The “Greek Crisis” in the Media: Hegemony, Spectacle and Propaganda

Ch. 3. P. 87–112.

Mylonas Y.

This chapter presents an account of the political role of the media. The discus-sion of media and politics begins with the notion of the public sphere and its critical conceptualisation as a field colonised by the strategic economic in-terests and ideological premises of capital and the upper classes (Dean, 2002, 2009, 2017; Negt & Kluge, 2016). In this regard, the concepts of hegemony and propaganda are important for making sense of the ways that the media work as strategic apparatuses and institutions to forge ahead the dominant interests through mass communication practices. While hegemony is achieved and maintained through the regular reproduction of dominant world-views and ways of thinking about various issues (such as what comes to pass as normal or “natural”) on a daily basis, propaganda can be understood as a central method to strategically advance particular positions in the public sphere at critical mo-ments, such as times of war or an economic crisis. As an important space of ex-perience, the public sphere offers the pretext where hegemonic interventions unfold through the media in globalised, late capitalist societies. Simultaneous-ly, the dimension of the spectacle is to be found in all aspects of mainstream media production and political communication today.

Keywords: hegemony, Greek crisis, media culture

In book

The “Greek Crisis” in Europe: Race, Class and Politics

Mylonas Y. Leiden: Brill, 2019.