The Concept of Ideology and Mass Communication Research

Abstract

It was Walter Lippmann who, in an almost ritually quoted passage about the division between &dquo;the world outside&dquo; and &dquo;the pictures in our heads,&dquo; drew attention to the &dquo;insertion between man and his environment of a pseudoenvironment&dquo; made of &dquo;representations of the real environment&dquo;-representations which, nonetheless, served as a basis for actual behavior (Lippmann, 1922: 15). Lippmann was concerned about the possibility of lack of correspondence between the two sides of the insertion, between &dquo;the world&dquo; and its &dquo;interior representations,&dquo; not only because of its epistemological import, but also because of its practical ramifications. He feared that such discrepancies could mislead people in their daily lives.However, despite his recognition of potential distortion, he did not raise the question whether such lack of correspondence might follow certain systemic patterns, whether the pseudo-environment might mis-represent the real environment in certain discernible, even predictable ways.Speaking from a democratic liberal point of view, he considered the fictitious representations either natural flaws of human information processing mechanisms-a consequence of living in an environment &dquo;altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance&dquo; (Lippmann, 1922: 16), giving rise to a need for simpler models in order that they can be managed more easily-or outcomes of certain external constraints such as limited access to facts. For Lippmann, these representations (&dquo;the picture of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, relationships&dquo;) were public opinions whose careful analysis &dquo;was the task of political science&dquo; (Lippmann, 1922: 29). Had he raised the question of systematic distortion, he would have run into the problem of ideology, whose study is the task of social sciences in general and, in the case of media-produced representations, mass communications research in particular.

Decontextualizing the war on drugs: A content analysis of nij publications and their neglect of race and class

“…They insist that the government agencies have a vested interest in maintaining prevailing notions of crime; these notions, in turn, legitimize their authority in controlling lawbreakers. As our findings indicate, NIJ's depiction of the war on drugs often lacks meaningful references to racial and socioeconomic biases, and thereby preserves a dominant ideological perspective of drug control (see Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner 1980;Chermak 1997;Chiricos 1996;Hall et al 1978;Herman and Chomsky 1988;Sahin 1980). A particularly significant feature of the dominant ideology is its neglect of social conditions (e.g., poverty) and their connection to crime and drugs (Barlow et al 1995a(Barlow et al , 1995bFishman 1978;Gramsci 1971;Humphries 1981;Marx 1978).…”

“All the News That's Fit to Print”: A Content Analysis of the Correctional Debate in the New York Times

“…From a Marxian view of the media, the power of the ruling class extends beyond the ownership and control of the means of material production by exerting influence over the means of mental production. Public pronouncements ratifying the government's criminal justice apparatus, for instance, are mental products transmitted in line with the imperatives of the dominant ideology (see Gramsci, 1971;Larrain, 1983;Marx, 1978;Sahin, 1980). This research discovered considerable evidence of the politicization of punishment and criminal justice agenda setting.…”

Moral Panic Over Youth Violence

“…Above all, the dominant ideology serves the interests of the upper classes by protecting and reproducing their way of life. Still, the dominant ideology also exhibits universal qualities to ensure that the elite worldview is shared to some degree by subordinate classes (Marx, 1978; also see Gramsci, 1971;Larrain, 1983;Sahin, 1980). The emergence of wilding as a new menace should be understood as manifestation of shared latent social anxiety given that violence is a significant problem concerning people of all social classes.…”