ABSTRACT
To address the question of the mass media’s effects in terms of communicative power, the critical paradigm saw as necessary the foregrounding and analysis of the domain of ideology. In a liberal capitalist state, it was argued, the ideological is situated as the key arena around, and through which, the dominant groups or alliances of dominant ‘fractions’ are able to consolidate their influence through the social formation. This social power is exercised and accepted, not by way of the direct use of coercion, but by winning the consent especially of subordinate groups to particular ways of seeing the world which may systematically work against their interests in favour of the interests of the dominant groupings (Hall 1977: 332-3). By using what Hall (1982: 81-5) characterized as the ‘enlarged concept of hegemony’, the notion of ‘dominance’ was conceptualized not as the external imposition of, or total incorporation into, ruling ideas but a question of ‘cultural leadership’ which in the case of the media was manifested in ‘the struggle over meaning’ and public discourse. O’Sullivan et al. (1983: 103) point out that the concept of hegemony, as employed by the critical paradigm, was found most often in research which sought to demonstrate how everyday meanings, representations and activities were organized and used to understand the world in ways which presented the vested interests of the ‘dominant bloc’ as apparently natural and inevitable. It is through this process, as Hall (1977: 333) contends, that the ‘subordinate classes “live” and make sense of their subordination’. For Goldman and Rajagopal (1991) hegemony has to refer not to ‘a dominant ideology per se, but to practices and relations which predominate in structuring definitions of social reality’.
