Stuart Hall: Why the Same Words Mean Different Things to Different People

The encoding/decoding model, and why reception is always a political act

Stuart Hall (Photograph: David Levene)

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The assumption inside every news bulletin

When a journalist presents a story about striking workers, or a politician addresses the nation about border security, there is usually an implicit assumption at work: that the message, more or less, arrives intact. That audiences receive what was sent. This assumption is so embedded in communication theory that it took decades for anyone working in media studies to challenge it systematically. Stuart Hall did so in 1980, and the implications have not been fully absorbed.

Stuart Hall (1932-2014)

Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and came to Britain in 1951 on a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. He was among the founding members of what became the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), which he directed from 1968 to 1979. He was not a linguist in the technical sense. He worked across Marxist cultural theory, semiotics, and media analysis, drawing on Gramsci, Althusser, and the structuralist tradition stemming from Saussure.

It is not simply a biography. It is a background. Hall was a Black Caribbean intellectual writing in a Britain that routinely misrepresented Black communities in its press and broadcasting. His attention to the gap between what was said about a community and how that community received those representations was not an abstract theoretical interest. It came from the position he occupied. For Hall, theory and experience were connected in ways that most communication researchers had not considered.

The transmission model and its politics

Hall’s 1980 essay ‘Encoding/Decoding’, published in Culture, Media, Language, begins by rejecting what he called the linear or transmission model: a sender encodes a message, a channel transmits it, a receiver decodes it. The model assumes a basic equivalence between what is sent and what is received. This assumption had a political life in both directions. It underpinned left-wing fears of media manipulation (the Frankfurt School’s argument that mass culture produces passive consumers) and right-wing claims of media transparency (the idea that a free press simply reports what happens). Hall argued that both positions misunderstood how meaning works.

Signs, he insisted (following Saussure), are not transparent. A television news report does not mirror reality. It produces a representation of reality through selective framing, word choice, visual composition, and narrative structure. These choices are not neutral. They are made within institutional contexts and professional ideologies that tend, across time, to favour certain interpretations over others.

Encoding and decoding

The encoding process is the work of production. Journalists, editors, and institutions construct a text using the codes available to them, codes shaped by professional norms and institutional pressures that feel, to those inside them, like common sense rather than ideology. The result is a text that works to produce a preferred meaning, the reading the text is structured to favour.

The decoding process is the work of reception. Audiences bring their own codes, shaped by social position, education, and prior frameworks of understanding. These codes do not automatically match those used in production. The same sign can be decoded differently by different audiences, and that mismatch is not a failure of communication. It is, Hall argued, the normal condition.

Three reading positions

Hall described three decoding positions.

A dominant or preferred reading accepts the framework the text offers. The viewer takes the preferred meaning and works within it. A news report that opens with patient harm before reporting on a strike, uses the verb phrase “walk out” rather than “take industrial action”, and quotes government ministers more prominently than union representatives, is structured to produce this reading: the strike is the disruption, and the government is managing it.

A negotiated reading accepts the dominant framework in general but modifies it at specific points. A viewer might agree that the NHS is under pressure and that patient risk is real, while also thinking that the pay figures the union cites are accurate and deserve more prominence. This reading operates partly inside and partly outside the preferred meaning.

An oppositional reading rejects the dominant framework and substitutes an alternative. A viewer who identifies the opening focus on patient harm as a structural choice that positions workers as a threat rather than employees exercising a legal right, and who reads the prominence of ministerial quotations as an institutionally privileged position rather than neutral balance, is reading oppositionally.

These are not personality types. They are reading positions, shaped by social location and ideological framework. The same person may occupy different positions across different texts. Crucially, they are not equally available: the text is built to make the preferred reading feel natural.

A concrete case: the 2023 junior doctors’ strikes

When junior doctors in England struck in March 2023, broadcast and print coverage consistently opened with patient impact. The noun “disruption” appeared routinely in headlines; reports led with appointment cancellations and risk to vulnerable patients. The British Medical Association’s claim that real-terms pay had fallen by more than 26% since 2008 (BMA, 2023) appeared, where it appeared at all, after this framing had been established.

Two observations at the level of language are worth noting. First, the choice of “disruption” positions the strike as the cause of harm rather than the underfunding it was responding to. The agency is displaced: workers disrupt; the conditions that produced the strike remain grammatically background. Second, the ordering of information is itself an argument. What comes first in a news report is what the text treats as primary.

A preferred reading accepts this as responsible public-interest journalism. A negotiated reading might grant the framing while noting that the pay-cut figures received less prominence than they deserved. An oppositional reading sees the ordering and the vocabulary as a political choice that benefits one side of a labour dispute.

Hall’s model does not adjudicate between these readings. It explains why all three exist, why the text is structured to favour one, and why that structuring is a form of power.

Hall and critical discourse analysis

Hall’s essay does not supply the linguistic tools that CDA developed. It does not analyse transitivity, lexical choice, or modality at the clause level. What it supplies is a theoretical account of why those features are significant: because texts are constructed to produce preferred meanings, and those preferred meanings serve particular social interests.

Fairclough (1995) and van Dijk (1988) took Hall’s central question (whose meaning does a text naturalise?) and gave it systematic linguistic form. Richardson (2007) extended that project specifically to news discourse. The relationship between Hall’s model and CDA is not one of derivation; it is one of complementarity. Hall explains the politics of reception; CDA supplies the tools for identifying, at the level of specific language, how preferred meanings are built in.

Where this leads

The encoding/decoding model explains how preferred meanings are produced and contested. It does not fully explain how those preferred meanings come to feel like common sense in the first place. That was Hall’s own question, and he borrowed the answer from Antonio Gramsci.

In the next article, I examine Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and why the most effective ideological work is the work that no longer looks like ideology at all.

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©Antoine Decressac — 2026

British Medical Association (2023) Pay restoration for junior doctors in England. London: BMA.

Fairclough, N. (1995) Media Discourse. London: Arnold.

Hall, S. (1980) ‘Encoding/decoding’, in Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A. and Willis, P. (eds.) Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79. London: Hutchinson, pp. 128-138.

Hall, S. (1997) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage/Open University Press.

Morley, D. (1980) The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding. London: British Film Institute.

Richardson, J.E. (2007) Analysing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

van Dijk, T.A. (1988) News as Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.