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Croteau, Media/Society, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2019
Chapter Outlines
Chapter 6: Media and Ideology
Purpose and Goals of the Chapter
Chapter 6 introduces the question of ideology, exploring the values, beliefs, and
norms that media products routinely display. The chapter looks at the underlying
perspectives in the images that confront us every day, as well as the potential
contradictions and ambiguities that are built into media texts.
The chapter discusses the meaning of the term “ideology” and explores the
theoretical roots of analysis of media ideology, while, at the same time, suggesting that
much current media criticism implicitly uses an ideological framework. A series of
examples from news, film, television, music, and advertising explore a range of
substantive arguments about the ways that contemporary American mass media
disseminate ideology. At the same time, we discuss the ways that such ideology is often
fraught with contradiction and subject to change.
Outline of Key Chapter Themes
• Ideological analysis of media provides a window onto broader debates in society.
• Media help to normalize, or make unexceptional, certain widely circulating attitudes and
behaviors.
• Hegemony is a key concept for ideological analysis.
• The taken-for-granted, the realm of commonsense, and our definitions of the “natural”
are the terrain of ideological analysis.
• News media draw boundaries that help legitimize and obfuscate opinion.
• Ideological analysis often focuses on a specific genre, specific historical period, or
ideological perspective.
• Television helps to define social relationships, including the meaning of family.
• Some rap music is contradictory political expression that, on one hand, provides a
critique of American society, and on the other hand, sometimes reinforces sexist and
homophobic attitudes.
• Consumerism is the underlying ideology that is promoted by mass advertising.
• Women’s magazines promote, in both ads and editorial content, an ideology that
celebrates consumption.
• Ad images of foreigners generally reproduce assumptions about powerful Americans and
subservient “others.”
Chapter Outline
• What Is Ideology?
o Ideology and the “Real” World
o Dominant Ideology versus Cultural Contradictions
Croteau, Media/Society, 6e
SAGE Publishing, 2019
o The “Culture War” Battles over Ideology
o Ideology as Normalization
• Theoretical Roots of Ideological Analysis
o Early Marxist Origins
o Hegemony
• News Media and the Limits of Debate
o Elites and Insiders
o Economic News as Ideological Construct
• Movies, the Military, and Masculinity
o Action-Adventure Films
o Vietnam Films and War Films Today
• Television, Popularity, and Ideology
o Television and Reality
o Television and the Changing American Family
o Revising Tradition: The New Momism
• Rap Music as Ideological Critique?
• Advertising and Consumer Culture
o Selling Consumerism in the Early 20th Century
o Women’s Magazines as Advertisements
• Advertising and the Globalization of Culture
• Internet Ideology
• Conclusion
