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interesting thread--in general i agree with paulybrklynny....
hegemony--cultural domination--might be seen as control over the discursive frame of reference. over the past 20 years or so, the right has done an impressive job via the development of media inputs structured by the network of think tanks on the order of aei, brookings, cato, etc. in shifting the general frame of reference onto their grounds---if you wanted to do an analysis of "biais"---sort of a strange term in that it presupposes the idiotic notion of objectivity as a norm---it would make far more sense to actually examine the way in which arguments are framed--chomsky's propaganda model, mentioned above, makes this point---discourse analysis on the order of jean-pierre faye's work on fascist discourse, pierre bourdieu's work on heidegger, provides more precise data that can be seen as working in the same manner.
inidividuals can be asked to self-identify politically and it will tell you nothing about the frame of reference in terms of which they shape what they write, for example---like most conservative modes of trying to make social arguments without taking the social seriously, this self-idenitification tends to naturalize the frame of reference. if you wanted to do such an analysis, you could identify a series of terms that function as markers of ways of thinking structured by neoliberal or other rightwing ideologies, and simply count their occurances in televised or printed news stories (within the sample obviously). you would probably find that these terms operate consistently in the way reports frame their issues, and that there is little disagreement amongst individual reporters of different, vague political orientations about the neutrality of these terms and their utility.
there is extensive sociological work out there already on the social reproduction of journalism---of course the article at the beginning of this thread ignores all that. maybe it does not matter to readers of the christian socience monitor. i dont know.
insofar as matters of economic class are concerned---conservatives have real trouble with thinking about capitalism as a social system--i have never understood this, in that it makes coherent thinking about capitalism almost impossible---as such, there is little possibility of hearing arguments about the necessity of integrating the maringalised into the dominant order in the interest of long-term social stability--instead you get a fatuous moralizing understanding of poverty and a suicidal series of conclusions about how to deal with poverty deriving from them.
as for the matter of being a "champion of the downtrodden" and this somehow running into a contradiction because to be a champion means you have to be visible, which means you have to have some kind of cultural power, the problem seems to be framed in a manner that follows from the above---if you like capitalism as a system, then it is in your interest to think in systemic terms about it, to deal with the problems of marginalization/poverty as political issues and to argue for the redirection of resources to deal with these consequences of the unequal distribution of wealth as basic adjustments that are necessary for the ability of the wealthy to continue to extract wealth from the system, for the continued operation of the system at all---the notion of "champion of the downtrodden" functions to hide the matter of poverty, of the unequal distribution of wealth--it reduces the problems of an entire social sector to those of an individual, a spokesmodel--the social situation of that model then becomes an easy target, because in conservativeland it is always easier to shoot the messenger who mentions problems than it is to think about those problems. either way, if you are going to advance a political argument, you need to have access to the cultural sphere that shapes political debate. no access=no visibility=no position from which to argue. qed. unless the underlying point of attacking these figureheads is a desire to have no disruptions, no unpleasant arguments intruding on the manicured interior world of the television-watching petit bourgeois, in which case everything follows--but the critique refers more to an aesthetic position relative to politics than it does to politics.
and as for nationalism=it is a kind of collective mental disorder. the sooner that ideology implodes the better. "globalism" seems more a recognition of the reorganization of capital flows in the real world than it does a substitute for nationalism. fact is that if nationalism implodes, the right will be completely lost---problems for nationalism are problems that shake the entire foundation of conservative ideology--and its "liberal" variant as well.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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