Media reproduce dominant ideology through impartial professionalism, not open 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. How, then, do the discourses of the media become systematically penetrated and inflected by dominant ideologies? — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 920

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sets up the book’s central puzzle: how ideological work happens through putatively neutral professional news practices.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony and to Chomsky’s propaganda model, which answers this same question with ownership and filtering mechanisms; Hall will refuse that crude answer.