ࡱ> RTQ9 RWbjbj&jSl8Vr%("$M mX^ ^ ^ ^ :^ ^ F^  @r/,"0% F^ Guoxin Xing Fall 2007 Comprehensive Exam Definition (Second Area): Reading Ideologies In The Mass Media: Methodologies and The Theory of Ideology The theoretical perspectives contained within Marxism agree that the mass media have the ideological functions and effects (Curran, et al, 1982: 28; Hall 1982: 65; 1977: 339; Allan 1999: 48-67). To read ideologies in the mass media, for instance the news media, a multi-dimensional perspective conceives of news as hegemonic institutions or as discourse and attempts to disclose how ideology is transmitted through communication and culture by textual analysis of news (Hall 1986; Fowler 1991; Hartley 1982; Van Dijk 1988). The concept of ideology provides the starting points for a variety of methodologies, ranging from content analysis to framing analysis, and through critical linguistic analysis to critical discourse analysis. As Shoemaker and Reese (1996: 228) argue, considering ideology in the news media is to examine to what extent medias symbolic content systematically serves to further the interests and power of certain [dominant] groups. However, the validity of the concept of ideology has been challenged by poststructuralist approaches to the nature and power of media and culture. Accordingly, these methodologies, which have incorporated the concept of ideology as being analytically or heuristically relevant, are at stake. This comprehensive exam will apply the theory of ideology, challenged and rehabilitated, to evaluate methods of reading ideologies in the news media. As a research technique, content analysis is useful for the description of media contents and for making inferences about both the processes of production and reception of media messages. As Krippendorff (2004) argues, content analysis is a research technique for making replicative and valid inferences from data to their context (p. 21). Content analysis, as an empirical instrument for data gathering, is not contingent upon a particular theoretical perspective. It has been widely used by contrasting approaches from positivism-functionalism to Marxist/critical theory. Within the critical paradigm, content analysis can be used to identify preferred or alternative meanings in media messages. Either political economy, which concerns the impact of the structural influences on the production and content of the media conglomerates messages, or cultural studies, which has been interested in the range of what Hall (1977: 344-345) calls preferred, negotiated or oppositional readings by the different audience segments or groups, can resort to content analysis for empirical evidences. Nevertheless, content analysis gives too much emphasis on comparative frequency of different symbols appearance and blurs differences between manifest and latent meaning (Sumner 1979). As Sumner (1979) argues, the limitation of the method is geared to ideologys immediate, concrete appearance as a series of signifiers expressed by an individual or group (p. 98-99). He points, merely reading the signifiers of a discourse is superficial, and speculating their meanings attributed to the intentions of the communicators is not scientific. The measurement of frequency and manifest content in content analysis has led to the ignorance of the tensions among expressed elements of meaning or between what is said and what is left unsaid. The qualitative turn of framing analysis is useful in making up content analysiss quantification deficiency. As D. Reese (2001) argues, framing analysis helps resist the reductionistic urge to sort media texts and discourse into containers and count their size or frequency (p.2). According to Gitlins (1980) oft-cited definition, frames are viewed as persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse (p. 7). Frames enable journalists to assign information to cognitive categories, bringing otherwise amorphous reality into a meaning structure. For Gitlin (1980: 21), frames are thus more than the simple inclusion or exclusion of information. Frames are given a power in the forming and delimiting of public assumptions, attitudes, and moods of ideology, in short (Gitlin 1980: 9). They are ideological in terms of propagating legitimate discourse to shape the publics definitions of its situation, serving to the continuation of the established order. Framing analysis, as an analytical approach to journalism and the mass media, will address the questions regarding the generation of ideas in society and the acceptance or rejection of certain ideas. As Gitlin argues, frames represent a field of discourse, which is disseminated as the common sense and makes the world intelligible to the people. Similarly, Hackett and Zhao (1994)s textual analysis of US newspaper coverage of domestic protests against the Gulf War reveals the dominant interpretative news frames, which underlie Americas master narrative of war. The master narrative is a set of assumptions about Americas moral high ground in international conflicts, which have been considered as natural and never subject to be questioned. Through its focus on how issues are framed as a result of social and institutional interests, framing analysis examines the power relations. This moves beyond a narrow concern with bias in media studies to characterize the ideological dimension of news, which is structured in its content, practices and relations with society. Under this approach, however, it is not unproblematic to label, classify, and reduce issues to a simple theme in studies of news content. Nevertheless, framing analysis cautions against unduly compartmentalizing components of communication - sender, content, and audience. Viewed as an active process and a result, frames of news media are examined by Gitlin (1980: 252-282), who borrowed Gramscis concept of hegemony, as a process of ideological hegemony. Using the concept of hegemonic ideology to analyse the news media is significant: the media and political systems are considered as sites of contestation, in which meanings are contested in a struggle among classes (groups) to shape pubic consciousness. If framing analysis attempts to capture the meanings embedded in the internal relations within texts, it gives less systematical attention to properties of the texture of texts in detail. Two linguistically oriented approaches have taken up this general objective. Critical linguistic analysis seeks to interpret texts, particularly media discourse, to explore the value systems and sets of beliefs which reside in texts, in other words, to reveal ideology in language. As Kress (1983: 122) argues, using some of the insights of linguistic theory may be an aid in uncovering the ideological layerings of meaning in a given text. Linguistic tools, such as transitivity, syntactic transformations of the clause, lexical structure and modality, are designed to explore the structure of a news text, which can carry ideological meaning (Fowler 1991: 66-90). From a critical linguistic perspective, ideology describes the ways in which what we say and think interacts with society. Deriving from the taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs and value-systems which are shared collectively by social groups, an ideology is the ideology of a particularly powerful social group and thus is dominant. As Fowler argues, dominant ideologies are mediated through powerful political and social institutions like the government, the law and the medical profession. The representation is ideological as the specific linguistic practices of the social groups who comprise these institutions shape our perception of them (Fowler 1991: 120-145). Assimilating ideological processes and linguistic processes, critical linguistic analysis focuses on individual pieces of text to understand how the structures of domination in the local are implicit in the text. Consequently, as Fairclough (1995: 28) argues, it is problematic: first, social-cultural practice of texts is understated; the role of media in ideological reproduction tends to be considered as monolithic. By contrast, Hartley (1982) s semiotic analysis considers analysis of texts as a significant part of socio-cultural analysis of media. By exploring language-related codes and conventions underlying news stories, semiotic analysis typically discerns categories and classifications implicit in news texts, which are ideologically potent. Although semiotic analysis is limited in its ability to systematic analysis of detailed properties of the texts, it has the merits of linking properties of texts to ideologies, power relations and cultural values (Hartley 1982; Fairclough 1995: 24). Despite the linkage, nevertheless, Hartleys semiotic analysis gives much one-sided emphasis on representations. Critical discourse analysis pays greater attention to social-cultural analysis of media texts. According to Fairclough (1995: 57), critical discourse analysis involves an alternation between double, complementary perspectives of a communicative event and the order of discourse. While the first perspective focuses on the relationships between three dimensions of a communication event text, discourse practice and social-cultural practice, the second analyzes how it is structured in terms of configurations of genres and discourses. As Fairclough (2001: 122) argues, this approach does not assume the existence of some autonomous linguistic system but is, rather, based upon a view of semiosis as an irreducible part of material social processes with language as an integral element of such processes. By linking discourse to power and social interests, critical discourse analysis is particularly concerned with the ideological effects of discourse. As Fairclough (2003: 9) argues, discourses are representations of the world, which are ideological by contributing to establishing, maintaining and changing social relations of power, domination and exploitation. Similarly, in analyzing structures of news, Teun van Dijk makes a distinction between the overall content of a text, its thematic structure, and the overall form of a text, its schematic structure. His framework has a social-psychological emphasis on processes of social cognition. By linking media texts to context, van Dijk is to reveal how social relationships and processes, for example, the reproduction of racism in news accounts, are accompanied at a micro-level through routine practices (Fairclough 1995: 29). Beyond traditional studies of ideology and language with emphasis on lexical items, van Dijk suggests that opinions and the assumptions which they contain may be expressed in many complex ways in text and talk, for example, in Headlines, story structures, arguments, graphical arrangements, syntactic structures, semantic structures of coherence, overall topics and so on (van Dijk 1998: 31). He points, the ideological effects of discourse are to sustain, legitimate or manage group conflicts, as well as relationships of power and dominance (van Dijk 1998: 24). Despite their conventionalist epistemology (Hackett and Zhao 1998: 128), the intellectual origins of those methodological approaches to ideology are in Althussers structuralism, Gramscis concept of hegemony and John B. Thompsons conception of dominant ideology. For Althusser, ideology was ultimately a function of class power in capitalism (Nicos 1976). Nevertheless, the Althusserian concept of ideology as a material practice that constructs concrete individuals as subjects is problematic in the respect that it gives no attention to class conflict and resistance within the social formation. Against this background, developments in the Marxist theory of ideology turned back to Gramsci, who afforded a more flexible way of conceptualizing the relationship between ideological and social-economic processes (Boggs 1976). The Althusserian and Gramscian conceptions of ideology have facilitated the British tradition of cultural studies, which was concerned with the operation of power and ideology in the mass media in the 1980s (Hall 1982; 1981). Johnsons conception focuses on the effect of ideology, i.e. serving domination, without making the further claim of a functionalist causal account of ideology, thus moving away from a functionalist assumption in the work of Althusser (Humphrey 2005: 232). Those approaches to ideology typically stem from a lineage that takes the work of Marx and Engels as its starting point (Jorge 1983). Despite their variations, they share the common features concerning epistemology and class domination contained with the Marxist concept of ideology (Eagleton 1991: 194-196; Lovell 1980: 30). Nevertheless, the portrait of ideological thought as suffering from a false claim to true knowledge was first challenged by the conventionalist interpretation of Marxism by post-Althusserians Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, and later totally rejected by post-structuralism (Zhao 1993: 77; Eagleton 1991: xi-xii). Despite the differences, leading poststructuralist approaches share the common features the replacement of ideology with discourses, rejection of the true/false or science/non-science criteria, and dismissal of essentialism and positivism (Malesevic 2002: 95). Foucault (1980) uses the terminology the politics of the discursive regime to reject the categories of truth/falsity or truth/ideology, shifting the source of power to language itself. For him, discourses are a social force which has a central role in what is constructed as real and therefore what is possible. It determines how the world can be seen and what can be known and done within it. Discourses are thus crucial in explaining how the social subject is positioned and limited, as the question he highlights, how are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations? (Foucault 1980: 318). Sharing similarities with Foucaults criticism of ideology, the post-Marxism of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) conceive of society as a field of discourse without an extra-discursive reality. Society is conceived of as a stable articulated entity the only perpetual attempts of discursive articulation. Discourses may have a value of materiality, but their materiality is not connected to the consciousness of the subjects. Instead, positions of the subjects are dispersed within a discursive formation. In their writings, Laclau and Mouffe abandon the Marxist category of ideology and replace it with their relational theory of discourses to understand and explain the social meaning of words, speeches, actions and institutions. This is the discursive turn in the Lefts approach to representation and ideology. As they argue that the interpellation of subjects as class formations or class agents is an effect of discourses instead of a reflection of conceret social reality, class analysis is disabled. Hall (1988)s analysis of Thatcherism is greatly influenced by this poststructuralist discourse theory. John B. Thompson (1990)s introduction of dominant ideology made a contribution to rescue the Marxist concept from the abandonment by shunning its dependence on the revelation of epistemological falsehood. For Thompson, believing that ideological ideas are those serving class domination does not have to take a position on epistemological falsity. If Thompsons conception shifts from a functionalist causal account of ideology to a focus on the social effects of certain beliefs (Humphrey 2005: 232), he does not give a head on rejoinder to the poststructuralist criticism. However, the latest development calls for rehabilitating the concept of ideology by incorporating the poststructuralist critiques. Malesevic (2002) argues that it is plausible for post-structuralism to reject the application of the true/false and science/non-science dichotomies to the study of ideology. By calling for recourse to the concept of discourse, nevertheless, post-structuralism differs little from structuralism in their understanding of ideology. The failure of post-structuralism to provide a better theoretical and methodological solution means that it will be premature to abandon the concept of ideology altogether. As attempts to reconcile the explanatory merits of ideology theories with the poststructuralist critiques, Malesevic proposes a new conception of ideology: a shift from structure-centred approaches to agency-centred approaches, from the function to the form and content of ideology. Deepa Kumar (2007)s latest analysis of media coverage of the UPS strike has rendered the concept of dominant ideology insufficient. As Kumar (2007: 157-171) argues, the existing literature on resistance give more emphasis on the medias power to perpetuate the dominant ideology than on the power of the collective agency of the working class. Kumars empirical studies echo the necessities of rehabilitating the theory of ideology. The methods of reading ideologies will benefit from the expansion of the scope of ideology to build up their reliability. Bibliography Allan, Stuart. (2004) News Culture (2nd edition). Maidenhead; New York: Open University Press. Boggs, Carl. (1976) Gramsci's Marxism. London: Pluto Press. Callinicos, Nicos. (1976) Althusser's marxism. London: Pluto Press. Curran, et al. (1982) The study of the media: theoretical approaches, in Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran, Janet Woollacott (eds.) Culture, Society and the Media, 11-28. London: Methuen. Eagleton, Terry. (1991) Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso. Fairclough, Norman. (2003) Analyzing Discourse. London: Routledge. Fairclough, Norman. (2001) Language and Power. London: Pearson/Longman. Fairclough, Norman. (1995) Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold. Foucault, Michel. (1980) Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977. Brighton: Harvester. Fowler, R. (1991) Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London: Routledge. Gitlin, T. (1980) The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the News Left. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Hackett, R. and Yuezhi, Zhao (1994) Challenging a Master Narrative: Peace Protest and Opinion/Editorial Discourse in the US Press During the Gulf War. Discourse and Society. Vol.5(4): 509-541. Hackett, R. and Yuezhi, Zhao (1998) Sustaining Democracy? Journalism and the Politics of Objectivity. Toronto: Garamond Press. Hall, Stuart. (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal. London: Verso. Hall, Stuart. (1986) Media Power and Class Power, in J. Curran, J. Ecclestone, G. Oakley & A. Richardson (eds.) Bending Reality: the State of the Media, 5-14. London: Pluto Press. Hall, Stuart. (1982). The rediscovery of ideology: return of the repressed in media studies, in Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran, Janet Woollacott (eds.) Culture, Society and the Media, 56-90. London: Methuen. Hall, Stuart. (1981) Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms, in T. Bennett, G. Martin, Colin Mercer and J. Woollacott (eds.) Culture, Ideology and Social Process: A Reader, 19-38. Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd with The Open University Press. Hall, Stuart. (1977) Culture, the Media and the Ideological Effect, in J. Curran, Michael Gurevitch & Janet Woollacott (eds.) Mass Communications and Society, 315-346. London: Arnold. Hartley, J. (1982) Understanding News. New York: Routledge. Humphrey, M. (2005) (De)Contesting Ideology: The Struggle over the Meaning of the Struggle over Meaning. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Vol. 8, No.2: 225-246. Kress, Gunther. (1983) Linguistic and ideological transformations in news reporting, in Davis, Howard and Paul Walton (eds.) Language, image, media, 120-138. Oxford: B. Blackwell. Krippendorff, K. (2004) Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kumar, Deepa. (2007) Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Larrain, Jorge. (1983) Marxism and ideology. London: Macmillan. Lovell, Terry. (1980) Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics, Pleasure. BFI Publishing. Malesevic, Sinisa. (2002) Rehabilitating Ideology after Poststructuralism, in Malesevic, S & Iain Mackenzie (eds.) Ideology After Poststructuralism, 87-108. London: Pluto Press. Reese, Stephen D. (2001) Prologue, in Stephen D. Reese, et al. (eds.) Framing Public Life:Perspectives on Media and our Understanding of the Social World, 1-25. Mahwah, N.J.: Laurence Erlbaum. Shoemaker, P. & Reese, S. (1996) Mediating the Message: Theories of Influence on Mass Media Content. (2nd edition). New York: Longman. Sumner, Colin. (1979) Reading ideologies: an investigation into the Marxist theory of ideology and law. London: Academic Press. Thompson, John B. (1990) Ideology and modern culture: critical social theory in the era of modern culture. Cambridge: Polity. Van Dijk, Teun A. (1988) News as Discourse. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers. Yuezhi, Zhao. (1993) The End of Ideology Again? The Concept of Ideology in the Era of Postmodern Theory. Canadian Journal of Sociology. 18(1): 70-83. 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