Cultural Hegemony and Ideology and Advertisements

     Cultural hegemony is when the elite or ruling class push across a certain idea or or ideology through a certain type of medium. This is largely seen in every type of media we consume on a daily basis and possibly more apparent in children's films and cartoons. For instance, when a cartoon character goes out on a date with his woman cartoon character ,and when they are on the date, portray him buying his date things and spoiling her. This type of cartoon would suggest to the public that women want things and to be catered to if you are interested in them romantically. Another example of this would be seeing a family on television with a mom, a dad, and two kids. This suggests that the social norm in America is to have two kids with mom and and dad in the house.
      However, throughout the years there has been little that has changed in the ruling classes ideology and hegemony is still focused on the same ideas that were being pushed on the public for the last thirty years. While studying kids media culture, I found this subject to be quite interesting because of the ideas that are being pushed onto such a vulnerable age group. Cultural hegemony is seen in its most unhidden form in children's television.
   While our cultural hegemony can be seen clearly through the media the children watch and interact with, our cultural hegemony can also be seen in such as advertising as well. My example of hegemony in advertisements is an example from the 1950's where cigarettes were advertised as being a somewhat healthy habit.
    In all these examples cigarettes are being recommended by doctors and dentists, trustworthy occupations of the American society. This shows how if a certain idea, or made up fact, can make itself real to millions of people. At this time, cigarettes were seen by the public as non-lethal and mostly safe to smoke. I can conclude that a lot of that public view came from advertising in movies and in print.  By the time it had came out that cigarettes were bad for you and often caused death, the media had to try and undo what they had done to the cultural hegemony concerning smoking cigarettes. This is probably what led to the banning of advertising cigarettes in video and print media. The banning of these advertisements was to try and change the ideology about cigarettes that the public had.