Introducing Media Studies

The assumption that technological progress is inevitable and creates significant social change is called technological determinism.

Good visuals always win out over strong ideas.

A famine does not exist unless a BBC reporter stumbles upon it.

Agenda setting: the need to tie up news with political agenda and the pressure to manufacture social issues. Even “established facts” are filtered through a number of processes. Facts and impartiality are always at loggerheads with ideology. Most newspapers present their “facts” through their chosen political filters.

Pictures of starving people sell records.

The basic assumption of the hegemonic model is that the ruling classes are able to rule by ideas and cultural influence rather than force.

Through words, sounds and pictures, the various media produce a likeness of the “real” world. Through a process of mediation, they re-present the world to an audience. This re-presentation of reality is apparently similar to the way in which we interpret the world and create meaning for ourselves through our own physical senses. By constructing a representation of reality, the media constructs meanings about the world.

Discourse: structured representation of events; structured and inter-related interpretation of social and cultural knowledge that express power relations.

News is metonymic: a reported event is often interpreted to represent the whole of reality.

Media texts are encoded by the sender and decoded by the receiver.