A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

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It would be inflated to talk of a „conspiracy‟ between broadcasters and their larger
public here; ill-considered unaware complicity will do (Hoggart, 2005:67).
Hoggart contends that the reason why media producers don‟t go in for serious critical
analysis of the structural causes of human unhappiness is that they consider this would bore
their consumers. On behalf of its audiences, the media occupies a role as a gatekeeper:
keeping out not so much obviously undesirable elements such as rank obscenity or
malicious slander but worrying elements, elements which the anonymous audience
simply „might not like‟ – intellectual criticisms of some popular attitudes, anything
remotely judgemental of those attitudes (Hoggart, 2005:71).
Broadcasters, celebrities, disabled people, all participate in the daily reproduction of
disabling social relations because this seems right and because they cannot see how it could
be different. If neither oppressors nor oppressed recognise their roles, but instead perceive
the world as it is as the result of a natural ordering, it becomes difficult to name oppression.
While everybody is absorbed with their own unique importance as individuals, as within a
disciplinary society each is required to be, this naming becomes increasingly difficult.
Pierre Bourdieu muses:
Sometimes I want to go back over every word the television newspeople use, often
without thinking and with no idea of the difficulty and the seriousness of the subjects
they are talking about or the responsibilities they assume by talking about them in
front of the thousands of people who watch the news without understanding what
they see and without understanding that they don‟t understand. Because these words
do things, they make things – they create phantasms, fears, and phobias, or simply
false representations (Bourdieu, 1998:20).
While Bourdieu refers here to newsreaders‟ uses of words including Islam, Islamic,
Islamicist, there are plenty of other words to which Bourdieu‟s reflection could similarly be
applied: the disabled, people with disabilities, tragic, brave, triumph, struggling, suffering,
overcoming, special, vulnerable, care...