Broadcasters regulate themselves mainly by imagining public opinion.

Evidence

Though “the consensus” is extremely difficult to locate, its existence also underwrites and guarantees the broadcaster in his day-to-day functions. His sense of “the state of play” in public opinion provides a sort of warrant for his performance. It offers him a rough-and-ready way of referring himself to “what people in general are thinking and feeling about an issue.” He is not obliged to reproduce the consensus, as he understands it perfectly, and indeed, since groups which differ in class position and in power and status occupy different ends of this nebulous construct and define it differently, he cannot help but infringe “the consensus” somewhere every time he broadcasts. Still the consensus provides him with an outer horizon, a set of boundaries to “what is normal, expected, understood, taken-for-granted,” which he systematically offends against at his peril. In formal democracies, though power is in fact centralized within the elites, the elites gain legitimacy by this continuous process of “mentally referring themselves” to the public at large. It is my impression that in their everyday professional practice, broadcasters are more consistently regulated by their sense of their audience than by any single other source. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 874

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how ‘consensus’ functions operationally for broadcasters — an outer horizon of the taken-for-granted rather than a measurable public poll.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony concept (consent manufactured through reference to a presumed public), central to Hall’s broader theory.
• DEEPTHINKING: The point that elites in formal democracies legitimize centralized power by mentally referring to a public consensus — illusory yet regulatory — is a genuinely dense, paradigm-shifting insight worth sitting with.