billboards, radio, television, newspapers, advertisements, World Wide Web, books, CDs, video cassettes, SMS, computer games, mobile computers; we are besieged by these means.
Today’s world is dominated by the power of the media. Different images, analyses, news and realities are produced according to the attitudes, attachments and ideologies of the Media and all of these may belong to sponsors who are of different racial, ethnic, religious, political, economic and identical origins; People who support the media financially, ideologically and politically. So the reality produced cannot be the real reality because it feeds on the ideological views of the sponsors.
What Baudrillard mentioned as “hyperreality” refers to the artificiality of the real that blurs the boundaries between the “real” and “simulation, entertainment and actuality” (cited by Barker, 2001: 212).
The United States, as a multicultural society, with diverse racial and ethnic groups, is of concern in this article by focusing on blacks and how the media as producers of messages or transmitters of ‘signal vehicles’ (cited by Rojek, 2003; 94 ) in this Melton Pot is exercising the power of ethno-racial construction.
Breed has been a controversial issue since the exploration of America. It is woven into the warp and woof of American society and permeates all social institutions, and the media is no exception.
Media with the potential to spread facts, information, and opinions have a special place in American society. According to statistics from Media Policy 101, the average American spends more than 4 hours a day watching television, 78% of adults listen to the radio, 88% of Americans believe that the Internet plays an important role in their daily routine and the average American child watches 40,000 commercials a year. About 12 million viewers watch the nightly news on ABC, NBC, and CBS (Jacobs, 2000: 24).
And how are racial and ethnic groups like African Americans represented in this important place?
In the United States, it was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that we find black families on television drama (Barker, 2000: 267). Hall believed that this show was a comedy that became symbolic of the degradation of black people by its use of humor based on stereotypes. Representations of people of color in the media increased during 1980-90.
Stuart Hall believes that there are binary forms of representation between ‘them’ as white and ‘us’ as black. White has always been represented as good and black as bad, respectively civilized/primitive and attractive/ugly. Takaki also in ‘The storm in the desert’ showed this type of binary position in the case of the British and the Irish (Takaki, 1993; 28). Although these two are of the same origin, the British consider themselves civilized and educated, but the Irish are natural and wild.
This misrepresentation and ignorance also happens to Arabs in Hollywood movies. Norman Solomon pointed out that Arabs in Hollywood are always portrayed as dirty, untrustworthy, violent and lascivious (Solomon, 2004; 4).
media support ideologies
Althussers was a Marxist philosopher who defined a concept of ideology. He believed that ideology is one of the three levels of social formation. This concept means system of representation such as images, myths, ideas or concepts (Barker, 2000; 77). Ideology constitutes subjects and subjects are fragmented and have plural subject positions. Ideology is understood as a material phenomenon rooted in everyday conditions. In the definition of it, there are four ideological state apparatuses:
1.family
2. educational system (transmit the ideology of the ruling class)
3.church
4. media
For me, ideology can be one of the important factors in media formation.
In America since 1975, two-thirds of independent newspapers and one-third of television owners have disappeared. Just 4% of radio stations and less than 2% of television stations are owned by people of color.
The reason for the misrepresentation of African Americans can be traced back to occult ideologies. The existence of racial media depends on the existence of racial ideology.
Based on the above statistics, I believe that the American media is becoming more and more dominant in the masses and decides not only what to watch, but also how to think and believe in “produced reality”. I can also say that almost the power of the media is controlled by white Americans, not people of color. This shows how much they are marginalized from the main space of society and how ethnic racial power also exists in the media.
Gramsci, ideology and hegemony
Gramsci, an Italian writer, politician, and political theorist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, defined hegemony as “a situation in which a historical bloc of factions of the ruling class exercises social authority and leadership over subordinate classes” ( cited by Barker, 2000; 80).
He believed that the representation of the formal education system as a meritocracy and people of color as naturally inferior and less capable than white people is shaped by ideology. The hegemonic bloc, as he said, is not a single socioeconomic category, perhaps ideology plays a crucial role in group alliances. In Gramsci’s words, hegemony has to be constantly remade and renamed.
To have these two theories as a model, I think that African Americans have an experience of subordination towards whites during history and this historical bloc has existed since the exploration of America. The history of slavery and torture against black Americans was a cycle of rebuilding and regaining hegemony for white Americans.
During 1960-1970, the United States experienced a racial crisis that caused so many professionals and journalists to organize a series of conferences to consider racial issues. At that time the media was deficient in the neutrality of racial problems. Carolyn Martindale in her pamphlet “The White Press and Black America” stated that the media had failed on three counts:
1. Covering black people as a normal part of American society instead of reinforcing and promoting stereotypes.
2. Portray the problems faced by black Americans.
3. Explain the causes and underlying condition of African Americans.
According to Martindale (1986) and Campbell (1995), African Americans in the news are represented as criminals related to weapons and violence (cited by Barker, 2000; 269).
So far, in reviewing the theories of Althusser and Gramsci, I am tired of saying that the representation of blacks in the American media implies the existence of concepts of ideology and hegemony. Clearly, media such as newspapers, television, websites, and other forms (mentioned in the introduction) are dominated more by white power in America and blacks, a part of the American population, are subservient to white exceptionalism and the hegemony of whites to direct and sponsor the media.
White media also produce reality that can be hyper-reality involving white values and ideologies. Media have this ability for two reasons:
1. The media are managed by the corporation’s capital, so profits play an important role in the production of reality. In my idea, the media is a capitalist phenomenon that lives only on money.
2. The media creates reality and what they offer audiences is a version of “hallucinatory resemblance” (Barker, 2000; 212)
According to Nietzsche, pure knowledge is inadmissible and nothing more than the convenience of certain races and species (cited by Barker, 2000; 199). That is why today in the media we have different narratives for the same event. Each medium interprets the world with its own eyes. This goes back to the media feature. I believe that the media is not and cannot be a neutral phenomenon. It is basically profit oriented, regardless of the economic, cultural or political.
The media as a tool for shaping public opinion is of more concern to politicians and government agendas. Governments can stabilize their hegemony over the control of the media and the persuasion of the masses by ideologies. Censorship and the articulation of specific news, the representation of minorities as problems, alterization and racial/ethnic discriminations are policies of the sponsors of the media. I believe that the media have this ability everywhere, it is not specified in a particular part of the world, but the difference is in the amount and degree of interference.