Cultural Hegemony or Emancipation? Historical Perspectives on Media and Social Inequality, Vol. 32 - 2025, No. 4
Unequal Media Worlds: East Berlin Media Criticism after 1990
This article examines East Berlin media criticism post-1990, focusing on the unequal distribution of symbolic resources between East and West Germans. Utilising Giddens’s structuration and identity theories, we link the discursive side of inequality with media and define media criticism as one response of marginalised groups’ to hegemonic discourses. We conducted 37 biographical interviews with East Berliners to examine their media criticism and experiences of exclusion in media discourse. We found that hegemonic media narratives about East Germany have influenced East Berlin media criticism. This criticism is directed at systemic media biases, particularly in public service broadcasting. The study identified a latent consciousness of structural factors shaping media realities among East Berliners, often linked to their experiences of social declassing and the socioeconomic challenges after reunification. A range of East Berliners criticised the portrayal of German Democratic Republic (GDR) life in the media, particularly the focus on the Stasi and negative stereotypes, which they feel misrepresent their lived experiences. The persistence of these stereotypes has, for some, reinforced an East German identity and fostered media criticism as a form of identity work.
Full text (PDF/ePub) | Export Reference | Link to this article
How Different Models of Media Regulation Address Social Inequality: A Qualitative Textual Analysis of Key Media Regulation Texts from Germany and the United Kingdom
The article employs a comparative textual analysis of key legal texts within German (democratic–corporatist) and UK (liberal) media regulation models to examine the relationship between mass media regulation and social inequality. The research addresses three key questions: firstly, how each model approaches different markers of inequality (such as gender, age, race, ethnicity, or religion); secondly, how regulation has evolved alongside changing identity politics; and thirdly, what this reveals about underlying power structures – conceptualised as “symbolic violence” with Bourdieu – within each system. The analysis demonstrates a broadly similar acknowledgement of inequality markers in both countries, though the normative justifications for addressing them diverge. Notably, both regulatory frameworks pay limited attention to socio-economic inequality, reflecting a global trend of prioritising cultural identity over economic disparities. The study provides insights into how mass media regulation both reflects and reinforces existing power dynamics within media regulation systems, and offers avenues for further research at the intersection of mass media and social inequality.
Full text (PDF/ePub) | Export Reference | Link to this article
Censorship in the News: Understanding Social Inequalities in Portuguese Printed News in the Second World War
Twentieth-century Portuguese history is marked by the longest autocratic regime of Western Europe, the Estado Novo. Throughout this period, the state instructed its Censorship Office to ensure that news outlets would not only portray a magnanimous regime but also project the image of a prosperous and secure country. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, the government chose to position the country as neutral in the conflict, instructing the censors to prevent information about the war or its impact from dominating the news at that time. In contrast, this article analyses the content of the newspaper O Século, aiming at understanding the social inequalities felt by the population and the real impact of the war on the country. It demonstrates that the censorship and propaganda apparatus was able to create an echo chamber and project the view of a country unaffected by the conflict – a prosperous nation without social problems or inequality. In reality, however, the effect on the population was hidden from view, demonstrating how the state was able to silence the truth.
Full text (available at Taylor & Francis) | Export Reference | Link to this article
High Expectations, Hostile Perception, and Biased Coverage? The Labour Movement and the Press Coverage of the Paris Commune, 1871
In the nineteenth century, representatives of the socialist labour movement leveraged public communications to pursue their goal of overcoming class inequality. They expressed high expectations for media outlets and were consistently disappointed by the coverage of a hegemonic bourgeois press they regarded as biased. Demands for fair reporting tied in with the emerging self-image of the bourgeois press as news providers in the nineteenth century. Drawing on the concepts of hostile media perception and media bias, this paper examines whether the labour movement’s perception of the dominant press corresponded to the reporting of the leading newspapers. The study is based on content analysis of 1,092 articles from The Times and Kölnische Zeitung covering the Paris Commune in 1871. The analysis reveals that representatives of the Commune had their say in principle, but to a relatively small extent, and that the newspapers mainly used neutral language. However, measuring coverage against the emerging norms of journalism resulted in a perceived inequality for the labour movement.
Full text (PDF/ePub) | Export Reference | Link to this article
Broadcasting and the Creation of a Black Public Opinion in the Portuguese Empire: Using Radio to Promote and Counter Cultural Dominance
The article addresses how radio played a double role in the Portuguese Empire. First, it functioned as a tool of cultural domination by promoting the superiority of European languages and cultural practices while presenting African cultures as unworthy of being audible on the airwaves. Second, radio became central to the creation of a black public opinion that was instrumental to the emergence of a sense of nation among the indigenous populations in the territories ruled by Portugal in Africa. This was made possible specially through the listening to programmes produced by the liberation movements that were fighting the colonial regime on the military front but also via the airwaves. Some of these movements broadcast to the Portuguese colonies from neighbouring countries where they were granted access to broadcasting infrastructures. By analysing this dual role played by broadcasting in the context of Portuguese Africa, the article argues that the audio medium was used to foster pro and anti-colonial public opinion. Finally, it discusses how the first broadcasts in African languages, started by white radio producers, aimed foremost to increase their own revenue, as they addressed the black listener as a consumer, not a citizen.
Full text (available at Taylor & Francis) | Export Reference | Link to this article
Children, Angels and Demons: The Coloniality of Print Media Representations of (Dis)ability in South Africa (1978–2023)
South Africa presents a unique case for the study of the link between historical and present-day inequalities, as it emerged relatively recently from colonialism and institutionalised segregation. While racial, socio-economic and gender discrimination takes centre stage in the media, disability has been relatively neglected. In the present article, we examine representations of people with disabilities in ten newspapers between 1978 and 2023. Using a qualitative approach, 48 articles were codified and analysed thematically. Articles were deductively allocated to categories emerging from the scholarly literature on historical forms of inequality. A decolonial theoretical lens reveals how past and recent stories employ colonial and patriarchal epistemological tools of oppression such as infantilisation, idealisation and/or demonisation. Representations of people with disabilities as children, angels or demons, understood not as outright and deliberate mystifications but rather as unconscious, often internalised and largely benevolent constructions of (dis)ability, concurrently feed the symbolic violence of able bodies as naturally superior, as reference points and as primary interlocutors and justify persisting inequalities.
Full text (available at Taylor & Francis) | Export Reference | Link to this article
Decay, ‘Dependency’ and Deindustrialisation: The Evolving Discourse of ‘The Left Behind’
This article examines the conceptual evolution of a defining trope of the UK’s Brexit era: “the left behind”. Widely used today as discursive shorthand for marginalised post-industrial places and populations, the term “left behind” was popularised to describe older white working-class voters alienated from mainstream politics and susceptible to right-wing populism. It has since become a floating signifier for competing conceptions of social inequality. The Left has mobilised it as a counter-hegemonic signifier for socio-economic and socio-political marginalisation seen to affect areas scarred by deindustrialisation. The Right has weaponized it as a synonym for values cherished by such communities – arguing that these have been socio-culturally marginalised by latter-day mores promoted by metropolitan global elites. But prior to its conceptual capture by political scientists seeking to explain the resurgence of nativist politics, earlier iterations of the “left behind” concept had begun circulating in the language of press and Parliament. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of Hansard and newspaper from the years between the formation of Britain’s post-crash Coalition government and the 2016 EU referendum, the article traces the early emergence of “left-behind” narratives in discursive practices spotlighting problematic social groupings: othered communities scarred by “worklessness”, underachievement and “dependency” on social protection.
Full text (PDF/ePub) | Export Reference | Link to this article