Hegemony (Media Studies)

A term (from the Greek for “leadership”) mostly associated with the political theorist Antonio Gramsci, who used it to describe how capitalist power maintains itself in the modern state—namely, less through repressive force than through a correlation of political coercion and civil consent. Hegemony explains how the masses can voluntarily cooperate in their own domination by a ruling class. Gramsci describes the structure of civil society in terms of trench warfare. His choice of a military metaphor is pointed, implying that political and military science are identical and that a capitalist government is a form of war. As in trench warfare, it is impossible to engage the enemy head-on because its military strength is dispersed through a wide system of trenchlike structures, such as the judiciary, government, compulsory education, the church, and mass media. Because democracies refuse to vest absolute authority in any single person or executive body, and because the democratic state machine is always bigger than any individual or group of individuals, power is exercised through a totality of discrete institutions that on the face of it are often in conflict with each other. Modern versions of hegemony turn from the metaphor of the trench to the web, conceiving of power as a potentially endless network of relations that continually shift to incorporate every position of dissent encountered. This model of power is dynamic and mobile, in which the media become the site of competing ideologies rather than the instrument of a single class interest- some are independently funded, and some are owned by large [Page 233]corporations. They have the appearance of autonomy-they “perform” power by continuous representation, coverage, and management of information- by “covering” apparently everything of note or interest, they assimilate positions of dissent- by claims to balanced reportage (in terms of both quantitative and qualitative coverage), they elicit the consenting agreement of the masses.