Consistency
Consonance, hypothesis of See news values.
Conspiracy of silence The tacit agreement
among those with significant information to
‘keep mum’ about it – say nothing. An early use
of the phrase is ascribed to the head of BBC News
in 1938 at the time of the Munich crisis, refer-
ring to the Corporation’s failure to broadcast
any close examination of Neville Chamberlain’s
policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany.
See censorship; noelle-neumann’s spiral
of silence model of public opinion, 1974.
Conspiracy theory Not so much a theory, more
a hunch or suspicion. As far as the media are
concerned, the ‘conspiracy’ relates – in the view
of those who claim it exists – to the practice
of manipulating messages in order to support
those who own the means of communication,
their social class (i.e. middle and upper) and
their interests. Th e conspiracy theorists argue
that in a capitalist society where the media are
owned or strongly infl uenced by the capitalist
establishment, information is shaped to
underpin existing social, economic and political
conditions (see consent, manufacture of).
In his introduction to the glasgow
university media group publication Bad
News (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), Richard
Hoggart ventures to locate two levels or forms
of conspiracy theory, High and Low – the one
aligning with the Marxist view of media opera-
tion; the other with the generality of people who
at some time or another suspect that the media
project the interests and value systems of those
who own, control or run them. See hegemony.
Contiguity See yaros’ ‘pick’ model for
multimedia news, 2009.
Constituency Term generally applied to an
electoral area which returns a parliamentary
candidate, but it is also used by researchers to
refer to the readership of a newspaper, and
carries with it the implication that the reader’s
political views may be infl uenced by the paper’s
coverage of events. Th e notion of audience as
constituency was particularly prevalent in the
age of press barons such as – in the UK – Lords
Northcliff e, Rothermere and Beaverbrook, who
claimed access to political decision-making on
the strength of the constituency of their papers’
readership.
Consumerization Describes a vision of contem-
porary life dominated by the marketplace and
prompting fears that, with the global advance of
transnational corporations, and their substantial
buying-in to media and culture generally,
society has become one-dimensionalized – the
consumer dimension.The authors are of the view that the media
constitute an ideological apparatus for the elite
(see ideological apparatuses), but their
theory has incurred both criticism and the
occasional academic cold shoulder – arguably
for the reason that certain truths, while being
self-evident, are too uncomfortable to accept.
Th e manufacture of consent becomes particu-
larly imperative in times of crisis. Following the
terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and New York’s
Twin Towers on 11 September 2001 (9/11), public
consent to the war in Afghanistan, while needing
little coaxing from a shocked nation, neverthe-
less progressed in part as a result of the denial
of opportunities for critics to suggest alternative
responses.
William Blum points out in Rogue State: A
Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Zed
Books, 2002), ‘Many critics of the bombing
campaign, who were in vulnerable positions,
suff ered consequences: a number of university
teachers who had spoken out against the war
lost their positions or were publicly rebuked by
school offi cials ... the only members of Congress
who voted against the “Authorization for Use of
Military Force” received innumerable threats
and hate mail ...’
A similar scenario played out when Ameri-
can (and British) forces invaded Iraq in 2003.
Support for the war and occupation was almost
universal in the US, and critics were accused of
being unpatriotic. By 2005, however, both media
and public support began to slip as the deaths in
Iraq and Afghanistan of American servicemen
and women increased: sooner or later the manu-
facture of consent bends to the force of evidence.
Th e process thus enters a new phase, usually by
shifting the grounds of justifi cation: what was to
be a swift war is now to be a long-haul.
With the the multiplication of information
sources brought about by the Internet, and the
opportunities networking off ers for audiences to
express their own opinions (see blogosphere;
mobilization), some commentators have
predicted a lessening of the power of mass media
to cultivate consent, if only because people are so
busy surfi ng the Net that mass media messaging
is increasingly ignored. See agenda-setting;
demotic turn; digital optimism; discourse;
hegemony; journalism: citizen journal-
ism; news management in times of war.
See also topic guide under media: politics &
economics; media: values & ideology.
Consistency See cognitive consistency
theories; effects of the mass media;
frequency; intensity.