Policing the Crisis and the Production of the News

• In Event: Revisiting Policing the Crisis: Race/Immigration, Populism, Culture, and the Media in the Current Conjuncture

Abstract

Policing the Crisis still clearly resonates today whether thinking about media’s representation of Muslims, the ‘refugee crisis’ or on-going demonization of black youth. However, while media scholars generally recognize the value of Policing the Crisis, political economists have problematized its particular approach to the mass media and the state for over-determining the role of ideology. This talk agrees that a proper political economy analysis of news media is lacking in Policing the Crisis. But it also defends the book’s emphasis on the powerful effects of ideology that as Hall states, drives journalists to produce “again and again, accounts of the world constructed within fundamentally the same ideological categories.” The aim is to explore how such a stress on ideology can be incorporated into production studies of the media that is crucial not just to our understanding of contemporary racisms, but also to the formulation of effective cultural political interventions.

Author

• Anamik Saha