Media reproduce dominant ideology through impartial professional norms rather than overt bias

Evidence

Finally, what are the actual mechanisms which enable the mass media to perform this “ideological work”? In the class democracies, the media are not, on the whole, directly commanded and organized by the state (though, as in the case of British broadcasting, the links may be very close). They are not directly subverted by a section of the “ruling class” speaking in its own voice. They cannot be directly colonized by one of the ruling-class parties: no major interest of capital can exercise its access to the channels of communication without some “countervailing” voice. In their day-to-day administration and practices, the media are set to work within the framework of an impartial professional-technical set of working ideologies (e.g., the “neutral” structure of news values, applied, like the rule of law, “equally” to all sides); though the configurations which they offer are strikingly selective, drawn from an extremely limited repertoire , the open operation of “bias” is the exception rather than the rule. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 920

Categorization

• XREF: This is the puzzle of structural selectivity without conspiratorial bias — a hallmark of Hall’s anti-conspiracy theory of ideology, connecting to his later work on authoritarian populism and the encoding model. — connects to: Professional media staff gatekeeping determines the deliberative quality of public opinion — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 29; Control of immigrant press advertising let nativists dictate newspaper content — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1553; Internalised media anti-intellectualism polices culture more effectively than state coercion — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1218 (+4 more)