Americans are comfortable enough
materially to devote energy and resources to more intangible ends.
b. neo-institutionalism
The chapter takes another critical cue from “neo-institutional” theory, a form of political
analysis identified with Theda Skocpol and others. The basic premise of neo-
institutionalism is that institutions do not behave in a uniform manner; that is to say, it is not
helpful to speak of a state, a corporation, or some other large entity acting as if it was itself
an agent possessed of a will, interests, etc. This habit of mind puts us at risk of what is
called “reification”: the intellectual error whereby we “think of or treat something abstract as
if it existed as a real and tangible object.” We reify constantly in media and other
discourses: we speak of the invislble hand of the market, the strategic interests of the state,
the mood of the public., Contrary to this image of society, states and other collective bodies
consist of real people, often organized into interests, factions, and cliques, and each with
their own agenda, values, and outlook. Neo-institutionalism, seeking to avoid the habit of
reifying the state and treating it as if it had a mind and agency of its own, investigates the
actual behaviour of individuals and groups in states and other major institutions.
Neo-institutionalism recognizes that the political life of a society does not depend on either
politicians or the voting public. Rather, 英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】the state’s bureaucratic factions are themselves
political actors who have their own influence on issues, events, and the overall political
culture in which they operate. Miljan and Cooper define neo-institutionalism’s thesis as
follows: “The argument, very simply, is that any set of political demands may as easily
result from prior state action as from the action of private individuals or elected politicians”
(2003:49). But to understand their larger argument relating to “bias” better, more sophisticated knowledge of the actual nature of “bias”—more helpfully identified here as
“ideology”—is called for.
c. ideology: what it is and why it matters
What is frequently called “bias” might more productively be identified as ideology, insofar as
the “spin,” “slant” or “opinion” we have on any number of issues is motivated by a deeper
sense of how the world works. Ideology is the name we give to that sense. Ideology,
perhaps the most important concept in communication scholarship, has two distinct
scholarly meanings.
The first, typically defined in terms of what is called “dominant ideology” thesis, is a view of
ideology that sees it as a framework for understanding and experiencing reality that is
imposed by society’s elites onto the majority of the population. This definition of ideology,
th
century social critic and activist Karl Marx, is still sometimes
derived from the work of 19
used today in media studies, notably in the analy
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