Key Theorists Flashcards
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky is considered as the founder of modern linguistics, but is also a social critic has also written widely about the USA, its
economic and political power and especially the role of the media in modern societies. He is a strong critic of capitalism, imperialism and American foreign policy.
With Edward S. Herman, he developed the propaganda model which shows how the news is structured so that it becomes propaganda for the state and capitalism. The media manipulate their audiences so that consent for state policies can be created.
The media, across the political spectrum, legitimises state policies, marginalises other opinions and ignores news that does not fit their ideology. Herman and Chomsky argue that this kind of censorship is more subtle and difficult to undermine than the more obvious use of propaganda in the Soviet Union.
Ben Bagdikian
Bagdikian was an American newspaper investigative journalist who played a significant role in the publication by the Washington
Post of the Pentagon Papers, which showed how the American government had deceived its people about the war in Vietnam.
Bagdikian was from Armenia and as a child survived the Armenian genocide.
After his career in newspapers, he moved into academia and was dean of the School of Journalism.
His 1983 book The Media Monopoly warned about the growing concentration of ownership of news media in the USA, seeing this as a threat to freedom of speech and to democracy, a theme he continued in later publications. He claimed that the five largest media corporations and their owners had ‘more communications power than was exercised by any despot or dictatorship in history’. He influenced Chomsky’s views on the media
Greg Philo
Philo is a member of the Glasgow Media group which developed new ways of analysing media content, especially television, and how audiences establish meanings.
The group has published many books analysing news. Their content analysis research shows how television news reporting is biased in favour of powerful groups and how the views of the less powerful, such as strikers and refugees are ignored or marginalised, so that the media present audiences with a narrow agenda.
This is not state propaganda, but to maximise audiences and profits. It comes also from the shared background of those who work at high levels in the media, who are male, white, middle class and often attended the same private schools and universities.
Stuart Hall
Hall was born in Jamaica, and moved to the UK as a young adult. He was later Professor of Sociology at the Open University. He was a pioneer in the field of cultural studies and was particularly interested in race and gender.
With a team of colleagues, in Policing the Crisis, he analysed the moral panic about ‘mugging’ in the 1970s, which as a Marxist he saw in terms of the capitalist state in crisis creating a diversion by making young Afro-Caribbean men scapegoats for social problems. He developed the ideas of encoding and decoding media messages,
showing how messages were not simply consumed as given but interpreted.
