Media Hegemony
The concept of hegemony, which first was put forward by Antonio Gramsci (1971), refers to the moral, philosophical, and political leadership of a social group, which is not gained by force but by an active consent of other social groups through taking control of culture and ideology. During this process, the leading social group exerts its impact and gain its legitimacy mainly through social mechanisms such as education, religion, family and the mass media. Based on the definition of hegemony, media hegemony means the dominance of a certain aspects of life and thoughts by penetrating dominant culture and values in social life. In other words, media hegemony served as a crucial shaper of culture, values and ideology of society (Altheide, 1984). 
For example, TV news departments are considered as extensions of a capitalistic economic order (Hall, 1979). The products of the media contain messages that convey the nature of society, the nature of relation of production within the media and the domain of institutions and social process (Golding, 1979). Thus it is crucial to decode media to figure out the latent capitalist ideology within the products of the media, and more importantly to realize the role of the media as tools to produce merchandise in a late capitalist economic order.
Hegemony
From the Gramsci analysis derived the political science denotation of hegemony as "leadership"; thus, the historical example of Prussia as the militarily and culturally predominant province of the German Empire (Second Reich 1871–1918); and the personal and intellectual predominance of Napoleon Bonaparte upon the French Consulate (1799–1804). Contemporarily, in "Hegemony and Socialist Strategy" (1985), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe defined hegemony as a political relationship of power wherein a sub-ordinate society (collectivity) perform social tasks that are culturally unnatural and not beneficial to them, but that are in exclusive benefit to the imperial interests of the hegemon, the superior, ordinate power; hegemony is a military, political, and economic relationship that occurs as an articulation within political discourse. Beyer analysed the contemporary hegemony of the United States at the example of the Global War on Terrorism and presented the mechanisms and processes of American exercise of power in 'hegemonic governance'.