Response to Long and Wall: Media Power

During this chapter, Long and Wall raise many various points regarding media power. They focus on areas such are ideology, hegemony and discourse. In this short response I am going to focus on their ideology section, as I feel it is the most interesting.

As with all of the sections, the authors begin by defining the subject then exploring the basic definition. 'Ideology has something to do with ideas, but it is initially hard to see how ideas can be 'hidden', or how they can be presented as 'truths'.'1 They then include a few basic examples and begin to explore Marxism in relative depth. They write positively about Karl Marx's work by suggesting he was 'influential' and 'important'. The part I find most intriguing about this section is that, they also bring other scholars, such as 'German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel' into the discussion to further their evidence. Long and Wall state 'the basis of Hegel's theory was that ideas have an existence all of their own', they follow this up by briefly explaining how this theory works, yet they don’t continually make reference back to Marx. I decided to focus on this because it seems like a simple error, however it makes the reader lose sight of any point that was being made. Textbooks have a long reputation as being unclear in their approach to combining different arguments, and I believe that this lack of referring between scholars is evidentially as to why.

As far as I can see, this is the only example in the text of Long and Wall making this error, however I feel that as this is from a textbook, used to teach others, that it shouldn’t have been overlooked. The lack of reference makes the text lack continuity thus making it difficult to read. Other than this the chapter is full of arguments, which are substantially supported with evidence and explanation.