Table of Contents

Mapping hegemony

television news coverage of industrial conflict

by Robert Goldman and Arvind Rajagopal

Preface ix

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction

Hegemony
Television and the Big Picture Circa 1977 6

1 Network News and Ideology 7

Television News and Public Debate in Class Society 7
Democracy, Capitalism, and Objectivity 12
News as Commodity 16
The Negotiation of Hegemonic Ideology 19

2 Studying Network Coverage of Strikes 23

Research on Television News and Labor 24
Audiences and Texts 27
Methods for Analyzing News Texts 29

3 The Coal Strike in Historical Context 37

An Alternative Account 39
Rank-&-File Agendas for Change 43
Wildcat Stoppages Versus Bureaucratic Arbitration 46
Crisis of the Health and Pension Benefits 51
The BCOA's Political-Economic Agenda 54
Negotiations 58
White House Intervention 63
Energy "Shortages" 66
Invoking Taft-Hartley 68

4 Reading Social Texts/Mapping Ideology

The Framebox 78
Picturing the Strike 79
Synchronizing Pictures and Words 81
The Channeling of Voices 83
No Spokesman was Available 85
The Media Politics of Discursive Space 86

5 CBS's "Natural History" of the Coal Strike 89

A Descriptive Summary of Narrative Curves and Frames 89
Carter Takes Center Stage 93
ABC and NBC 96
Summary of Frames 97
Prevailing Frames 98
Absent Frames 105

6 Ideological Analysis 111

Hegemonic Encodings and the Plurality of Decodings 114
Framing Practices and Narratives Codes 118
Frames at Work 126

7 Hierarchy of Access 129

8 Defining the Strike Consensually 139

Condensation and Flow 143
Ideological Consensus and Conceptual Disarray 147

9 Cutting Out Capital: Foregrounding Anarchy 151

Anarchy Versus Arnold Miller 158

10 Formulas of Neutrality 167

Network Mediation of Working-Class Speech 167
Narrative Neutrality and Balance 172
Introducing the BCOA 175
Eclipsing Class Without Bias 176

11 Pseudobalance: Carter, Taft-Hartley, and the Miners 179

Screening Class Conflict 190

12 Covering the Strike 195

Public Relations and Class Relations 201
Where Then Does Hegemony Come From? 205

13 Conclusion 209

Hegemony and U.S. Network News -- The Late 1970s 210
Abbreviated Information and Presumed Knowledge 214
Television News, Hegemony, and Public Discourse 215
References 219
 

Appendix 1: Reading the Wider Political-Economic Framework 237

Appendix 2: CBS News Dates 243

Appendix 3: Framebox Symbols 245

Press Citations on 1977-78 Coal Strike 227

Author Index 249

Subject Index 252

 

RETURN TO GOLDMAN HOMEPAGE