прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - Ideology

'popular' capitalism of Thatcherism and Reagonomics, and the increasing power of the New Right. 6

At the same time union membership may be discredited as 'communise, radical' or simply out of date. Thus, forms of intra-group solidarity of dominated groups may be prevented or obstructed. The same divisions may be created among women by discrediting feminism; they may be discredited among ethnic minorities by emphasizing ethnic crime or by discrediting multiculturalism through allegations of political correctness, on the one hand, and at the same stressing the positive role of the governrnent and the 'offering' of integrated minority lelp' by mainstream institutions, on the other hand. Obviously, such strategies are not always successful, and resistance and opposition may be able to challenge them in many ways, thus leading to specific social changes, including some in the ideologies of

dominant groups. 7

Further complications

Of course, deeper analysis of there ideological processes is in order, because the picture is much more complicated. For one, even within dominant groups, there are ideological dissidents. That is, there are elite group members (leading politicians, journalists, scholars, etc.) who reject and resist dominant ideologies and may even 'side with' dominated groups, as has been the case in most ideological revolutions. The converse is also true — members of dominated groups may espouse elite ideologies, if only in order to get, individually, recognition or access to other resources that the elites will provide to them as tokens of their gratitude for their 'defectioñ .

Examples may for instance be found among some minority group members who Nave espoused ideologies (e.g. about'political correctness') that are clearly inconsistent with those of their own group (see Chapter 28).

Another well-known complication is the fact that, despite what has been said aboye, there are cases in which elite ideologies are successful among specific dominated groups even when they are inconsistent with the interests of most group members, as is the case for neo-liberal market ideologies. One, equally well-known, explanation for such success, apart from their pervasiveness in the mass media and public discourse, and the social processes of individualization and competition among the dominated groups, are the various mechanisms of manipulation.

That is, what the public discourses of such ideologies typically do is to tone down the obviously inconsistent parts of the ideology and emphasize those parts that may be more attractive. Thus, racist (and some conservative) parties may foment ethnic prejudices, blame immigrants or minorities for social problems, and may thus attract lower (middle) class voters and supporters. They will, however, seldom advertise their conservative policies when it comes to the position of women and the consequences, for the poor, of their market ideologies. At the same time, those who share more subtle

versions of racist ideologies may publicly mitigate their racist attitudes, and try to influence those among the population who reject overt racism, but who may be sensitive to, for example, ecological or social ideas. In that case, reference to overpopulation, scarce natural resources, or the cultural 'backwardness' (e.g. in the treatment of women) of some immigrant groups, may be used as 'rational' arguments in favour of an immigration control that may be acceptable even to liberals.

In the same way, the mass media will generally select or focus on those 'facts' that are consistent with elite interests, and vice versa, thereby persuasively influencing the models, and indirectly the knowledge and other social representations of the public at large, as described before. Most, prominent are examples of nationalist war propaganda, and the public praise of the blessings of the 'freedom' or the'flexibility' of the market, in which the multiple negative consequences for large groups of the population will be selectively obscured or simply ignored.

Strategies of ideological control

Thus, elite ideologies may well be adopted more broadly among the population at large or among specific dominated groups under the following conditions.

1 They are able to divide the non-dominant groups, by being at least attractive to, or in the interest of, some non-dominant groups, thus preventing intra-group solidarity and the organization of counter-power, for example sexism and especially racism, thus preventing non-elite solidarity and sharing of dissident ideologies, for instance among women and minorities.

2 Preventing ingroup solidarity of (important) non-dominant groups by creating divisions within the group and by addressing group members as individuals, for example dividing women between 'feminists' and the 'others', or enticing lower-class members with liberal rhetoric of personal responsibility and upward mobility.

3 There are no (strong) popular alternatives to elite ideologies, or these altematives, are unknown or marginalized, for example racism, because anti-racism is virtually excluded from the mass media; or neo-liberalism after the dernise of socialism and communism.

4 The elites (and especially media editors) prevent or limit the access to public discourse of leaders of non-dominant groups (no feminist, antiracist or political 'radicals' in mainstream media), or will marginalize or discredit them among the population at large or even among their own groups.

5 Popular ideologies are seemingly adopted by the elites, but in a very moderate way, thereby avoiding major conflicts with the interests of the elites, for example environmentalism and — partly — feminism.

6 ff elite ideologies are largely inconsistent with relatively strong and known ideologies of dominated groups, the elites have the special means of media access and control, and discursive strategies of manipulation of knowledge and opinions, for example by emphasizing the ideological implications that are less inconsistent with the interests of dominated groups, or de-emphasizing those that are inconsistent with these interests, for example nationalism, militarism, and especially neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism.

Of course, there are other means of ideological control, but these cover a wide variety of forms of ideological dominance. The more specific but crucial discursive strategies involved in these forms of ideological domination will be discussed in more detall later.

Concluding remark

This discussion suggests that the argumenta for the dominant ideology hypothesis are not very persuasive, but that in many situations and under specific conditions it does seem to hold true. It is the task of a more detailed theory of ideology to specify how and where it does apply, and where it does not apply. It is, however, a very general and abstract thesis, and it is clearly necessary that it be translated into the detailed structures of social cognition, discourse, communication and social structures, before it can be evaluated more rigorously. Despite the large ideological variety and confusion of contemporary society, the evidence strongly suggests that, given the increasing control of the elites of the mass media, and the increasing role of the mass media as the major means of ideological control of society, elite ideologies will generally tend to be dominant, as defined aboye. Popular ideologies may become dominant only (a) if they have broad support within or across several dominated groups, (b) if leaders of such groups have access to public discourse, and especially the mass media (which implies that at least some mass media need to collude with them), and more generally (c) if these ideologies are not fundamentally inconsistent with the interests of the majority of the elites.

Organizing the reproduction of ideologies

In the analytical sequence that carnes us from the psychology of individual cognition and action, and the microsociology of everyday situated interaction (including discourse), to the macrosociology of group relations, power and shared belief systems, we fmally need to examine the role of institutions that organize, manage or propagate such cognitions, actions, interactions and group relations. In the discussion about the role of discourse in the reproduction of ideologies, we shall further investigate how ideologies are reproduced in and by the text and talk of families, peer groups, schools, media, churches, unions, clubs, social movements, agencies, corporate businesses, and so on. In the previous chapters, we have found that the media play a central role in the reproduction of dominant elite ideologies.

Therefore, before I discuss the discursive details of such reproduction processes, a sociological analysis needs to focus more generally on the ideological role of organizations and institutions.

In many ways, institutions or organizations are the 'practicaP or social counterpart of ideologies. That is, in the same way as ideologies organize group cognition, institutions and organizations organize social practices and social actors. Merely being a 'group' of women, journalists, teachers, or anti-racists, may not be enough to organize members' actions effectively, and to achieve desired group goals, either individually or jointly. Institutions and organizations may co-ordinate common goals and actions, provide or distribute resources and other conditions and constraints, elect or impose leaders, and so on.

Similarly, in order to organize ideological practices, we may assume that ideological institutions are needed. 1 In other words, ideological institutions are created that (also) have as their task the 'realization' of a shared ideology. Probably there are few institutions that are exclusively ideological, that is, geared towards the propagation of belief systems only. Churches may still be the most obvious example, although in practice, and in order to realize their ideological goals, they also have several (other) social aims and activities, such as welfare and community services. At a more basic levet, also families and their socialization practices are pardy ideological, because of their role in the socialization of norms, values and fragmenta of ideology. 2

Schools, universities and the whole education system are among the most complex, elaborate and pervasive ideol6gical institutions, if only because

they involve virtually afl members of society, intensively and daily, sometimes for more than twenty years. Geared mainly towards the reproduction of knowledge and the acquisition of skills, they obviously also operate as major means for the reproduction of the dominant ideologies of society, although in sorne cases they also facilitate the propagation of counterideologies. Indeed, schools and especially universities are among the few institutions where enough freedom (from state intervention, from the market, etc.) exists for 'dissidents' to voice their opposed ideologies?

Despite this pervasive role of education, in contemporary information societies much of the ideological work of the family, the Church and the school is taken over by the mass media as an institution. While mainly geared towards the production of information and entertainment, they at the same time constitute the most complex institution for the public expression and challenge of ideologies: Without the media, and given the reduced role of the church, and the limitation of schooling to children and adolescente, public debate about issues, and shared knowledge about what happens in society and the world, would at present be unthinkable. It may therefore be assumed that in the reproduction of ideologies, the media play a central role. Social representations are easily and widely shared because of these forms of accessible public discourse, and the same is true for the ideologies that underlie these representations.

The structures, strategies and practices of these social institutions need not only be oriented by practical reasons of organization, efficiency, the distribution of roles or resources or the attainment of goals. They may also reflect and facilitate ideological concerns. Lessons, textbooks, exams, assignments, corrections and sanctions in educational institutions, thus, may be organized partly by ideologically based aims to teach and inculcate 'the right things', including the'right' ideologies in the first place. In a less organized way, the same is true for the various socialization discourses in the family.

The media

Though less explicit, but therefore probably more pervasive and influential, the same is true for the media. The production of news, advertising, documentaries, movies, games, talk shows and other shows, among many

— other.-media genres, may thus be examined in detail for the ways they organize actions, discourses, sounds and images in such a way that ideological production and reproduction, including processes among the audience, are most effective. In news gathering, such ideological concems monitor assignments, beats, interviews, press conferences, press releases, selection and decision procedures, among other practices. That is, these practices are govemed by professional expertise and attitudes and ideologies about what is true or false (fact or opinion), interesting or uninteresting, newsworthy or not, relevant or irrelevant, and so on. News values are among the many ideological systems that guide such practices — these specify, for instance,

the preference for news about elites, negative events (especially those caused by others), our own cultural group and world region, and so on.

13ut, less directly, the same is true for seemingly less ideological decisions about who has access to the media, who is interviewed, covered, and who will be quoted. It is well known that elite persons, organizations and states are predominant in these pattems of access, and hence also the opinions and ideologies of such elites. And sine most journalists in the West are white, male, middle class and heterosexual (among other identities), it is most likely that they will favour the access and the opinions of 'similar' news actors. Most research confirms this assumption.

In sum, the routines, actors, events and institutional arrangements in newsmaking are biased towards the reproduction of a limited set of dominant, elite ideologies, as we have seen in a previous chapter. This is not only true for news production, but also for current affairs programmes, documentaries, shows, and other categories of media discourse.

What has been said about institutional production routines and constraints is reflected in their products. Thus, preferential access is reflected in preferential quoting, favourable opinions and hence style, access to the opinion page, preferred topics, and in general in all aspects of media discourse. For such complex ideological reasons, thus, we get more news and opinions about alleged or socio-economically less destructive 'minority' crimes than about real crimes of discrimination by employers or other elités, more news by and about men and about topics that interest men more than women, and so on. These are familiar research fmdings, and my point is merely to recall them in order to illustrate the ideological conditions, practices and products of institutions.

Crucially, the same is true for the consequences of such ideological institutions for the reproduction of ideologies among the population at large, as I have already discussed when examining the dominant ideology thesis. Despite the personal differences and freedom of media users in their processing and use of media discourse, the overall ideological effects of the media are undeniable — the range of acceptable social ideologies is more or less identical with those that have preferential access to the mass media. Fundamental norms and values, the selection of issues and topics of interest and attention (agenda setting), selective if not biased knowledge about the world, and many other elements or conditions of ideological control, are presently largely due to the mass media, or indirectly to the groups and institutions, such as those of politics, that have preferential access to the media. Of course there will be debate, opposition, differences of opinion, as well as differences among newspapers. However, these are well within the boundaries of tolerable ideological variation. No serious newspaper advocates, for instance, the abolition of the market, the abolition of all arms and armies, a total reversal of all gender roles, so that women will be put in charge of the world and all major institutions, let alone the control of the mass media by independent monitoring organizations that will evaluate their truthfulness, quality, and the total absence of gender, class, ethnic or other

biases. In sum, within a theory of ideology, the pervasive role of ideological institutions such as those of politics, education and especially the mass media explains the very social conditions of ideologies, namely, the means and the ways of their being shared by large numbers of people and groups in the first place.

Institutional racism

Taking up again the example of racism, we should ask how racist ideologies are sustained and reproduced by institutions and organizations. The most obvious example in most countries in Europe and other white-dominated countries is the presence and activities of racist political parties. 5 Although politically nowhere dominant beyond the local level of some neighbourhoods and cides, and although often marginalized by the mainstream media, their indirect ideological influence is considerable. Even when covered in a context of conflict, for instance by quoting provocative statements of their leaders, or by highlighting counter-demonstrations and protests, they are as widely known as their ideologies are. The radical versions of these ideologies may be generally rejected by the elites, but it has been often observed that more moderate versions of their xenophobic or anti-immigrant slogans have found wide currency and even support among mainstream parties, as has been the case for instance for the conservative parties in the USA, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Italy, among other countries.

Increasingly harsh immigration restrictions, earlier advocated only by racist parties, are now standard government policy everywhere. The same is true for various policies that turn back (or never introduce) the gains and claims of the civil rights movement or similar movements in other countries. Popular support for such policies among large sections of the white population is guaranteed, after the ideological onslaught of racist and conservative propaganda, which tends to blame many social ills on the presence or the activities of immigrants and minorities. Immigration can thus easily be targeted as one of the major causes of unemployment, diminishing welfare or the real or alleged increase of crime. The mass media, and especially the conservative popular press, play a crucial role in the persuasive support and propagation of these ideologies.

And although I focus here on the production and reproduction of ideologies, it hardly needs to be added that such ideologies also sustain concomitant social and political action. Ideologies are translated finto actual policies, which are executed in concrete practices, for example of the immigration services, the police or the courts, or the media. The negative examples of the elites and state agencies are followed, often more blatantly or even violently, by organizations or youth groups who openly discriminate or attack immigrants and minorities. In a few dornains in society, the institutional and elite propagation of ethnocentrist, xenophobic and racist

ideologies clearly and directly influences everyday practices of exclusion, marginalization, problematization and violence directed against others, as is the case in the anea of ethnic relations. Colonialism, slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, the Holocaust, and at present Rwanda, Bosnia and South Asia, are the well-known illustrations of that observation.

In sum, racist ideologies, and especially their popular and populist versions, are sustained by a large number of important institutions and organizations. Extremist right-wing parties, conservative parties and thinktanks, the popular press, phone-in radio, racist pamphlets, marginal but influential racist scholars and their publications, are among the many institutional factors that are involved in this reproduction process.

Again, although the radical versions of these ideologies may not be predominant, moderate versions may well have become dominant in Western societies where conservative forces are in the majority. Even leftist and social democratic parties and organizations doñ t escape the pressures of the broad popular (white) support for such ideologies, and adapt their ideologies and policies accordingly. This does not only show in the support of antiimmigration or anti-minority attitudes, but especially also in the marginalization of anti-racist groups and ideologies.

Indeed, one of the main problems in Western societies may not be that moderate racist ideologies are influential, but rather that the official nonracist norm, as established by law and constitution, is not institutionalized in such a way that such ideologies are energetically combated. There are antiracist groups and institutions, but these are minor and often have a bad press or little support among the population at large, as well as among the elites. They may be officially marginalized as much as the extremist-right, while allegedly being too'radical'. In such a political evaluation, thus, both racism and anti-racism are rejected, thus leaving a vast consensus intact in which anti-immigrant ideologies may flourish because they are simply deemed not to be racist, but commonsense. We shall later see how political and media discourse constructs and sustains such a broadly organized consensus of white domination.

Part III

DISCOURSE

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The Relevance of Discourse

The special relevance of discourse

In the tbird part of this study I fmally focus on another crucial dimension of ideology, namely, its expression and (re)production in social interaction in general and in discourse in particular. Having assumed that ideologies are shared social representations that have specific social functions for groups, we need to fmd out how such ideologies are acquired, constructed, used and changed by social group members. This means that, after the excursion into the social macro dornain of groups, group relations and institutions, we now need to get down to the micro level again, that is, to the level where ideological production and reproduction is actually being achieved by social actors in social situations.

Against the background of the classical approach to ideology, such a micro-level study of interaction and discourse is especially relevant. Not only does the traditional account of ideologies tell us litde about the precise nature of ideologies (namely, as mental representations), but it is also unspecific about how exactly ideologies come about, and what role social actors play in their construction and reproduction. This also means that such approaches largely ignore how a typical macro notion such as ideology should be related to typical micro notions such as actors, actions, social practices, discourses and social situations.'

By focusing especially on the role of discourse in the reproduction processes of ideologies, I do not imply, as some current approaches do, that 1 reduce ideologies, or their study, to discourse and discourse analysis. 1 Discourse, language use and communication do play a special role in such processes of reproduction, but ideologies are also being expressed and reproduced by social and semiotic practices other than those of text and talk. From the study of racist and sexist ideologies, for instance, we know that many forms of non-verbal discrimination aso exhibit ideological beliefs. Besides these well-known practices of discrimination, also other semiotic messages (e.g. photographs and movies) may of course express underlying ideologies? When social members observe and comprehend such (non-

verbal) practices, they may also infer underlying opinions of actors; and across contexts these may also be generalized to more abstract underlying social attitudes and ideologies. They may do so through an inferential step that tells group members: 'This apparently is how we do it' or, 'This is apparently the way to deal with members of such and such a group.' In sum, although discourse is often crucial in the expression and reproduction of ideologies, it neither is a necessary nor a sufficient 'medium' of reproduction.

Although this part of the study focuses on discourse, we should bear in mind that it is paradigmatic for a broader study of ideological practices in all domains of society, from non-verbal communication to the myriad of other social actions and interactions that define everyday life. Also, we should not forget that discourse is often embedded in or otherwise related to such nonverbal interactions, as is the case for talk and text at honre, in parliament, in school, in the newsroom, the workfloor, the office, the shop, the agency, the hospital, the police station or in prison. Ideologically based dominance and inequality, conflict and competition, resistance and opposition, as discussed before, thus, are implemented and reproduced in many ways, both discursively and in other interactions.

Discourse, however, has a special status in the reproduction of ideologies. Unlike most other social practices, and in a more explicit way than most other semiotic codes (such as photos, pictures, images, signs, paintings, movies, gestures, dance and so on), various properties of text and talk allow social members to actually express orformulate abstract ideological beliefs, or any other opinion related to such ideologies. Specific actions only allow more or less indeterminate inferences about the underlying opinions of actors, but as such cannot express general, abstract or socially shared opinions.

With visual messages this is somewhat easier, and in some cases more effective than through discourse. But in general, there is no semiotic code as explicit and as articulate in the direct expression of meanings, knowledge, opinions and various social beliefs as natural language (and of course in various sign languages). If an image is worth a thousand words, this is mostly because of the visual details that are hand to describe verbally. This means that images may be particularly apt at expressing the visual dimension of mental models. If images express opinions or general beliefs and ideologies, they do so rather indirectly, and hence are in need of (indeterminate) interpretations. This does not imply that, in communication, such indirect expressions of opinions and ideologies need to be less persuasive. On the contrary, a dramatic photograph of a specific scene, event or person may be a much more 'powerfur means of expressing opinion than words. However, this persuasiveness is precisely based on the concreteness of the 'example', and needs reader-based inferences about what the picture actually 'means', as is also the case for model-based storytelling or other examples used as a means to convey abstract opinions and ideologies.