Elites concede to media’s professional logic because they need broadcasting to reach mass audiences.

Evidence

As he notes, because controversy is topical and makes for lively broadcasting, the media are inevitably drawn to what the powerful may well regard as “danger zones.” Therefore, controversial broadcasting operates in the space opened up by the concept of “professional codes” (as deployed in the encoding/decoding paper), where political or economic elites have to concede to the imperatives of the media’s own logic, given that they are themselves dependent on these media, in order to reach a wider audience than they can address directly through their own channels of communication. … We can see how the media regularly become the site of crucial ideological and discursive struggles, whose outcome is by no means always predetermined. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 764

Categorization

• XREF: Explains why the powerful tolerate ‘danger zone’ controversy — a mechanism relevant to any analysis of press freedom and elite dependency on media reach. — connects to: Music undergrounds need public broadcast exposure to force ideas upward — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1270
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the irony that elites fund and submit to media whose professional codes create the very ‘danger zones’ that embarrass them — parallels to modern tech platforms and politicians.
• QUESTION: Does Hall specify which elite audiences cannot be reached except via broadcast media, and how that dependency shifted with social media? Worth chasing.