Abstract
This chapter seeks to develop a theoretical framework to enhance Gramsci’s contribution to CDA and media studies. In particular, I first refer to the elliptic relation between CDA and hegemony. Then, I discuss the concept of intellectuals, and the distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals; I reintroduce the concept of hegemony and present those of superstructureand passive revolution. The next section includes discussions on the functions of the mass media, news values and media representations of the ‘Other’. It also refers to the links between CDA and media studies regarding representation of the ‘Other’, and emphasizes the representation of the Muslim ‘Other’ in order to justify why Gramsci’s work is essential to the study of media representations.
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Notes
- 1.
At this point I should mention that Michel Foucault (1980) also emphasized the concept of power and claims that power does not have directly to do with violence but is similar to a form of control over peoples’ consciences and actions. According to Foucault, what makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it does not only weigh on ‘us’ as a force that says no. It traverses and produces things, induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than a negative instance whose function is repression (1980, pp. 117–120, 141–143). Foucault also noted that the ‘mechanizations’, which can produce discourse and knowledge of what is accepted and what is not, are the state, scientists and intellectuals (ibid.). Hence, the first reading of the two concepts shows that Foucault’s power is close to Gramsci’s hegemony. However, I decided to focus on Gramsci’s hegemony because, from my viewpoint, it is more accomplished in relation to Foucault’s concept of power and Bourdieu’s symbolic power (1991) insofar as it includes class and resistance dynamics (counter-hegemony), and it seems to be a holistic approach to the modern capitalist state and its institutions.
- 2.
- 3.
A presentation of all the studies on critical discourse analysis of media is not possible in the limited space of this book. However, I would like to mention that this study was inspired by works such as: Richardson (2004, 2007, 2009), KhosraviNik (2015a, b), Macgilchrist (2011), Sandikcioglu (2000), Meadows (2005), Tekin (2010), Le (2002, 2010), Oberhuber et al. (2005), Krzyzanowski (2009), and Triandafyllidou et al. (2009).
- 4.
Van Dijk had earlier examined a number of media-research studies on migrants and their representation in the British press and deduced that minority groups were not represented as being part of British society, but rather as dangerous ‘outsiders’ (1987, pp. 40–45). Moreover, he assumed that the media play a central role in the reproduction of racism through the symbolic polarization between positive ‘Us’ and negative ‘Them’ (1993, pp. 243–252).
- 5.
- 6.
The term ‘war on terror’ had been used by American President Reagan (1983). President Reagan labeled the states of Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America as a ‘cancer’, a ‘source of terrorism’, ‘rogue states’ and introduced the term ‘war on terror’ as part of an effort to pass legislation that was designed to freeze the assets of terrorist groups and marshal government forces against them. President G. W. Bush repeated the term in his addresses to the American people after 9/11 (Chomsky 1999, 2001).
- 7.
- 8.
Here I should mention that there are other theories, such as the encoding/decoding model of Stuart Hall (2005), that focus on audiences’ defenses against media power. In any case I cannot ignore these theories, but I do need to highlight the fact that in this study I intend to approach mass media discourse as a form of institutional and hegemonic discourse.
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Boukala, S. (2019). Mass Media and Hegemonic Knowledge: Gramsci and the Representation of the ‘Other’. In: European Identity and the Representation of Islam in the Mainstream Press. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93314-6_3
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