Article
Corresponding author:
Farooq A. Kperogi, Department of Communication, Georgia State University, One Park Place South,
Suite 662,Atlanta, GA 30303, USA.
Email: fkperogi1@gsu.edu
Cooperation with the
corporation? CNN and the
hegemonic cooptation of
citizen journalism through
iReport.com
Farooq A. Kperogi
Georgia State University, USA
Abstract
The literature on online citizen journalism tends to construe user-generated citizen media
as inherently counter-hegemonic,as the emerging,as yet unformed but nonetheless virile
antithesis to the traditional media.This article argues that while the vigorous profusion
of web-based citizen media has the potential to inaugurate an era of dynamic expansion of
the deliberative space and even serve as a counterfoil to the suffocating dominance
of the discursive space by the traditional, mainstream media, we are now witnessing
a trend toward the aggressive cooptation of these citizen media by corporate media
hegemons. To demonstrate this, I study ‘iReport.com,’ a YouTube-type, user-generated
citizen news site launched by the Cable News Network (CNN). I argue that the trend
toward corporate-sponsored citizen media may, in the final analysis, blur the distinction
between citizen and mainstream journalism.
Keywords
citizen journalism, CNN, hegemonic cooptation, hegemony, iReport.com, journalistic
authority, online journalism, traditional journalism
Introduction
The progressive drift toward the migration of news and information to the internet has
conduced to the robust flowering and proliferation of web-based citizen journalism. Over
the last couple of years, millions of web logs, or blogs, with thematic preoccupations that
encapsulate a broad spectrum of human endeavors, have emerged and have continued to
new media & society
13(2) 314–329
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DOI: 10.1177/1461444810373530
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challenge, and even redefine, journalistic practices in many fascinating ways (Thurman,
2008). This development has inspired optimism in some quarters that what Herbert
Schiller (1989) famously called the ‘corporate take-over of public expression’ by the
traditional media is about to be subverted, perhaps even extirpated, by the unexampled
discursive democracy that web-based citizen media enable (Dahlgren, 2005).
Some people who are enamored with this thought-process often construe usergenerated
citizen media as inherently counter-hegemonic, as the emerging, as yet
unformed but nonetheless potent antithesis to the traditional media. Writing in the Buffalo
News, for instance, Violanti (2004: C1) gleefully celebrates the fact that ‘the mainstream
media met their match’ in blogs, which ‘not only compete in a new media landscape but
also answer to the competitors.’Implicit in this enthusiastic valorization of citizen media
is the idea that they exist apart from and, in fact, in opposition to, the mainstream media.
As Reese et al. (2007: 236) have pointed out, it has become customary to point to
instances where news and public affairs blogs exposed inaccurate reporting by mainstream
media as evidence that ‘the online army of bloggers will supplant the work and
value of traditional journalists.’
In this article, I argue that while the vigorous profusion of web-based citizen media
has the potential to inaugurate an era of dynamic expansion of the deliberative space and
even serve as a counterfoil to the suffocating dominance of the discursive space by the
traditional media, we are now witnessing a trend toward the aggressive cooptation of
these citizen media by corporate media hegemons. I deploy critical discourse analysis
(CDA) to examine the implicit assumptions embedded in what might be called the manifesto
of CNN’s iReport.com to make the case that contrary to Thurman’s (2008: 153–4)
optimism that ‘Online, self published current affairs journalism and news publications
built on a preponderance of reader contributions are starting to offer alternatives to established
news providers,’ online citizen media are actually being coopted into the culture
and conventions of mainstream media practices.
But, first, what is critical discourse analysis? According to Jager (2001: 32–3), critical
discourse analysis consists of five key components:
What knowledge (valid at a certain time) consists; how this valid knowledge evolves; how it is
passed on; what function it has for the constitution of subjects and the shaping of society and
what impact this knowledge has on the overall development of society.
In applying this method to this study, I examined the knowledge claims of ‘iReport.
com,’a YouTube-style, user-generated news site launched by the Cable News Network
(CNN). How did the website negotiate traditional conceptions of news with the
notional understanding of how nonprofessional ‘citizen journalists’ conceive of news?
What is at stake in this negotiation? What epistemological boundaries are being
policed in this enterprise? I also analyzed iReport.com from the point of view of its
functional utility for CNN, which increasingly uses material from the site for broadcast
in its main newscasts.
Based on a critical discourse analysis of the content and ontological assumptions of
iReport.com, I make the case that the distinction between citizen media and mainstream
media will become increasingly hazy. However, to understand how CNN’s iReport.com
constitutes a blurring of journalistic genres as a prelude to the hegemonic cooptation of
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citizen journalism, I first review the literature on models of journalism. What is citizen
journalism? How is it different from traditional journalism and the related but nonetheless
different concept of civic journalism? The next section answers these questions.
A review of models of journalism
Nip (2006) identified five broad genres of journalism: (1) traditional journalism,
(2) public journalism, (3) interactive journalism, (4) participatory journalism, and
(5) citizen journalism. Although these terms have widely different significations for different
scholars and do, in fact, overlap at different conceptual levels, there appears to be
sufficient agreement among journalism scholars on their distinguishing features to justify
delineating them as distinct journalistic models.
Traditional journalism, according to Nip (2006: 216), is the kind of journalism where
‘professional journalists are the gatekeepers who filter through the happenings of the
world, select the significant events, and report them for their audience.’ This model has
limited participatory content, except for letters to the editor and other kinds of audience
feedback, which are sometimes no more than indecipherable crackles of background
noise because they are merely reactive; they neither significantly inform the content of
the news nor do they influence the process of newsgathering. In this model, professional
journalists determine what constitutes news using frames of reference internalized from
their professional training and associations. In most cases, news is little more than the
actions of what Herman and Chomsky call the ‘primary definers’ of news: politicians,
accredited sources in government, and other institutions that have access to the media
almost as a matter of right (Herman and Chomsky, 2002: xvii). In this sense, as Woollacott
(1982: 109) points out, the media serve ‘to reinforce a consensual viewpoint by using
public idioms and by claiming to voice public opinion.’ This has been the dominant
model of journalism practiced by the mainstream media for many years.
Public journalism, also called civic journalism, emerged as a response to the perceived
inadequacies of traditional journalism. According to Jay Rosen, the concept of ‘public
journalism’first appeared in the United States in 1993 as a reaction to the deepening chasm
between journalism and the citizens it professes to serve on the one hand and between the
quotidian concerns of ordinary people and public life in general on the other (Rosen, 1999).
The Wichita Eagle is the first notable newspaper to experiment with this model of journalism
(Friedland, 2003). Public journalism, in essence, imposes on itself the task of actively
seeking the input of local communities both in decisions about what constitutes newsworthy
events and in how the news is presented. As Nip (2006: 216) points out,
Town hall meetings, citizen panels, and polls are common techniques used to tap the concerns
of the community, which would then form the reporting agenda for the journalists. During the
news-gathering process, professional journalists often report back to the citizens what they
have found for generating discussion in search of solutions to the problems…. There have been
cases where the citizens even partnered with the professionals in gathering the news.
Although this model represents a greater connection with the people than traditional
journalism does, it still retains the professional journalist as the gatekeeper. That is why
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some scholars aver that civic journalism, while pretending to be an improvement on
mainstream news practices, is mere cosmetic reformism that leaves intact the fundamental
essence of professional, mainstream media practices (see, for instance, Davis, 2000;
Glasser, 2000; Woodstock, 2002). For one, it is market driven and is constrained by the
institutional and organizational structures of the dominant mainstream news practices
from which it purports to depart.As Woodstock (2002: 37) argues, ‘traditional and public
journalisms adopt similar narrative strategies to effect essentially the same ends: placing
the power of telling society’s stories in the hands of journalists.’
Now, how is interactive journalism different from public journalism? The interactive
journalism model is not radically different from public journalism, although it seeks to
improve upon some of the shortcomings of public journalism by taking advantage of the
improved technical capabilities of media organizations in the last couple of years since
the internet became a demotic medium. However, precisely what interactive journalism
actually entails is still imprecise (Matheson, 2004). Following Iser, though, we can construe
it as consisting in ‘networks of response-inviting structures, which impel the reader
to grasp the text’ (Iser, 1978: 34) and in which the reader ‘is less massified and more
open’ (Matheson, 2004: 453). Hujanen and Peitikainen (2004: 383) also define interactive
journalism as ‘the increasing opportunity to communicate across “old” boundaries
of time and place, and between journalists and citizens.’
According to Brian Massey and Mark Levy (1999), there are two important dimensions
to interactivity: content interactivity and interpersonal interactivity. Content interactivity
is said to be present when readers can have the latitude to liberate themselves
from the one-dimensionality set by professional journalists as well as to have the liberty
to avail themselves of a wide variety of choice of content on a given site. Interpersonal
interactivity occurs when users can interact with professional journalists through
exchange of emails, chat sessions, or when the ‘comment’ pages of news organizations
can serve as a site for the push and pull of views in response to a news story on a news
website. Interactive journalism, in this sense, is little more than computer-mediated
public journalism.
Participatory journalism goes a step further than interactive journalism by actually
engaging consumers of news in the newsgathering process. In this model, users do not
merely interact with the news and with professional journalists; they also participate in
some fashion in a many-to-many collaborative journalism. Like interactive journalism,
it is also enabled by the technology of the internet, as it allows a new generation of internet
users to become content creators. Bowman and Willis (2008) define participatory
journalism as:
The act of a citizen, or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting,
reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information. The intent of this participation is
to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a
democracy requires.
They add that participatory journalism uses what they call a ‘publish, then filter’ model
instead of the traditional ‘filter, then publish’ model (Bowman and Willis, 2008). Some of
the features of the model, according to them, include discussion groups, user-generated
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content, weblogs (blogs), collaborative publishing, peer-to-peer systems, and web
syndication. Although public journalism allows the participation of news users in the
news-gathering process, the process is still controlled by professional journalists within
mainstream institutional journalistic structures. The OhmyNews site in South Korea is
often credited with pioneering this brand of journalism. On this site, readers generate the
bulk of the news stories, but the stories are edited by a full-time staff of a few dozen editors.
Yeon-Jung Yu, writing in the Japan Media Review says, ‘Most are written by housewives,
schoolkids [sic], professors and other “citizen journalists”’ (Yu, 2003). San Jose
Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor predicts that the many-to-many collaborative
journalism model of Korea’s OhmyNews would define the direction of news business:
‘OhmyNews is transforming the 20th century’s journalism-as-lecture model – where
organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience either buys it or doesn’t –
into something vastly more bottom-up, interactive and democratic’ (Gillmor, 2003).
Among prominent news organizations that have adopted this model are: the BBC’s
‘Have Your Say’ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/default.stm), which invites
news users to express their views about the news and then publishes them in a particular
section of the news product, and the relatively less successful MSNBC’s Citizen
Journalists Report (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6639760/), where an editor suggests
assignments for whoever is interested in reporting on specified aspects of developing
news stories, and so on. In both examples, however, a corps of professional journalists
sits in judgment over what stories get published.
Citizen journalism is the model of journalism that allows a wider range of participants,
including what Rosen (2006) has called ‘the people formerly known as the audience’
to perform ‘random acts of journalism’ (Lasica, 2003: 70). Citizen journalism is
different from the preceding four models precisely because it eliminates the authority of
the professional journalist. It can be initiated and sustained by just one person. It can also
be practiced by a group of people, an activist organization, the non-paid staff of a
non-governmental organization, news websites, community radio stations, and so on.
However, not all unfiltered, user-generated content on the internet is citizen journalism.
To qualify as journalism, the content needs to include ‘some original interviewing,
reporting, or analysis of events or issues to which people other than the authors have
access’ (Nip, 2006: 218).
The Indymedia site, a transnational multimedia news outlet that became prominent
for opposing the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, is often cited as
one of the pioneers of the citizen journalism model. More generally, news-based weblogs
can also be categorized as practicing citizen journalism since the defining feature of citizen
journalism is that it is wholly user-generated, is free from the encumbrances of professional
news judgment and gate-keeping, and is concerned with news events.
The five models of journalism discussed so far vary on the extent and form of people
participation, with citizen journalism involving the people to the greatest extent, and
traditional journalism the least. Interactive journalism empowers users after the news is
published, whereas participatory journalism gets the users to gather the news. Public
journalism encompasses a wide range of experimentation in engaging citizens as advisers
and partners in news gathering while also allowing interaction after news publication.
It is clear that none of these models are immanent, self-sufficient containers of meaning.
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For one, they are not self-conscious journalistic models isolated in time and space. And
they constantly overlap. It does appear, though, that citizen journalism is the only model
that can be reasonably thought of, with some qualification, as distinct, even new-fangled,
from the point of view of traditional newsgathering practices; the rest are mere adaptations
of or improvements on traditional journalism. However, as the next section
shows, the reality of corporate-mediated user-generated citizen media complicates this
easy categorization.
CNN’s iReport.com: a fusion of journalistic models?
The iReport.com, launched on August 2, 2006 (CNN.com, 2007), is a CNN citizen journalism
experiment that gives ordinary people from everywhere in the world the
opportunity to contribute unedited, unfiltered, and uncensored user-generated video and
text-based news reports. It is precisely this feature that qualifies it to be labeled a citizen
medium. Its structure appears to instantiate what Naim, editor in chief of the U-based
Foreign Policy magazine, called ‘the YouTube effect,’ which he defines as ‘the phenomenon
whereby video clips, often produced by individuals acting on their own, are rapidly
transmitted throughout the world thanks to video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube,
Google Video, and others’ (Naim, 2007: 104). But iReport.com has expanded the
YouTube model by making its site truly multi-platform: although video clips are the most
common materials posted on the site at the time of this study, there were also many
photos and text-based user-generated news reports.
The site is divided into seven categories – latest,’‘highest rated,’‘most viewed,’‘most
commented,’ ‘most shared,’ ‘on CNN,’ and ‘newsiest.’ It is these categories, which
encapsulate the philosophical underpinnings of the corporate-sponsored citizen journalism
experiment, that provide the locus for this study’s discourse analysis. The core of
iReport.com’s professed philosophy revolves around the acknowledgement of the arrogance
of normative canons of news judgment by professional media organizations. This
acknowledgment seeks to reconcile what Carlson (2007: 265) calls the ‘symbolic competition
over credibility, legitimacy and cultural authority’ between entrenched, traditional
mainstream media and the emerging web-based citizen media. In this respect,
iReport.com’s ‘About Us’ page is worth reproducing in great detail because it appears to
self-consciously address this tension.
Lots of people argue about what constitutes news. But, really, it’s just something that happens
someplace to someone. Whether that something is newsworthy mostly depends on who it affects –
and who’s making the decision. On iReport.com, that is you! So we’ve built this site and
equipped it with some nifty tools for posting, discovering and talking about what you think
makes the cut. Use the tools you find here to share and talk about the news of your world,
whether that’s video and photos of the events of your life, or your own take on what’s making
international headlines. Or, even better, a little bit of both. (iReport.com, n.d.a; emphasis added)
In this passage, we see a conflation of the notions of civic and citizen journalistic
models. This manifesto of corporate-sponsored citizen media performs many symbolic
functions here. It divests – or at any rate pretends to divest – professional journalists of the
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exclusive right to define what news is. News, according to this manifesto of the convergence
of traditional and citizen media, is denuded of grand, highfalutin intellectual accoutrements
and is rendered as no more than ‘something that happens to someone someplace,’
and the decision to confer this ‘something’the status of ‘newsiness’is entirely arbitrary; it
is determined as much by our social and material conditions as it is by thse inherent doxa
of power relations. By investing in the ‘iReporter’the latitude to define news and report it
unmediated by traditional (media) power relations, CNN creates the impression that it has
democratized journalistic authority. This apparent discursive inclusivity appears to contradict
the position of many journalism scholars who have pointed out that professional journalists
in the mainstream media perpetually seek to consolidate their professional
legitimacy and power by appealing to their authority and denigrating alternative perspectives
that question their judgment (see, for example, Dahlgren, 1992; Easton, 1988).
However, as an analysis of the features of the website shows, CNN is merely deploying
a more sophisticated hegemonic narrative of journalistic authority to simultaneously confer
legitimacy on its notion of what constitutes news and to tap into the vast – and free –
resources that abound in the citizen media. I use the term ‘hegemonic narrative’ in a
Gramscian sense to refer to the ability of the capitalist ruling class to impose moral and
intellectual dominance over subordinate groups in the society and persuade these subordinate
groups to accept this dominance as ‘common sense’and ‘natural,’(see Femia, 1975;
Mattelart and Mattelart, 1992), what Theodore Adorno once called the ‘abstract’ character
of domination by the ‘dictatorship of the self-appointed elite’ (see Cook, 1996: 6–7).
By extending the discursive boundaries of what constitutes news and making the citizen
journalists cherish the illusion of control over the construction and reportage of
‘news,’ CNN deflects attention from the many hidden assumptions on the iReport.com.
In so doing, it constructs the ‘normality’of prevailing conventions of news judgment and
therefore helps in the reproduction of the hegemony of traditional journalistic practices
and norms. For instance, although the iReport.com says news is ‘just something that happens
someplace to someone,’ and that ‘whether that something is newsworthy mostly
depends on who it affects – and who’s making the decision,’ it has a category called
‘newsiest,’ which subtly subverts this definitional democracy in news judgment. The
‘newsiest’ category rewards ‘iReports’ that conform to the conventional canons of professional
news judgment and in so doing potentially achieves an understated ‘commonsense’
consensus about news that previous strategies of journalistic consolidation could
probably not achieve. CNN’s criteria of what constitute the ‘newsiest’ citizen-generated
news videos are instructive. It says,
Newsiest is a calculation that combines freshness, popularity, activity and ratings. The idea
behind newsiest is that all the contributions the iReport.com community of users make to the
site – stories, comments, ratings, pageviews – and what CNN producers pick for their own
stories could add up to tell us something new about what people think is newsworthy. (iReport.
com, n.d.b; emphasis added)
Although this definition appears to be egalitarian, it actually gives more leverage to a few
CNN producers in the definition of ‘newsiness’ than it does to users and/or citizen reporters.
An analysis of the 30 news videos that were honored as the ‘newsiest’ during the
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one-month period that this study was conducted from April to May 2008 showed that they
were disproportionately news videos that appeared on CNN’s mainstream broadcasts.
And there is a sense in which the airing of a news video on CNN is likely to attract more
attention, increase its page views, and therefore increase its chances to be a candidate for
the ‘newsiest’ news videos. It appears to be a self-replicating circle.
Winch (1997: 3) once made the point that journalism’s hegemonic power to define
newsworthiness ‘depends on the ability of people to distinguish between it and other
kinds of mass communication.’However, in the era of the proliferation of citizen media
and the potential for the blurring of the boundaries between traditional and citizen
journalism, it would seem that we are witnessing a reversal of Winch’s observation.
Now, corporate-induced user-generated media are leading the way in instigating a false
sense of unity between everyday conceptions of news and time-honored, normative,
professional news judgment in which the latter seeks to be normalized through the
active consent by the former.
However, more than this, through this user-generated citizen media that has generated
over 200,000 news videos as of the time of this study, CNN is tapping into a mine of free
labor from all over the world. As Naim (2007: 103) observed, ‘international news operations
may have thousands of professional journalists, but they will never be as omnipresent
as millions of people carrying phones that record video.’Wikipedia, the collaborative
online encyclopedia, in fact, situated the emergence of corporate-sponsored citizen
media on the desire of cable and broadcast networks to have access to instant news
videos, particularly in the wake of the devastating tsunami in 2004 and the July 7 bombings
in London. It added that, ‘Pictures from both were difficult to obtain in the moments
after each tragedy. Broadcast news outlets, depending on agency or bureau video, were
fortunate to receive submissions from people on the scene. Developing this format
became a necessity for cable and network news shows’ (Wikipedia, n.d).
But that’s not the only way iReport.com takes advantage of free creative labor. The
iReport.com also has a section called ‘Assignment Desk’ where CNN producers list topics
for ‘iReporters’ to investigate and report. Most of these reports end up being used on
CNN, which in a way suggests that CNN, in fact, sets the agenda for citizen journalists.
For instance, when news breaks in any part of the world, CNN producers encourage citizen
journalists to contribute video and news content to the iReport website, most of which
end up in the CNN main newscast. Feature-length assignments, such as the one that asks
people to send reports on the topic ‘Black in America,’ were used in the main CNN telecast.
This recalls the discussion about the singularities of participant journalism.
So, in addition to artfully incorporating potentially threatening citizen media into the
hegemonic fold, this model of journalism also expropriates the creative labor of ordinary
people from around the world since their viewer-submitted content is often used in the
mainstream media without monetary compensation to them. This voluntary cultural
labor is exploited by CNN, and other corporate media outfits that have embraced this
model, for profit. Andrew Ross (2000: 6) perceptively characterized this phenomenon as
the principle of ‘cultural discount’ whereby ‘artists and other arts workers accept nonmonetary
rewards – the gratification of producing art – as a compensation for their work,
thereby discounting the cash price of their labor.’ This donated labor, he points out, has
found its way in ‘the funky milieu of the Webshops, where work looks almost exactly
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like play. All in all, the New Media workplace is a prescient indicator of the near future
of labor, which combines mental skills with new technologies in alternative environments’
(Ross, 2000: 11–12).
It must be pointed out, nonetheless, that this experiment can also offer glimpses of the
capacity for ‘resistance.’ For instance, the iReport website, for all its artful cooptation of
citizen media into mainstream news practices, has a few videos and news texts that
openly criticize CNN’s coverage of certain news events. An example is a submission
titled ‘CNN Jack Cafferty’s Hatred [sic] Speech Toward Chinese’by a Chinese contributor
who fulminated against what many Chinese regarded as Jack Cafferty’s racially
insensitive remarks after he called Chinese people ‘the same bunch of goons and thugs
they have been in the past 50 years’ during an interview in Wolf Blitzer’s ‘Situation
Room’ in a previous CNN telecast. The iReport.com was used as a platform to solicit
signatories for an online petition drive against CNN.
Similarly, there are many citizen stories on iReport.com that give radical perspectives
on the US economic recession. An iReporter from California, for example, posted a textbased
iReport, titled ‘No Recession or Depression........It’s a Class War,’ that questions
the dominant perspectives on the economic crisis in the corporate media (iReport.com,
n.d.d). In the comment section of the report, a commenter instructively remarked: ‘This
is interesting information, but I doubt you would see this in CNN’s headline news.’ This
is a powerful illustration of Gramsci’s contention that in hegemonic battles, there is
always contestation and that the volitional consent of the broad segment of subordinate
classes has to be perpetually won and re-won. As Slavoj Zizek argues, a successful ideology
always grants subjects the latitude to cherish an intentionally conceived distance
towards an ideology’s overt ideals and prescriptions, a phenomenon he calls ‘ideological
disidentification’ (Boucher and Sharpe, 2005: xiv). Hegemony has never been about the
elimination of opposition; it is, on the contrary, about the artful, nonviolent discursive
containment of opposition.
Now, in what ways does CNN’s iReport.com represent a ‘hegemonic cooptation’ of
potentially threatening citizen journalism? The next section sketches the outline of the
conceptions of hegemony and then shows how CNN’s embrace of citizen journalism
might be understood as a form of ‘hegemonic cooptation.’
What hegemony is and why iReport represents hegemonic
cooption of citizen media
The concept of hegemony was popularized, but by no means invented, by Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci, in spite of assertions to the contrary from some well-regarded the­
orists.1
The notion of hegemony emerged in an attempt to reconcile or explain the apparent
disjunction between classical Marxian teleology and the reality of ideological
reproduction, negotiation, and legitimation in capitalist society, which challenges or at
least problematizes this teleology. In classical Marxist theory, it is customary to attribute
the inability of the proletariat to extirpate capitalist relations of production to the blinding
effects of a capitalist ruling class ideology, which is purportedly adept at inducing a
‘false consciousness’ in subordinate classes (Eyerman, 1981). For instance, in Friedrich
Engels’ oft-cited ‘Letter to Mehring’ (1893) he said, among other things, that:
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Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker. Consciously, it is true, but with a
false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise
it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive
forces. (cited in Eagleton, 1991: 89)
Engels, in this passage, grapples with the notion that the process of the ideological
legitimation of capitalist ethos percolates into and gets inscribed in the consciousness of
workers through a direct, conscious manipulation. People who are manipulated by the
capitalist system, including ‘the so-called thinker,’he said, are blissfully unaware of this
manipulation. However, later Marxists, beginning, to some extent, with Lenin derided
this account of the process of the orchestration of dominant ideology as simplistic.
These critiques clearly provided the epistemological template for Gramsci’s theoretical
interventions.2
Gramsci transcended classical Marxist theory by rejecting the notion that the willingness
by subordinate social classes in capitalist society to live with and even endorse their
oppression is the consequence of a ‘false consciousness.’As Laclau and Mouffe (1985)
point out, Gramsci’s whole project was to fill what they term the ‘double void’3
that
became nakedly transparent in the traditional Marxian epistemological universe as capitalism
advanced and mutated over the years.
Gramsci explained the inability of socialism to replace capitalism by the early 20th
century by suggesting that capitalism entrenched its dominance not by means of political
and economic coercion through violence, or through a manipulation of the workingclass,
but through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became
naturalized as the ‘common sense’ values of all. Alvarado and Boyd-Barrett (1992: 51)
quote Geoffrey Nowell-Smith as arguing that common sense is ‘the way a subordinate
class lives its subordination.’ These values are subtly orchestrated in the everyday consciousness
of subordinate groups through what, on the surface, appears like an indeterminate
push and pull of the ideas of both the dominant group and of the subordinate
groups. However, unlike classical Marxists, Gramsci emphasizes contestation. He noted
that ‘common sense is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually transforming
itself’ (Gramsci, 1971: 326). And, according to John Fiske (1992: 291), because hegemony
is not a mechanical process of will imposition, ‘the consent of the subordinate
groups must be constantly won and re-won, for people’s material social experiences
constantly remind them of the disadvantages of subordination and thus poses a threat to
the dominant class.’ Thus, a consensus culture develops in which the subordinate class
identifies its own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helps to maintain the status
quo rather than revolt against it.
Although the notion of hegemony emerged as an explanatory framework to account
for the enduring dominance of capitalism in spite of the existence of ‘objective conditions’
for its demise, the concept has been expanded and extended over the years to
explain the strategies for consensus-building in dominant practices. Condit, for instance,
deployed – and extended – the concept of hegemony to explain the process of opinion
formation and accretion in the mass-mediated discourse of reproductive technologies
(Condit, 1994). González (2000) points out, too, that for too long the concept had been
held hostage by theoretical abstractions and has moreover been associated with explaining
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the dominance of capitalism and the relations between nation-states or the structure of
the global order. He argues that ‘we need a less confining understanding of hegemony to
serve us well’ (González, 2000: 107). A conception of hegemony that has utility for the
practical, everyday world, he says, is one ‘where hegemony is considered not as a direct
stimulation of thought or action but a framing of competing definitions of reality to fit
within the dominant class’s range’ (González, 2000: 107).
Torfing (1999) also moves the notion of hegemony from its erstwhile limited concern
with state structures to the dynamics of contestations for the definitions of social reality
by various power blocs within a given system. He points out, for instance, that ‘the political
as well as moral-intellectual leadership of a hegemonic force (state, class, movement,
other) hinges on the construction of a discursive formation that provides a surface of
inscription for a wide range of demands, views and attitudes’ (Torfing, 1999:101). This
view expands the terrain within which the concept of hegemony can be applied.
Hegemony can be exercised not just between and within formal state structures but also
between and within social movements, classes, professional practices, etc.
This perspective is a powerful explanatory framework within which to situate CNN’s
appropriation of a model of journalism that is traditionally located outside the mainstream
of corporate journalistic practices. Since the 1990s when the anti-corporate Indymedia
popularized citizen journalism, this model of journalism had luxuriated only on the fringes
of the corporate, mainstream media. Now by ‘mainstreaming’ it through the iReport.com
experiment, CNN is seeking to contain, or at least negotiate, its potentially disruptive
effect on mainstream journalism through a hegemonic cooptation that actively seeks the
consent of the practitioners of this fringe, newfangled form of journalism.As noted earlier,
iReport.com does this by democratizing the conception of news – and in fact of journalism
as such – in ways that both strategically negate the canons of journalistic orthodoxy and
that seem intended to invite the approval and consent of non-professional journalists who
dominate the practice of citizen journalism. In so doing, CNN hopes to generate ‘cultural
goodwill’ from people who had been excluded from mainstream journalistic practices.
However, as the analysis of the categories of iReport.com shows, CNN’s apparent definitional
inclusivity in its conception of ‘newsiness’ is actually in practice congruent with
conventional journalistic canons as evidenced in the kinds of iReports it privileges for use
in its news coverage, a fact that inspires many ‘iReporters’desirous to appear on CNN and
attract visibility and attention to their reports to do similar reports. Its ‘Assignment Desk,’
which encourages citizen reporters to ‘share your story about one of these topics in the
news and it may end up on CNN!’also favors the corporate media’s particular conception
of what constitutes acceptable news practices (iReport.com, n.d.c).
What is apparent from this is that CNN has sought to win over non-professional citizen
journalists first by making its news values seem like, as Gramsci would say, the
‘common sense’ values of all and then by legitimizing these values not so much by
manipulation as by active consent. Thus, many ‘iReporters’ see – or are encouraged to
see – their news values as not differing from the news values of the corporate media after
all. This conduces to the evolvement of a consensus news culture that sutures the contradictions
between citizen journalism and corporate, mainstream journalism. It is instructive
to note, though, that this process is not uncontested. There is a perpetual process of
negotiation and renegotiation. This means that the citizen journalists who practice their
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‘random acts of journalism’(Lasica, 2003: 70) under the watch of big media corporations
are no dupes or thoughtless automatons.As the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist
Slavoj Zizek asserted, in an instructive extension of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, the
efficacy of contemporary ideology lies in its capacity to secure the voluntary consent of
the people about otherwise contestable policies and arrangements. As he put it,
[…] with a disarming frankness one ‘admits everything,’ yet this full acknowledgment of our
power interests does not in any way prevent us from pursuing these interests – the formula of
cynicism is no longer the classic Marxian ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’; it is ‘they
know very well what they are doing, yet they are doing it’. (Zizek, 1994: 8)
CNN ‘admits everything’ by asserting on iReport.com that, contrary to the time-honored
canons of traditional journalistic practices and in consonance with ‘alternative’ conceptions
of newsworthiness, news is ‘just something that happens someplace to someone,’
and that ‘whether that something is newsworthy mostly depends on who it affects –and
who’s making the decision’(iReport.com, n.d.a). Coming from a professional news organization,
this is an almost self-abnegating admission. However, this admission has not
stopped CNN from privileging and rewarding iReports that conform to canonical conceptions
of newsworthiness and, in the process, negating its admission and encouraging
citizen journalists to endorse the corporate view of news. Yet, as Zizek (1994) argues,
people who are targets of hegemonic cooptation only voluntarily agree to this process if
they believe that, in accepting it, they are giving expression to their free subjectivity.
And, as Jacob Torfing notes, ‘the political as well as moral-intellectual leadership of a
hegemonic force (state, class, movement, other) hinges on the construction of a discursive
formation that provides a surface of inscription for a wide range of demands, views
and attitudes’ (Torfing, 1999: 101). So the army of ‘iReporters’ who generate content for
iReport.com are no victims of a ‘false consciousness;’ they actively participate in this
corporate-sponsored brand of citizen journalism because the platform not only provides
a vent for the expression of their subjectivities but also because it acts as a slate for the
untrammeled inscription of their views and attitudes. This is precisely why the experiment
has the potential to be an effective hegemonic cooptation.
Gramsci points out that hegemonic articulation usually takes one of two operational
modalities: transformism and expansive hegemony. Transformism, he said, is an incorporatist
strategy that seeks to dilute opposition and conflict through the cooptation of
marginal groups within a discursive formation. Expansive hegemony, on the other hand,
is an offensive strategy of a traumatized hegemonic bloc, which exploits the consensus
in the polity to mobilize popular sentiments against a competing power bloc (Gramsci,
1971). CNN is clearly adopting the former. By coopting citizens who are otherwise on
the other side of the spectrum of journalistic models in the production of news through
its iReport site, CNN is pursuing a transformist hegemonic agenda that protects and preserves
traditional industrial journalism from the threats of the plethora of citizen media
that the internet has enabled through its strategic extension of the discursive formation of
journalistic practices. This transformism may well define the response of the corporate
media to the potential threats of citizen journalism as evidenced in the popularity of this
experiment among US news media giants. The relative success and popularity of
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iReport.com has already inspired other big US media corporations to initiate similar
experiments. ABC, for instance, has come up with its own ‘i-Caught.com,’ Fox News
with its own ‘uReport.com,’ and MSNBC with its ‘FirstPerson.com.’
Conclusions and recommendations
What is clear from the foregoing is that the iReport.com experiment in many ways represents
a creative and symbolic convergence of journalistic models. It is at once traditional,
interactive, civic, participatory and citizen journalism. Although CNN uses
many stories freely posted on iReport.com, several reports on iReport.com are also
informed by or are a response to the content of CNN news casts. Naim (2007: 103) calls
this phenomenon the ‘double-echo chamber:’
One is produced when content first posted on the Web is re-aired by mainstream networks. The
second occurs when television moments, even the most fleeting, gain a permanent presence
thanks to bloggers or activists who redistribute them through Web sites like YouTube.
The rearticulation of the relation between journalists and users and of the claim to authority
made in news texts that this reality provides scholars of both journalism and new
media with a case study of the adaptation of journalism to new contexts. Although this
corporate encroachment, some would say ‘invasion,’ of the ‘safe spaces’ previously
thought to be exclusive to citizen media does not necessarily herald the death or loss of
the vitality of the inchoate genre of citizen journalism, it does potentially represent two
things: a move toward big media’s hegemonic cooptation of potentially oppositional citizen
media and the expropriation of the labor and creative energies of ordinary people
who contribute content to corporate-sponsored citizen media, especially since this usergenerated
content sometimes ends up being used in the traditional broadcasts of these
stations without any monetary compensation to the originators of the stories.
But the cooptation of citizen media may also make possible the emergence of subtle
yet consequential ‘resistant’ and ‘emancipatory’ forms of journalism in corporatesponsored
citizen media, as has been shown in the preceding pages. This is a powerful
illustration of Gramsci’s contention that in hegemonic battles, there is always contestation
and that the volitional consent of the broad segment of subordinate classes has to be
perpetually won and re-won.As Slavoj Zizek argues, a successful ideology always grants
subjects the latitude to cherish an intentionally conceived distance towards an ideology’s
overt ideals and prescriptions, a phenomenon he calls ‘ideological disidentification’
(Boucher and Sharpe, 2005: xiv).
The hegemonic cooptation of citizen journalism is only just beginning to evolve. It is
anybody’s guess how this will all play out eventually. It is not clear, for example, if it will be
profitable for the corporate media in the long run. It is also not clear how the surfeit of citizen
media still located on the margins of traditional journalistic practices will react to this emerging
phenomenon. Will most of them migrate to the spaces provided by the corporate media
to practice their citizen journalism, or will they consciously resist the cooptation by the corporate
media? These are all robust materials for future empirical research. It will also be
useful to compare and contrast the assumptions and operations of all the corporate media
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organizations that are now following CNN’s lead in initiating their own corporate-mediated
citizen journalism projects to determine if common themes and practices can be isolated in
all of them and what implications this might have for citizen journalism.
Notes
1	 For instance, Laclau and Mouffe argue in their book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985),
that ‘Only the isolated example of Gramsci … can be quoted as a new departure producing a
new arsenal of concepts – war of position, historical bloc, collective will, hegemony, intellectual
and moral leadership theory’ (p. ix). While Gramsci undeniably advanced the theoretical
boundaries of the notion of hegemony, it is not faithful to the facts to argue that he represented
a lone voice in departing from vulgar Marxian notions of ideology.
2	 González (2000: 107) gives V.I. Lenin credit as the first Marxist to deploy the concept of hegemony
to suture the contradictions of Marxism before Antonio Gramsci.
3	 Laclau and Mouffe use the phrase to encapsulate the contradictions that attend the irreconcilability
of the logics of two key Marxian concepts: spontaneism and historical materialism.
Spontaneism contends that an isolated revolutionary ferment in one place of work can set off
the motion for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist socio-economic formation, not
only in one country but all over the world – or at least the industrialized world. Historical materialism,
on the other hand, has an almost metaphysical, even fatalistic, attitude to the overthrow
of capitalism. It holds that the very nature, structure, and essence of capitalism create the basis
for its inevitable dissolution – unaided by agency.
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Farooq A. Kperogi, a PhD candidate in Communication at Georgia State University where
he also teaches journalism, is a former Nigerian newspaper journalist. He received his BA
in Mass Communication from the Bayero University Kano, Nigeria, and his MS in
Communication from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA. He will defend his
doctoral dissertation – which explores the newfangled, insurgent, citizen online journalism
of the Nigerian digital diaspora – in the fall of 2010.
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