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Beneath the fold: reading ideology in the Irving family newspapers.

Article Excerpt
Introduction

Media in all of its forms are a constant and pervasive force in most Canadians' lives from birth to death. Communication media have overtaken other social institutions, such as education and religion, as the primary forces of legitimization. The media, including newspapers, are usually the first means through which ideology is manifested, partly because they have immediacy and because they have the capacity to evolve quickly.

In this article, I examine the development of ideology as a theoretical concept, exploring the ways in which classical and contemporary theorists have defined and utilized the term. In addition, I present a case study that highlights the workings of ideology in the media. This case study focuses on the media coverage of a strike at the Irving Oil Refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick, from 1994 to 1996. The media coverage of this labour dispute provides fertile ground for an analysis of the workings of ideology. A variety of central issues are located here, including monopoly ownership of the New Brunswick media by the Irving Group of Companies; the concept of "manufactured" news; the ideological presentation of strikes in general; and the representation of changing labour relations in a post-industrial, globally-oriented society.

In terms of media coverage of this particular strike, a number of additional factors are present compared to previous case studies in this literature. The most significant factor for students of ideology' in the media is that the Irving Group, which was in dispute with the workers, is the owner and de facto editor of every single English-language daily newspaper in the province. Thus the adage that "freedom of the press is for those who own one" is particularly salient in this case. Yet the coverage of this issue reveals that there were differences among the New Brunswick papers as well as in the Globe and Mail, and the other Canadian papers. In addition, while the representations of the strikers at the Irving papers appear to be largely negative, they are done in a subtle way that prevented many readers from recognizing the control exerted by the publishers over the content of these stories.

Ideology

The conceptual terrain suggested by the word "ideology" is a thorny one: the term's frequent and often misleading use has created an overgrown and chaotic landscape. As used regularly in the media and in general discussion, ideology is a concept which in its most common usage is frequently presented as a form of propaganda or lie: "I have truth and you have ideology." Among scholars there is persistent confusion over the significance and multiple meanings of ideology. Ideology is, however, a profoundly important concept in social analysis.

For Karl Mannheim, ideology is a set of ideas for interpreting and understanding reality. It is presented as a neutral term that takes an adjective, as in "capitalist" ideology or "communist" ideology. In Mannheim's theory, if the way you make sense of the world around you is shaped by certain values, such as functionalism, then your understanding of reality will be based on belief in consensus. In the process of news writing, the ideological orientation--or worldview, or "package"--of the journalist will necessarily frame the writer's understanding and interpretation of events. The neutrality of the Mannheimian definition is very attractive as it seeks to address the ideological nature of this everyday interpretation of the world. It avoids the association of ideology with false belief and it is more general than some of the other possibilities, such as the liberal definition. Yet it does not directly address the issue of the promotion of propaganda, or the omnipresent shaping of ideas by material forces and agents, or even hegemony.

On the other hand, Karl Marx, especially the later Marx, defines ideology as a set of ideas that distorts reality. Ideas are shaped by the dominant economic class. This can be most clearly seen in the case of capitalist ownership of newspapers, in which selection of editors, and the selection and filtering of news and editorial material, tend to reinforce the views of the ownership. Material production shapes mental production, in other words. The Marxist definition of ideology falls short because by defining ideology as false belief, it first of all assumes the existence of "true belief" and it fails to account for the existence of a communist or socialist ideology.

American liberals such as Daniel Bell define ideologies as political ideologies, emphasizing distinct philosophical beliefs that influence political action. In the 1950s, Daniel Bell claimed that we were seeing the end of the dominance of the traditional rigid adherence to grand political ideologies of this type, especially in their most extreme forms, like Fascism and Communism. In terms of media analysis, liberals would identify turn-of-the-century partisan presses as examples of a bygone age of overtly ideological media that has been replaced with a medium that seeks to be an objective window on the world. These end-of-ideology adherents, or `Enders,' as I will refer to them, declared the end of this former type of ideology and failed to identify the ideological nature of their own political beliefs and activity. The Enders' definition is too restrictive and doesn't allow for analysis of the ideology inherent in the repetitive routines of everyday life, that come to us through commonsense or the common stock of social and cultural knowledge. This is ideologically loaded material, but it is not treated as ideology when ideology is limited to the restrictive definition. In addition, the claim that the "end of ideology" has arrived is very misleading when we consider ideology in its "inclusive" sense, disregarding for the moment questions that...

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