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Mass media: cultural effects
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Mass media: cultural effects
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This is where the presentation of certain groups as outsiders plays such an important rôle in defining the consensus.
Fowler points out:
The Press is bound to be preoccupied with the ogres of socialism and trades unionism, and to condemn them, because the interests of socialism and of organised labour are experienced as antagonistic to the business of making money. It is not surprising that the British Press is almost without exception strongly Tory in its political views, and that there is no successful socialist newspaper: the latter would be a contradiction in terms.
Fowler (1991) p.20
He goes on to argue that the press had considerable effect in persuading the British people to vote for a series of governments committed to 'a vast range of devastating decisions and proposals for cutting public spending' by appealing to 'a small cluster of consensual values, principally effective use of resources, freedom of individual choice and self-reliance.'
According to this view, the mass media identify core values in society, which are 'common sense', 'obvious', 'taken for granted'. After all, no sensible person would wish to oppose 'freedom of individual choice', would they? As Stuart Hall explains,
In a world saturated by money exchange and mediated by money, the 'market' experience is the most immediate, daily and universal experience of the economic system for everyone. It is therefore not surprising that we take the market for granted, do not question what makes it possible what it is founded or premised on.
Hall (1996) p.38
And because relationships based on money are so pervasive, the media are easily able to set up such relationships as a metaphor for the rest our relationships in society. The free market thus becomes the model of the functioning of society, a model of something fundamental, commonsensical and 'obvious' in human nature.
Certain groups are then shown to us as posing a threat to these core values - socialism, for example, is portrayed as collectivist, denying individual choice, levelling us all down to the lowest common denominator. It is a threat to those 'common sense' values. On the other hand, Conservatism is shown as the stalwart defender of those values. It allows us as individuals to make the most of our abilities as we 'stand on our own two feet'. It massively reduces taxation (thus giving people more 'individual choice' as to what they do with their money), reduces funding of the National Health Service and public education (thus ensuring that people are more 'self-reliant') and hands over nationalised industries to the private sector (which will ensure more 'effective use of resources').
That is an example of the way that the mass media are seen to 'define the consensus'. (See, for example the section under media ownership on News International)
Hypodermic needle model
Empiricism
Uses and gratifications
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