According to Karl Marx, economy determines the social structure in any society. This theory when applied to media brings out the fact of oligarchy prevailing in the field. Media has become a culture industry with the content production done by a minority. Here the rich not the intellectuals fill the base and the superstructure is of labour class who receives the base-interpreted version of events.Democratic participation is less in such content manufacturing.
But Marxism no longer is based on such a single ideology, as Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci points out. Taking a different angle to Marx' socio-economic point of view, these Neo-Marxists say that no institution can exercise one single ideology on the entire mass. According to Althusser, State Apparatus also influence mass in shaping ideologies. Through the term State Apparatus which he himself coined, Althusser means those set-ups that are owned and controlled by the state. Each individual gets affected by the apparatus like family, school, media, religious institutes through out ones life, not just by the mass culture produced by mainsteam media. He comes to such a conclusion through the studies he underwent viewing the mass who receives the cultural industry products as heterogenous, not as ones with a common perspective of events. He argued that every persons' take on an event differs with respect to the socio-cultural background he's from. Constant ideological conflicts are hence prevailing in the society.
Antonio Gramsci went further, introducing a philosophical and sociological theory of Cultural Hegemony, that a culturally diverse society can be dominated by one social class by manipulating the social culture. In his view, this hegemony is the supremacy over the thought process not by force but through building up a constant rational arguement in support of an idea or perspective which convinces the mass gradually to accept it as the true version of event.
