{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title":"Digital Capitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2021022153","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","id":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","uuid":"50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title":"Digital Capitalism","normalized_title":"digitalcapitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"2021022153","isbns":["2021022153","9781032119182","9781032119205","9781003222149","2405518376"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":343,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Digital%20Capitalism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/50b7f922-b940-4a05-8eb0-c4dc0d8ec9ed/search"},"page":{"printed_page":88,"pdf_page":102,"physical_index":102,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"0300ae4b9bc286d77c001e2580612ffbb8052f2a6353cad92d70ca98e3db59e1"},"chapter":"DIGITAL CAPITALISM","content":"3.3 Journalism and Reification\n\nLukács on Journalism\n\nIdeology does not exist independent from human beings but must be constantly produced and reproduced in social relations. Lukács mentions bourgeois journalists as producers of ideology. By “bourgeois” journalists, we mean journalists who create stories that reify capitalism and domination with the help of various ideological strategies. Bourgeois journalism is a particular type of ideological labour, labour that creates ideological news stories.\n\nLukács argues that physical workers experience reification relatively directly. Their labour “directly possesses the naked and abstract form of the commodity, while in other forms of work this [reification] is hidden behind the façade of ‘mental labour’, of ‘responsibility’, etc.” (HCC, 172). “The more deeply reification penetrates into the soul of the man who sells his achievement as a commodity the more deceptive appearances are (as in the case of journalism)” (HCC, 172). Journalists’ love of their work and their ethos as democracy’s fourth estate that guarantees freedom of expression and opinion and tries to make power transparent and tries to prevent the abuse of power, can easily veil their status as wage-workers.\n\nIn HCC, Lukács remarks in one passage: “The journalist’s ‘lack of convictions’, the prostitution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification” (HCC, 100). As a result, the news produced by bourgeois journalism often reifies capitalism and domination. In a footnote to the passage just cited, Lukács (HCC, 210, footnote 24) refers to an essay by Béla Fogarasi (without mentioning its title). Fogarasi (1891–1959) was like Lukács a member of the Hungarian Communist Party. They were both members of the “Sunday Circle”, an intellectual discussion group that existed from 1915 until 1918 in Budapest. Fogarasi’s (1921/1983) essay “Tasks of the Communist Press”, to which Lukács refers, was published in 1921.\n\nThe essay distinguishes between the capitalist and the communist press and argues that the capitalist press is “an ideological weapon in the class struggle” (p. 149) utilised by the bourgeoisie in order to dominate “the ideology of the ensemble of classes” (p. 149).\n\nWhat the capitalist press seeks is to shape the structure of the reader’s consciousness in such a way that he will be perpetually unable to distinguish between true and false, to relate causes and effects, to place individual facts in their total context, to rationally integrate new knowledge into his perspective. (Fogarasi 1921/1983, 150)\n\n88\n\nTheorists","previous_page":87,"next_page":89}