MCM604 GDB 1 Solution and discussion

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International Communication
MCM604
SEMESTER FALL 2019
MARKS: 15
TOPIC Media Hegemony
Learning Objectives:
 To develop the understanding of hegemony.
 To develop the creative skills. Question
Gramsci’s conception of hegemony is rooted in the notion that the dominant social group in a society has the capacity to exercise intellectual and moral direction over society at large and to build a new system of social alliances to support its aims. Discuss the focus of the media hegemony theory and how foreign news agencies and news channels affect our news channels regarding dissemination of national information? Support your answer with the help of example.
Learning outcomes: Students will be able to:
 Analyze the role of International communication
 Identify the process of media Hegemony
 Note: Copied material will be graded “Zero”. Schedule
Marks: 15
Opening Date and Time Due Date and Time
November 21,2019 12:01 A.M. (Mid-Night) November 27, 2019 At 11:59 P.M. (Mid- Night)
MCM604 International Communication
VU

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MCM604 International Communication VU

[zareen]

Solution: Guidelines
Following points would be considered while making solution regarding the focus of the media hegemony theory of foreign news agencies and news channels on our news channels regarding dissemination of national information:

• Gramsci’s conception of hegemony is rooted in the notion that the dominant social group in a society has the capacity to exercise intellectual and moral direction over society at large and to build a new system of social alliances to support its aims.

• Gramsci argued that military force was not necessarily the best instrument to retain power for the ruling classes, but that a more effective way of wielding power was to build consent by ideological control of cultural production and distribution.

• According to Gramsci, such a system exists when a dominant social class exerts moral and intellectual leadership - through its control of such institutions as schools, religious bodies and the mass media - over both allied and subordinate classes.

• Social and intellectual authority is exercised by the government ‘with the consent of the governed - but with this consent organized, and not generic and vague’ in such a fashion that its right to govern is rarely challenged seriously.

• The ‘state does have and request consent but it also “educates” this consent’.

One of the most important functions of the state, Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks, ‘is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level (or type) which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling classes’. Schools, courts and a multitude of ‘initiatives and activities … form the apparatus of the political and cultural hegemony of the ruling classes’. This, he argued, was in contrast with a situation in which the dominant class merely rules, that is, coercively imposes its will on subordinate classes. This consent thus manufactured, however, cannot simply be assumed or guaranteed and has to be renewed, indicating that hegemony is more of a process - which is to be continually reproduced, secured and lost - rather than an achieved state of affairs.

• The notion of hegemony is widely used to conceptualize political functions of the mass media, as a key player in propagating and maintaining the dominant ideology and also to explain the process of media and communication production, with dominant ideology shaping production of news and entertainment. Thus, though the media are notionally free from direct government control, yet they act as agents of legitimization of the dominant ideology. The communication channels and news agencies of developing countries are dependent on foreign content/ developed nations’ information. So foreign content influenced the channels of developing countries. Media hegemony established through the control on information.