Language and Media Dictionary of Key Terms (April 2016) Martin Montgomery

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hard news media n. hard news stories are distinguished from soft news stories by their seriousness and timeliness. Hard news is likely to be assigned a prominent position by news outlets either because of the scale of the event which it captures or because of its general significance in political, economic or social terms. Soft news, by contrast, lacks seriousness and timeliness though it may be strong in human interest and thereby high in entertainment value. mmo

harijans A term meaning “children of God” popularized by Mahatma Gandhi as a substitution for the pejorative “untouchables” which refers to the Dalits, a caste traditionally discriminated against in India.=> caste system. sj

hegemony media n. term associated with the work of the Italian Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937), who used it to explore how subordinate groups become reconciled to their position to the degree that they accept certain key ideas as commonplace and commonsense. For Gramsci, hegemony is a term that foregrounds the role of everyday popular culture is supporting relations of power and domination, though he also used it to emphasise the importance of cultural politics in resisting relations of power. mmo

high culture media n. general term for those cultural artefacts (painting, music, sculpture, literature) judged to be of the highest value for a society. The term exists in contrast not so much to ‘low’ culture as to mass, popular or folk culture, though qualitative assumptions play an important part in the distinction. The value of high culture lies in its capacity to educate and refine the moral and aesthetic sensibility of those who can appreciate it and the term carries (deliberate) connotations of exclusivity and elitism. For this reason much cultural commentary in the latter half of the 20^th century was devoted to finding different ways of organizing the distinction between minority high culture and popular mass culture so as to rescue ‘the popular’ from the implied devaluation. mmo