Consensus fabrication requires including contrary voices to appear legitimate

Evidence

Nevertheless, in its own way and time, room must be found for other voices, for “minority” opinions, for “contrary” views, so that a shape, to which all reasonable men can begin to attach themselves, emerges. This forms the great unifying and consolidating level of the media’s ideological work: the generative structure beneath the media’s massive investment in the surface immediacy, the phenomenal multiplicity, of the social worlds in which it traffics. The production of consensus, the construction of legitimacy—not so much the finished article itself, but the whole process of argument, exchange, debate, consultation, and speculation by which it emerges—is the third key aspect of the media’s ideological effect. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 919

Categorization

• QUESTION: How does including oppositional voices strengthen rather than undermine manufactured consensus? Worth chasing how this idea gets applied in Hall’s later work on Thatcherism.