Audiences (p. 25-32)
Media are seen as the conveyors of meaning or information. Different information reaches different audiences (e.g. based on age/race/country). Audiences are seen as the consumers of media products. They would have to be examined as a significant factor in the equation of how meanings were communicated.
Controlling consumption
People usually tend to copy what they see on television. Early studies show that when they watch violence on TV, this may result in copying this aggressive behaviour (Jamie Bulgar case). In this case two boys were thoroughly changed by the movie ‘’Childs Play 3’’ and they decided to kill a young boy. People have been starting to grow more conscious about what they watch.
Active audiences
Noam Chomsky states that the real product that manipulates the audience is the audience themselves. TV programmes are made in order to achieve success among the audience. The audience kind of makes the programmes because the media serves what the audience wants therefore the audience has influence on itself.
Texts among audiences
Audiences can interpret texts in 3 different ways according to Stuart Hall:
Preferred reading: For example a police officer reads about a crime. Just because he is a police officer makes it easier for him to understand the text.
Negotiated reading: This is when the audience is not totally familiar with the product. For example a woman that watches a film with a male actor. She will not always agree on all points just because some features are different.
Resistant reading: This happens when a person is against a certain viewpoint. For example the text about the crime will be read oppositionally in a prison.
Positioning audiences
When men watch a film, they will usually focus more on the men in the film. When others (e.g. females) are exposed more, those men usually will find it harder to identify with the emotions of the females. For example The Lion King. The voices of hyenas were spoken by Afro-American people. This could children give the idea that Afro-American people are bad people.
Mode of address
It is difficult for a journalist to fulfil the wishes of 10 million people watching his programme. Therefore they sometimes make up imaginary individuals to talk to and share their opinion. As those fictional people will always agree (because they do not exist :D) it makes it easier for the people to accept the opinion of the journalist.
Regional chic
The increased use of regional accents is an interesting feature in recent broadcasting. This makes people from a certain area feel more comfortable with that certain programme/TV company. This will make the people watch the programme more often.
Targeting audiences
When television advertisers want to sell a certain product they can ‘buy’ the audience for a certain amount of time and show their advertisement on national television.
Advertising
Newspapers also tend to ‘sell’ their audience to advertisers. These places are very popular amongst advertisers because newspapers are read by many people and different ages/races/countries.
Audience measurement
Audience can be measured in various ways. These numbers have become more reliable over the years because it has become easier to measure. These numbers are used to convince advertisers to advertise in their paper. High-income audiences are more popular among advertisers than low-income audiences.
Audience behaviour
The Nazis started media research as one of the first. They aimed at brainwashing the Russians in order to win the war. They constantly asked themselves: What are the effects of media on people?
The effects of tradition
Studies of the effect of the media on people have been asking themselves the same questions over and over again. What is the effect? Does watching violent films make people more aggressive?. They usually come up with the same results. Only a little percentage of the surveyed people showed different behaviour. These studies are used by governments to pass/change laws.
Effect studies
There have been a lot of studies about whether or not aggressive movies/games have an influence on young people. The intention of those studies was to investigate potential links between watching screen violence, and then copying it in actual behaviour in any form. These studies have become better and better and they show that media are fully involved in affecting the people.
Language (p. 45-47)
The world we live in is a massive human-created world according to Norman Fairclough. The world is made up of ideologies. These ideologies are systems or values made by humans. They are always linked to culture or behaviour. Examples of ideologies are beliefs about gender roles, economy and technology. Language is a tool which is abused by the media. Using language is the most common form of social behaviour in the human world. Language also is a tool for thinking and believing. Feminists would also agree that language carries ideologies and gives power.
Naturalisation
If an ideology or belief system comes to dominate all others it will be seen as ‘natural’. Until the 60s it was perfectly normal to use ‘he’ to mean ‘he/she’. This was common sense and only few saw any problem. Until women came to the conclusion that this language exc luded them from some things.
Repetition
With repetition, the media wants a point of view or ideology to look like common sense. Failure to present or explore alternatives leads to the unchallenged assumption that this is the only way of doing things.
Semiotics
The use of signs or sign systems is called semiotics. Signs are easy to recognise and therefore handy to sell a new product of an already popular factory.
Signs
All communication can be seen as messages created out of signs. A sign can be a smile, a rude gesture, a photograph or a letter in the alphabet. Signs work as pointers. Icons are signs that resemble the object to which they refer. Symbols are signs that do not resemble the thing to which they refer (e.g. the cross for Christianity). Denotation is the term given to the naming and describing level of a sign, at its most literal level. Connotation refers to the associated thoughts that any particular sign brings to mind. These may be connected, suggested or implied by the sign. Polysemy refers to the capacity of all signs to be ‘many signed’: i.e. to have more than one meaning. For example range, which has 17 different meanings. Codes are systems of signs, put together to create meaning.
Media products (p. 51-56)
Media as business
The essential fact is that the majority of media organisations are private businesses. They are companies with shareholders. Their prime concern is to make a profit for those shareholders. Huge investments of mony are made. Most visible example: the film industry (Titanic cost more than 200mln to produce and 350 mln to break even). In the UK, the film industry is nowhere near as lucrative. It does have its own occasional spectacular successes. (The Full Monty). The pattern is very varied. Many newspapers are actually losing money: however, this does not seem to matter unduly, as some of them are not profitable.
BBC
- Is funded by the licence fee and run traditionally on a non-commercial basis. - Has no shareholders - Does not seek to make profits.
Before the privatisation drive of the 1980s, there were quite a number of national organisations which operated under this mantle: today, very few remain and even those that do may yet be required to yield at least some of their traditional character. The jury is still out on whether this will apply to the BBC, too! BBC has always been a very influential organisation in terms of setting standards in broadcasting and in developing programme material and formats. In the past few decades, it has been increasingly squeezed both by cuts to its core funding and by the growing number and size of commercial competitors. One result of this is that it has come to resemble those channels more in terms of output and operational practice.
Support of the powerful
Media organisations are felt to have considerable influence over their audiences, especially in the realm of newspapers and most especially in the run-up to general elections. Prior to the landslide victory of the Labour party in 1997, Tony Blair paid a very well-documented visit to Rupert Murdoch’s private island on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. The reason for Blair’s visit was to address the Labour Party’s attitude towards Murdoch’s company, Newscorp, the media interests of which include the Sun and Sky television: its purpose was clearly to reassure that individual that a Labour Government would not be injurious to his business interests. The text of speech was not made public. However, after this, Murdoch was to speak very favourably of Blair.
The Owners
Karl Marx proposed that the owners of big businesses are the ‘ruling class’. They make up around 5 per cent of the population, but control roughly three-quarters of the national wealth. The remaining people work for them exchanging labour for wages. In a Marxist view, the media owners represent reality from the viewpoint of ‘the bosses’. Studies of television news have found a tendency to favour authority figures, and the greater powers that they represent, in coverage of political and industrial events of various kinds. For the most part, the degree to which the media are manipulated to serve the interests of this powerful group is largely concealed. The process of acquiring the degree of control should not be seen as simplistic. Media producers have developed highly sophisticated methods of attracting consumers to their products, with an apparently wide range of fare on offer. If the material on offer has sufficient appeal, the majority of the public will not worry too much about the ins-and-outs of ownership.
Hegemony Political theorist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony to chart how governments require the consent of their peoples to be governed. In a democracy, this is essential as, without consent, law and order can easily break down. Large-scale, popular dissent can result in the people becoming literally ungovernable. French lorry drivers and farmers are good examples of this. The consent of the people to abide by the law and be ruled is therefore crucial. This consent has to be won and the media play a considerable part in this process. The entertainment, excitement and other diversions they proffer are key to maintaining the complacency of the general populace.
Tending towards monopoly Imagine a primeval swamp with a few bloated dinosaurs confronting each other. They exist in uneasy truce but if one beast turns its head momentarily, another will deliver a death blow. If one is smaller and grows more slowly, it will be hunted by others. In a media monopoly a single firm dominates, or even operates as the sole provider.
An oligopoly exists when there is almost a monopoly. In an oligopoly, 4/5 companies operate like cardsharps in a poker game. Each player knows what the others are up to, but does not have perfect knowledge. The players organise and control the markets to suit themselves. Others are excluded from the game. A conglomerate is a collection of diverse companies not bound by common activity or product, but often reinforcing each other’s interests.
Synergy Merchandising is now a long-established feature of film-making. Often, as much money can be made from the related products marketed alongisde the release of a major new film as from the film itself. Tie-ins and spin-offs, where merchandise is closely linked with particular media products, are very much a feature of today’s marketing world. So much so that people even claim that the film is now the trailer for the stream of products that is to follow.
Diversification is a process of enlarging a company by taking over or merging with other companies. Sometimes these other companies can be in similar or related areas of business; sometimes they are not.
Horizontal integration is when companies expand sideways. The entertainment media sells their products as pastimes in the leisure industry. A film company, for example, may spread its activities into virtual reality technology or holiday resorts.
Vertical integration is when expansion up or down occurs. It is made possible because the production process is divided into stages. A newspaper begins as a tree, then goes through multiple stages of production and distribution until it finally ends up as stuffing for a paded postbag.
Benefits
In the fluid environment of the modern business world, a narrow base of activity is regarded as highly undesirable. Diversification increases profits and long-term security. If one part of the firm loses money, the other parts can support it.
Problems
Sometimes, conflicts can arise between the interests of differing arms of a complex organisation. The management of The Observer was once famously pressured by its former owner, not to investigate condititons in mines in South Africa.
Media Factories what makes news has as much to do with institutional practice as newsworthiness. The industrial processes of media organisations are major determinants of the texts. Each organisation has particular values that determine what gets printed or screened. These values can be divided into two distinct categories: news values and professional values.
News Values There are patterns in the selection and presentation of news. Television programmes and newspapers have their own formats, their regular presenters and writers. A distinct set of criteria has emerged which determines the filtering processes of all the potential events that may be covered in any one day.
Most influential: Proximity: This is perhaps the most important - how close to home does the event occur. The general feeling is that the further away the location, the more dramatic the story has to be to compete with a natural tendency for audiences to identify primarily with ‘homegrown’ news.
Predictabillity: the coverage given to particular events follows predictable patterns. Media outlets develop certain ways of looking at the world and reinforce this with the way they present new stories.
Frequency: Has to do with the amount of time the story itself actually takes to occur. Events which are completed actions are preferred to things whichc take a long time to unfold.
Continuity: On the other hand, once a story started, following up to check on developments is regarded as important: police or public enquiries, ongoing trials and so on.
Negativity: has long been one of the prime requirements of all ‘good’ news reporting. Things that go wrong are regarded as the best sources of story material.
Surprise: an element in the selection process, but not as frequent in occurrence as might be thought. Too much of the unexpected makes it difficult to impose a pattern on news gathering.
Celebrity: is not strictly on the original list, but decidedly a category which needs adding today. Once confirmed to national politicians and international leaders, and focused on their public actions.
Professional values
All institutions have certain ways of doing things, which are built up over time and promoted with a high degree of internal pride. For some, there are external constraints, including legal controls, which determine how they do things: this is a very significant area and is dealt with elsewhere.
Formal mechanisms exist to guide and monitor the materials supplied to the public. In the case of newspapers, there is the Press Complaints Commission (PCC): this body responds to complaints it receives, and reviews published work to determine whether any serious breaches of the Press Code occur. It has no legal powers, and is a voluntary organisation funded by the newspaper industry itself. It can request that editors respond to transgressions which it identifies, but it cannot compel them to do so. The Press Code is a set of rules governing the conduct of jounalists, photographers and their employers. (see page 19 for details!!). In the realm of television, there are two distinct monitoring bodies: one for the BBC and another for commercial television. The Independent Television Commission (ITC) both awards licenses to broadcasting companies and scrutinises their output, to ensure that they do nothing to offend public decency. On the other hand, the BBC has no such external monitoring agency but does have its own Board of Governors, who are responsible for the running of the whole organisation on a solid professional basis.
Informal mechanisms are rather harder to see than formal mechanisms, although they may in fact be more influential in determining the nature of the fare actually produced. All media institutions have their own in-house organisational approaches to their trade and their own particular internal codes about how events are to be interpreted and represented. (Pravda, see p. 15). It is an open secret that newspapers have their own political affiliations. Today, these have become a little more divserse. Previously, most national newspapers had been staunch supporters of the conservative party. What is not always so clearly understood is the extent to which these organisations are prepared to manipulate facts to accommodate this political support. Similarly, journalists who wish to work for them have to adapt to the perspectives of these institutions.
Division of labour into roles
Labour is divided into component stages
Media producers have specialised roles such as journalist, editor, sub-editor, and so on. A consequence of this multiple authorship is that media texts often follow standard formulae. Media products are made in teams so no individual is totally responsible for the meanings communicated. The values of the text are therefore more likely to be those values acceptable to the institution as a whole.
Routines All media institutions develop routines that can have considerable impact on the shape of the final product. Any institution will do the same: if you have found an effective way of doing business, why look to change it? On the whole, this seems a sensible way to run an organisation. In news productino, it does raise some important quenstions. We have already seen how agendas of news selection are established. If the topics themselves are virtually preselected, then the means of reporting is increasingly in danger, too.
News management Recognising the power wielded by the holder of information, politicians above all others have now developed sophisticated methods of managing the news. There is a public perception of the media as purveyors of the truth - or of factual accounts of things that happen, at least. Of course, this image is carefully cultivated by news providers themselves. Reality is quite another story, however. Even in this notorious case, it was the role of the anonymous supplier of key information. Managing the release of news may not be the new phenomenon many take it for, but it certainly has become a central feature of government in all modern democracies.
The spin doctors There is a new breed of news manager in the arena now. Very much a product of the 1990s, the spin doctor is neither an elected member of the government nor even a civil servant, but rather an employee of a political party. The term itself is originally American; it derives from the game of pool and has to do with the techniques of controlling the cue ball. In essence, there is the ball itslef, which is a fixed entity and cannot be changed; there is then the manner of its delivery to its point of impact. In terms of government, similarly, there are nuggets of news which have to be presented to the public.
The influence of the professionals Journalists are mostly in favour of capitalism and free enterprise, but lean towards the left on social issues. They have an ‘anything goes’ attitude in relation to moral areas and they are often hostile to organised religion. Whether these views are actually reflected in news output is largely unresearched. So far, only journalists have been surveyed. The social views of other professionals working in the production of television dramas, quiz shows or horror films have not been explored at all.
Gatekeepers Key personnel within media organisations are designated with some kind of operational control over what passes through the particular institution. The ‘gates’ are where items of news, for instance, are considered for suitability. The ‘keepers’ of those gates are those people who determine what gets through and is used; editors and their deputies, chiefly.
Internal constraints Just as the education system or the police force has a particular ‘culture’, media institutions develop an ethos of their own about the correct way of doing things. Camera operators have the ‘well-trimmed image’, while magazine artists have the ‘house style’. Formats will vary widely from outlet to outlet. Newspapers are generally recognised as having preferences among political parties and it is unusual for them to print articles which do not adhere to these affiliations. Journalists need to be mindful of them when composing their articles. Journalists are also bound by a formal document called the Code of Practise (p. 19). This is a voluntary code drawn up by the PCC. This code was considerably strengthened after the death of Diana (Princess of Wales).
External constraints The Code of Practice has no legal standing: journalists and editors can be asked to comply with rulings by the PCC, and even asked to desist from future breaches, offer apologies, and so on. But they cannot be made to do so. A range of regulations impact on the final shpae of any media text. Some of these are voluntary codes and agreements; others are strictly enforced government regulations. Newspapers are traditionally considered to be free form direct government controls. The internet is also free of this because it has developed across national boundaries and enables individuals to virtually set themselves up as media organisations. Radio is said to have a light touch of control.
Regulation and ownership rules There is a theoretical framework and an actual implementation of it. The two do not entirely match up. (p. 20 is an example).
Television Initially, franchises (licenses to broadcast) were restricted to only one for any one company, and a limit set of only up to 20 per cent for onwership of another broadcasting company. Regulation is quite complex, given the diverse nature of the provision of television services in this country. The BBC is answerable to its own Board of Governors. They have the power to require a programme to be withdrawn from the schedule, if they deem it unfit for broadcasting, for whatever reason. Commercial television is licensed by the ITC, which publishes codes that these broadcasters must strictly observe. This body also deals with complaints, regarding programme and advertising material. Radio has proven to be one of the faster developing areas in the past ten years. Regulated by the Radio Authority, there is now a proliferation of new licenses operating in this field. Newspapers and magazines, having their origins in the 19th century, have been subject to less regulation than the broadcast media. No licence is required to publish in print, only extensive capital.
Broadcasting licences Commercial television and radio broadcasters must obtain a licence before transmission can start. Conditions attached to the broadcasting licences include: the requirement to contribute to an adequate and comprehensive range of services; upholding the ‘public interest’; maintaining programme standards; and not broadcasting illegal material.
Defamation and other laws of restraint It consists of two distinct elements: slander for the spoken word and libel for the written word. Broadly speaking, the offence consists of three parts: publication, identification and defamation. People who think that their reputations have been damaged by the media may take the matter to court. If foudn guilty, media organisations may have to pay considerable sums of mony. A number of other laws apply to the nature of reporting that may be carried out for particular kinds of subject, according to where they occur and whom they involve and the manner in which they may be covered.
Representation
Read through the example on page 35!
Defining representation
Media represent reality. When things happen, out there in the world, these events said to ‘present’ themselves. It is relatively rare for any form of media to capture this first presentation. The media are only representing things once they have occurred. This is the theory, at least. The actual practices of many media outlets mean that often it seems to be they who are genrating the reality on which they are reporting. Many tabloid stories, in particular, have homed in on personal miseries that they themselves have been instrumental in bringing about.
One of the regularly recurring negative images we are exposed to is that of the football hooligan. This social phenomenon has been with us for quite a long time now. It would be interesting to know whether the Romans ever had any problems with unruly crowdfs after their chariot races or lion-feeding sessions.
How representations work
Representations invite audiences to understand them and agree with them in certain preferred ways. Different interpretations are possible to some extent, depending on the audience. (read through p. 38 examples).
Stereotypes
It is a typical or mass-produced image, repeated so many times it seems to have established a pattern. It is a simplified and highly judgmental type of representation.
One well-known female stereotype is that of the dumb blonde. On the other hand, there is the male stereotype of the foolish sitcom father.
The word stereotype comes from the printing trade. Printers would make a papier-mache model and then cast a metal printing plate from it. Next, they would ink the plate and hundreds of identical printings could then be reproduced. Just as the image on the metal typesetting plate is fixed and endlessly repeated, so the stereotype is often applied whatever the circumstances.
Stereotypes are an extreme form of representation. They are constructed by a process of selection.
Ideology
O’Sullivan tells us how various powerful vested interests operate to ensure particular representations of the world are manifested. Thus communism was always presented as inherently bad. Capitalism, on the other hand, was always good. Ideology is an organised system of beliefs and values that inform the basis on which a particular society operates.
