News Theory

 Monday 16th May 2022

Industries:

Curran and Seaton: Media industries are capitalist and the owners control the media leading to a narrowing of opinions concluding that owners pursue profit.

Hesmondhalgh: Production is owned and controlled by a few media conglomerates with companies rely on repetition to minimise risk and cover failure as risk is seen in loss of money.  

Livingstone and Lunt: Citizens are social, seek public or social benefits from the media and require regulation to promote public interest and consumers who seek private benefits from the media require regulation to protect them.

Audience:

Bandura: The media can influence people directly influencing their values judgements and conduct can be altered directly.

Gerbner: Long term exposure to media forms cultivates standardised roles and behaviours with 'mean world syndrome' causing a mistrusting attitude towards others. 

Hall: media producers encode with a preferred meaning the dominant readings, negotiated readings and oppositional readings. 

Jenkins: Audiences are active, participatory audiences create online communities using new media forms to develop or influence how media is consumed. 

Shirky: Traditional media are shaped by centeralised producers, audiences are now seen as a mass of people with predictable behaviours, audience behaviour is now variable, they are prosumers who can create and shape their own content and user generated content creates emotional connections.

Media Language:

Baudrillard: Modern societies were organised around production of goods, postmodern society is organised around simulation - the play of images and signs. Hyperreality - media simulations which control the way we think and behave.

Levi-strauss: Binary oppositions, hidden rules which shape a structure to communicate ideologies or myths. 

Barthes: the meaning is communicated through signs which are made up of a signifier, the meanings created by these myths often reflect dominant values and ideologies.

Neale: Genre depends upon the repetition of codes and conventions in media products, genre conventions are not fixed and evolve over time as producers subvert established conventions or use other genres. 'the intertextual relay'

Todorov: narratives move from a state of equilibrium to disequilibrium to resolution to a new equilibrium. 

Representation:

Butler: Gender is created in response to our performance of gender roles. Performativity of these roles causes 'gender trouble' for those who do not fit the heterosexual norms.

Gilroy: The black atlantic is a transatlantic cultures that is simultaneously African, American, Caribbean and British. Britain has failed to mourn its loss of empire, creating post-colonial melancholia, leading to a version of British colonial history that criminalises immigrants.  Representations support a belief in they inherit superiority of white western civilisations.

Hall: meaning is created by a representation, but it isn't just by what is present but also what is absent and different. stereotypes are constructed and should be deconstructed to identify what they tell us about ideology. 

Gauntlett: identity: The media portray a wide range of different identities allowing people to think through their own identities, identities of gender and sexuality are now less fixed than they were in the past. 

Van Zoonen: Women are often objectified, viewed as sexual objects, in media representations.

Bell Hooks: Feminism challenges patriarchy and sexist representations, hooks argues for an intersectional approach considering how identities such as race, class and sexuality contribute to oppression alongside gender.