Marxism Flashcards
2 types of Marxists…
Instrumental – Traditional Marxist’s all about ideology and conscious manipulation.
Neo – Neo-Marxists are newer Marxists and they are less about conscious manipulation but more about hegemony and cultural ideology.
Instrumental Marxists…
The primary role of the media is to promote a myth of meritocracy and keep a largely passive audience from criticising capitalism and thus maintain the status quo therefore “alienating man for his potential”.
Media ownership…
Media owners are part of the ruling class elite and they consciously manipulate media content to transmit a conservative ideology to control the wider population and maintain their wealth and privilege.
The content of the media is thus narrow and biased and reflects the opinions of the ruling class generally and the media owners in particular.
The government does not effectively regulate media content because the political elite are also part of the ruling class like the media owners.
The ideological nature of the media…
According to Instrumentalist Marxists, the primary role of the media is to spread ruling class ideology and maintain the status quo, keeping the current unequal capitalist system in place.
There are five ways in which this can be done according to Milliband.
Milliband’s 5 ways of ideological manipulation…
1) We see many favourable representations of (rather than critical commentary on) the wealthy – for example Royalty, millionaires on Cribs, and middle class lifestyles more generally in all of those hideous programmes about spending £500K on a house in the country.
2) It spreads the ‘myth of meritocracy’ – Dragons Den and The Apprentice are two wonderful contemporary examples of this.
3) The News often dismisses radical view points as extremist, dangerous or silly, and a conservative (ruling class) view of the world as normal.
4) Negative portrayals of ethnic minorities and immigrants serve to divide the ruling class and discourage criticisms of the ruling class.
5) Entertainment distracts the public from thinking critically about important political issues.
The audience are passive…
Marxist instrumentalists see the audience as a mass of unthinking robots who are passive and easily manipulated. They essentially take what they see in the media at face value, and believe what they see without questioning it.
Adorno and Horkheimer…
The dialectic of enlightenment. - Adorno and Horkheimer (1940) think that mainstream, mass culture is mostly produced in an entirely rational way. So creative decisions are intertwined with commercial decisions.
In movies: stories, characters and actors are all chosen because they are considered to be the most appealing to a particular audience.
But it is not just the way that culture is produced which is the problem but how it is presented, how we consume it and the ways in which it encourages us to think (or not).
Adorno and Horkheimer think that real culture should challenge us, stimulate critical thought and (crucially) encourage our individuality. The culture which they think is valuable helps to cultivate a critical disposition in people.
The products of the culture industry, however, only encourage us to conform and obey. In this sense it has more in common with propaganda than real culture.
Supporting evidence…
Curran (2003) found lots of evidence of owners directly manipulating media content.
In the middle of the 20th century, “press barons” were quite open about their propagandist role, and also that there have always been a lot more Conservative-supporting newspapers than those critical of that party, which reflects them serving the interests of their wealthy owners.
He argues that in the later 20th century and today owners are, if anything, even more interventionist, with again Rupert Murdoch being the obvious example.
Critique…
It is impractical for media owners of large corporations to control all output on a day to day basis. At some point they have to trust editors.
Pluralists argue that media owners are primarily motivated by making a profit and thus would rather provide audiences with the diverse content they want rather than use their media companies to spread their own narrow view of the world.
The previous criticism follows on from the Pluralist view that audiences are not just passive and unthinking, they are active and critical, and thus not easily manipulated: they can easily choose to switch off if they don’t like what they see.
Cultural hegemony…
Neo-Marxists emphasise cultural hegemony.
Hegemony is where the norms and values of the ruling class are taken as common sense.
According to Neo-Marxists, the reason why we have a limited media agenda is because of cultural hegemony, not because of direct control by wealthy media owners. In other words, cultural factors are more important than economic factors in explaining narrow media content.
Simply put, journalists have accepted the conservative worldview of the ruling class as common sense, and they share this world view with the ruling class – they thus unconsciously spread the dominant ideology themselves without the need for direct control by the media owners.
Journalists voluntarily spread the dominant ideology…
Journalists have the freedom to report as they please, so other factors besides economic control/ ownership determine media content, factors such as the interests of journalists and industry news values.
However, the broad agenda of the media is still limited because the journalists share the same world view as the ruling class and the owners (this is known as ‘cultural hegemony’).
This is at least partly because Journalists are themselves mostly white and middle class, with more than 50% of them having gone to private schools. They thus present a conservative / neo-liberal view of the world on autopilot.
Also, journalists do not want to risk their careers by annoying owners and so are reluctant to publish content which might annoy owners.
Agenda setting…
Agenda setting and gatekeeping are the two processes through which journalists limit media content. They are normally used in relation to the selection and presentation of The News.
Gatekeeping = the process of choosing which items are selected for coverage, and others are kept out.
Agenda setting = deciding how media items are going to be framed, for example, who is going to be invited to discuss topics and what kind of questions are going to be asked.
According to neo-Marxists gatekeeping and agenda setting tend to result in issues which are harmful to the elite being kept out of the media, thus reinforcing the dominant ideology.
Examples of agenda setting…
> Only having two political parties discuss a news item – we rarely hear from the Green Party, for example.
> Focusing on the violence at riots and protests, rather than the issues which are being protested about, or the cause of the riots.
> The news taking the side of the police and the government, rather than hearing from criminals or terrorists.
Critiques of agenda setting…
Traditional Marxists argue that it underestimates the importance of economic factors, for example the power of owners to hire and fire journalists.
As with traditional Marxism, the role of new media may make this perspective less relevant. It is now much harder to maintain the dominant ideology, for example.
Pluralists point out that this perspective still tends to assume the audience is passive and easily swayed by the dominant ideology. In reality, the audience may be more active and critical.
Marcuse and the Nazis…
The Frankfurt school was set up in 1923. Its founders tended to be left wing German, Jewish intellectuals drawn from the upper and middle-classes of German society.
The rise of the Nazi Party in German in the 1930’s and its racist opposition of Jews together with totalitarian repression of the left meant that the members of the school were forced to flee to other parts of Western Europe and North America.
The School was temporarily situated in New York in the early 1940’s (although some members spent time in Los Angeles. It eventually returned to Germany in the late 1940’s, along with its leading figures.
Some members stayed in the USA, reverting to Liberalism, whilst others extended the Schools analysis of modern society to post-war capitalist America.
