurt School, which argued that twentiethcentury media strengthened ‘habits and attitudes’ which made individuals and groups more susceptible to the blandishments of right-wing ideology (Curran and Seaton, 1997). The critical tradition is, according to Hearfield, characterised by ‘an emancipatory interest’, while traditional theory is more interested in ‘the efficient control or manipulation’ of existing social structures (Hearfield, 2004, 2).
