Broadcasting’s formal autonomy conceals its ultimate orientation within state hegemony

Evidence

In this paper, I try to expand a proposition which seems to me obvious and true, but which is widely neglected and repressed. In Britain, the broadcasting institutions have a great deal of formal autonomy from the state and government: but their ultimate authority to broadcast derives from the state and, in the last instance, it is to the state that they are responsible. That part of the proposition is probably not contentious: but what I consider its necessary corollary probably is. The broadcasting institutions exercise a wide measure of editorial autonomy in their programs: but ultimately they operate within the mode of reality of the state, and their program content is, in the last instance, governed by the dominant ideological perspective and is oriented within its hegemony. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 841

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hall’s key framing: relative autonomy of institutions is the corollary that makes ‘in the last instance’ state control/ideological hegemony operative.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony and Althusser’s ‘last instance’ — the theoretical vocabulary Hall is deploying throughout these essays. — connects to: The BBC’s political coverage encodes unspoken rules suppressing political seriousness — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 738; Internalised media anti-intellectualism polices culture more effectively than state coercion — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1218; State actors manufacture folk devils that the media then amplify as secondary definers (+1 more)
• SEED: Angle: ‘the neutrality illusion of editorial freedom’ — how formal autonomy itself is what masks coercion in liberal-democratic media.