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Marxism and Broadcasting

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Marxism and Broadcasting Plan for Session Intro Marxism Owen Jones on Karl Marx & Marxism Input on Dominant Ideology Groupwork using Chomsky Article Content Analysis ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Marxism and Broadcasting


1
Marxism and Broadcasting
2
Plan for Session
  • Intro Marxism
  • Owen Jones on Karl Marx Marxism
  • Input on Dominant Ideology
  • Groupwork using Chomsky Article
  • Content Analysis of Benefit Street including
    discussion of dominant ideology.
  • Formative Assessment on The Scheme

3
Karl Marx
  • Karl Marx (1818 1883 German revolutionary
    socialist) is regarded as the instigator of class
    analysis.
  • He identified two new and fundamental classes
    those who owned the means of production (the
    bourgeoisie) and those without ownership, who
    had to sell their capacity to work (the
    proletariat).

4
Class
  • Marx believes class serves as a means of
    understanding the economic and cultural divisions
    that exist between individuals in society.
  • People are sorted into groups on the basis of
    economic factors (income or wealth), but groups
    or classes are then divided by social values,
    politics, beliefs and culture.

5
Class
  • Marx believed the working class were being
    exploited and this could only be resolved by
    proletariat revolution because this structure of
    power included surplus production that resulted
    in the accumulation of material wealth by the
    bourgeoisie at the expense of the working class.

6
Max Weber
  • Max Weber (1864 1920 German political
    economist) took the theories of Marx further. He
    broke the privileged class down into other
    subsets.
  • He believed that skills and their relationship to
    the market rather than ownership of the
    factories, etc put individuals together in
    groups.
  • Weber felt it relevant to include differences
    such as education and race in analysing the
    construction of class.

7
Class
  • Contemporary class identity and analysis
    recognises the place that gender, nation,
    ethnicity and sexuality have in the construction
    of identity and replaces the traditional
    definition of class.
  • In the new global economy, rather than owners and
    workers, many modern theorists refer to
  • information-rich and information-poor groups.

8
Class
  • The traditional two fundamental classes are now
    globally separated the owners of the wealth
    overwhelmingly live in the USA while the workers
    who make the products are located in cheap labour
    countries such as Indonesia and China.
  • (Strinati, 2003, An Introduction to Theories of
    Popular Culture)

9
Owen Jones on Karl Marx
  • Insert to the Daily Politics show 1/11/13
  • Owen Jones is a left-wing British columnist,
    author, commentator and political activist. He is
    a regular columnist for The Guardian and since
    2015 for the New Statesman.
  • His book Chavs The Demonisation of the Working
    Class has made a key contribution to the debate
    about class in Britain today.

10
Ideology in Media Studies
  • The term is generally understood to refer to a
    system of ideas, assumptions and beliefs.
  • Since these are central to the process of mass
    communication then ideology is particularly
    important in media studies.
  • The media is a prolific producer of sense,
    knowledge and meanings. It plays the role of
    organiser and producer of individual and social
    consciousness.
  • Consensus and common sense

11
Ideology in Media Studies
  • Ideology is seen as the practice of reproducing
    social relations of inequality within the sphere
    of discourse, often where this knowledge is posed
    as natural.
  • Texts are the means by which ideologies are
    circulated, established or suppressed. Examples?
  • Films of Michael Moore Countering hegemonic
    ideology.

12
Marx and Ideology
  • In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels write
    that "the ideas of the ruling class are in every
    epoch the ruling ideas, ie the class which is the
    ruling material force of society, is at the same
    time it's ruling intellectual force. (198964).

13
Marx and Ideology
  • The ruling class is able to use its economic and
    political power, derived from ownership of the
    means of production, to organise the perpetuation
    of class inequality and its own dominance.
  • Global media conglomerates Time Warner,
    Murdochs Sky International and (capitalist)
    state regulated bodies like the BBC.

14
Dominant Ideology
  • Critical scholars have argued that the media tend
    to express the ideological positions of those in
    power as dominant ideology that serves the
    needs and interests of a powerful elite (maybe
    the Government) and consolidates their economic
    and political power.
  • (TV Studies The Key Concepts P 153)

15
Dominant Ideology
  • Dominant groups do not simply win ideological
    struggles and retire to enjoy the spoils if a
    consensus is to be maintained, these battles need
    to be continually fought and won. (Hegemony)
  • National Sporting Events/National Lottery

16
Noam Chomsky
  • Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher,
    political activist, author, and lecturer.
  • He is a Professor of linguistics at the
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  • Manufacturing Consent How Television News
    Works. Propaganda Model.

17
Dominant ideology
  • TV News is more amenable to reproducing
    ideologies that sustain unequal relations of
    power.
  • There needs to be a balance between - audiences
    can reject or reconstruct the dominant ideology
  • and media organisations and media content have
    been shown to possess significant power in
    constructing and shaping ideological effect.
  • Polysemic
  • All signs and texts are capable of many potential
    meanings and readings and can be decoded in a
    variety of ways according to many factors.

18
Extract from Manufacturing Consent
  • John Lewis TV Advert 2015
  • What are the key ideologies in this text?
  • Is there a dominant ideology?
  • Values, beliefs, codes of behaviour?

19
Marxist Theorists
  • The traditions of the Marxist approach to
    studying the media are generally divided into
    political economists, structuralists like
    Althusser (Ideology)
  • and a more culture-orientated approach associated
    with the work of Gramsci.(Hegemony)

20
Marxism and Discourse
  • Tolson (1996) suggests ideology provides a way of
    understanding the relationship between
    semiological meanings and our social and
    political structures.
  • Discourse analysis enables us to investigate the
    values and ideas about the world and events which
    are limited, encouraged or prohibited.

21
Marxism and Discourse
  • Michel Foucault claimed that power and knowledge
    are interdependent power entails command over
    discourse and command over discourse entails
    power.
  • Examples?
  • Feminism in last lecture

22
Marxism and Hegemony
  • Media texts also draw meanings etc from wider
    society which are ideological framework of
    knowledge.
  • TV has its own codes and conventions are employed
    to complete the encoding process to naturalise or
    make transparent the meaning of the programme for
    the audience.

23
Modernised Marxism
  • Marxist emphasis on economics and class struggle
    has been largely replaced by an interest in other
    kinds of
  • Oppression ethnicity, gender, life-styles
  • Power formations global conglomerates,
    dominance of Apple and Microsoft.
  • Ways of circulating and challenging dominant
    assumptions the Internet, social media, web
    based forums etc.

24
How TV represents the working class Benefits
Street
  • Content Analysis
  • What stereotypes are presented in this opening
    scene?
  • What are the key ideologies?
  • Are the working class being demonised?
  • What position is the audience being offered by
    this text?

25
Formative Assessment The Scheme
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