Media consensus on national identity shapes news without conspiracy or coercion.
Evidence
This is the point. The media can do all sorts of things, represent all sorts of points of view, provide many things that are eccentric, unexpectedly original, even aberrant. But in the end, because they are corporations serving and promoting a corporate identity — “America” and even “the West” — they all have the same central consensus in mind. This, as we shall see a little later in the case of Iran, shapes the news, decides what is news and how it is news. It does not, however, dictate or determine the news involuntarily: it is neither the result of deterministic laws, nor of conspiracy, nor of dictatorship. It is the result of the culture; better, it is the culture; and it is, in the case of the United States media, an appreciable component of contemporary history. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 184
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The claim that media consensus is ‘the culture itself’ — neither deterministic law, conspiracy, nor dictatorship, yet decisively shaping the news — is a genuinely dense theoretical position worth sitting with.
- XREF: Echoes Gramsci’s hegemony and the earlier ‘Communication as Culture’ notes on ideology as common sense. — connects to: Media structure enabling deliberative opinion is a constitutional imperative. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 49; Control of immigrant press advertising let nativists dictate newspaper content — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1553
Related
- Media output is uniform despite the abundance of sources and outlets. (similarity 0.81)
- Media consensus works by limiting permissible frames, not dictating content. (similarity 0.80)
- Control of immigrant press advertising let nativists dictate newspaper content (similarity 0.80)
- Media reproduce dominant ideology through impartial professional norms rather than overt bias (similarity 0.79)