Jean Killbourne speaks publicly about how adverts can come across as sexualizing men and women in ‘different ways’.

Language and Representation	Audience and Institution	All Four Areas
– Letter To The Free – Ghost Town -Maybelline -Score	-War of the Worlds -The I -Daily Mail -Hidden Figures	-Television -Men’s Health -Oh -Teen Vogue -Tomb Raider

– The Score hair cream advert is an historical artefact from 1967

– It relates to gender roles, sexuality and the historical context of advertising techniques. 1967 can be seen as a period of slow transformation in western cultures with legislation about and changing attitudes to the role of women – and men – in society, something that the advert can be seen to negotiate.

Curran and Seaton present the view that a free press relies on a free market where individual newspapers can compete through their political stances and points of view.

Analyse the ways that The i and the Daily Mail attempt to establish a distinctive identity within this free market. To what extent has this been successful? Refer to the specific edition of your case study – for both papers – as well as, on-line versions of these publications

Curran and Seaton are theorists that came up with the idea that media is controlled by a small number of companies and primarily driven by the logic of profit and power. The theory of liberal press is targeted at newspapers. It’s the view that there should be a range of wider views in newspapers to make sure they’re less bias. A quote from Curran about the liberal press ‘the freedom to publish in the free market’ ensures that the press reflects a wide range of opinions and interests. Curran published a book called ‘Media and Democracy‘, in which he stated how  “The assumption that ‘anyone’ is free to start as new paper has been an illusion ever since the industrialization of the press.” which suggests anyone could create a newspaper. However Curren says in order to make it a successful newspaper “Newspapers and magazines must respond to the concerns of their readers if they are to stay in business”.

There are a few theorists that can link to The I and The Daily Mail such as Habermas. Habermas came up with a theory of the public sphere which is similar to the concept of free press. The public sphere suggests how people can freely be connected to others horizontally rather than vertically, but Habermas challenged that over time. The public sphere has been broken down due to globalisation and then the introduction of mass media. Within the public sphere, there are personal places, such as home to communicate with your family and then social places, such as coffee shops, where you can communicate and socialise with others, therefore connecting beyond our family and personal relationships. Socialising with others in public means you can transform your life and views and socialise with anyone throughout the whole World, which links to the Daily Mail and the I because they are available in shops and airports across the world. Noam Chomsky can also be linked to this, he came up with the theory of manufacturing consent. He argued that there are 5 filters of the mass media. These 5 filters are financial ownership, advertising, the media elite, flak and the common enemy. This links to these two newspapers because in 2019, the Daily Mail bought the I newspaper for £49.6million. Following on with the 5 filters of manufacturing consent, advertising links to the newspapers because each newspaper includes adverts, in which company’s pay to get published, meaning the newspaper will generate advertisement revenue from advertising. Usually, the newspapers would stick to very generic adverts such as supermarket ones in order to attract a wider audience. However, more specific gender-orientated media, such as magazines would include adverts that would appeal to their target audience. The third filter looks at the media elite. This filter explains how the big media corporations will publish media, exclusive interviews and celebrities in order to attract their target audience. Flak is the 4th filter and is where there is a negative viewpoint towards media sources. Newspapers commonly use flak to remove any articles that are being put up for publishing. An example of this is that a right-winged newspaper such as The Daily Mail will not include any left-wing articles journalists to write for them because The Daily Mail want to influence their readers to be more right-winged on the political spectrum. An example of Flak in the Daily Mail was in 2016, with the election of the new Prime Minister. The Daily Mail was heavily supporting Teresa May, a Conservative, but had a negative viewpoint towards Jeremy Corbyn (Labour).  The final filter is having a common enemy. The Daily Mail often uses their common enemy of terrorists, in order to help create a negative public opinion towards them. A final theorist I will include is Gramsci, who came up with the theory of hegemony. Hegemony outlines how certain ideas can be influential to others and this is shown by the lack of power that the working class would have over the higher class. Hegemony is shown in The Daily Mail because they have been criticised for using media sensationalism and overdramatising their news articles, as a technique to attract their audiences and change their viewpoints on the topics. This is opposite to The I because they have not been criticised for media sensationalism and while they are left-winged, they include some right-wing articles too which can show some diversity and suggest both sides of the spectrum, which can also suggest they are more central on the political spectrum.

The Daily Mail is a right wing newspaper as stated previously, who is owned by the Daily Mail General Trust (DMGT). The I, however, is a politically aligned left wing newspaper including some right-winged articles, which was also bought out by the DMGT in 2019. It is significant that by buying out the I, the DMGT has been able to generate more revenue because they are attracting people from both the different sides of the political spectrum rather than one side which could limit sales. This is because The Daily Mail, supposedly primarily targets working-class middle aged women. However, the I primarily targets younger audiences (young adults). While the Daily Mail has around 999,997 newspapers in circulation (as of June 2020), the I newspaper only had circulation of around 140,154. Therefore, it could be argued that the DMGT bought out the I to maximise their sales because Daily Mail readers would have brand loyalty to the newspaper and because they maybe wanted to target more of a wider audience with their different newspapers, so would most likely buy their subsidiaries. Both the I and the Daily Mail are available online as well as in print form, which attracts new audiences because phones are the new age of our generation and may be a more simple way to connect with newspapers instead of going to the shop to buy them. By having mobile editions of their papers, it can attract younger audiences. While these newspapers hold very contradicting viewpoints and are oppositely aligned on the political spectrum, they both include a mixture of hard and soft news and a range of articles, such as games, sports and breaking news in order to attract an all rounded audience, rather than 1 specific audience, which will mean that they will be generating as much revenue as possible.

The I newspaper, are politically left winged and will focus on left-wing articles. Using Laswell’s hypodermic model, Nigel Morris speaks about how Biden and Boris Johnson never met. This article from Morris will be received by Daily Mail readers and following the 2020 US Presidential Election, which creates the message that the I favours their support for the Democratic Party because they are objecting to a claim. Another theorist than can be applied is Katz, who came up with the uses and gratifications theory. The uses and gratifications theory is linked with Malsow’s hierachy of needs and for newspapers, it can be identified by using the uses and gratifications theory, newspapers serve the purpose for knowledge about the world and escapism. This is because both the I and the Daily Mail cover news articles from both locally around the UK, as well as having a few pages for global news. Lazerfeld’s two step flow can also be applied to the two newspapers, because while it can be susceptible to bias, interpretation, support and changes, what newspapers have are the main source of media and the opinion leader would be the reader, who may choose to believe something written in the newspaper and tell their friends, influencing them to change their opinions on this type of news. This is a common strategy the I and the Daily Mail use because they are politically aligned a certain way and would want their readers to adopt the same political spectrum viewpoint they have.

In conclusion, both the I and the Daily Mail have been mostly successful at creating their own distinctive identity. This is shown by the theory of the free press as they have both been able to publish what they want without any restrictions or interference from the government. However, it is significant that while the Daily Mail is one of highest circulating newspapers in the UK with almost 1 million sales, They have received criticisms for publishing inaccurate stories. In Contrast, it can be argued that the I is a more reliable newspaper source than the Daily Mail because it has included accounts from key political figures in the UK, such as Boris Johnson and 10 Downing Street and does sometimes include information from both the right and left wing.

-Bf Skinner: Operant Conditioning- Suggests we don’t have a free will ‘the fiction of free will’ – he’s deterministic suggesting that the environment has an effect on our behaviour and other outside factors are the reasoning for our behaviour making us not responsible for what we do.

-Schedule of reward- Instant gratification

Propaganda and Persuasion

Harold Lasswell- Involved in 1st world war- ‘Subtle Poison’ something injected into the veins of people

Hypodermic Model- Suggests we have a passive audience, spoon fed by media

Shoshana Zuboff- Speaks about behaviour management to persuade people to interact with certain types of behaviour

Cambridge Analytica-Alexander Nix

Early theoretical work on the relationship (or effects) of media consumption are often traced back to Harold Lasswell, who developed the theoretical tool of ‘content analysis’ and in 1927 wrote Propaganda Technique in the World War.

Shannon Weaver-1949- Developed and Criticized that model^– Maybe the message won’t go through ‘noise’-

Paul Lazerfeld-1948- 2 Step Flow– Tell one person they then tell other people- Those who interpret media messages first and then relay them back to a bigger audience.

Uses and Gratifications- Katz, Gurevietch, Haas- (1973)

Cultivation Theory- George Gerbner and Larry Gross and others worked on a large-scale, positivist, in-depth, longitudinal study into the effects of television, which started in 1975.

The Theory of Preferred Reading- Stuart Hall– Was developing a critical theory that looked to analyse mass media communication and popular culture as a way of both uncovering the invidious work of the State and Big Business, as well as looking for ways of subverting that process.

Clay Shirky-The End of Audience– To bring this summary of different audience approaches towards a conclusion, would be to look at Clay Shirky‘s notion of the end of audience. Because what could happen if, instead of the choice of three subject positions as offered by the theory of preferred reading, there were limitless, individual subject positions available to all of us, at any time, in any place, from any perspective?

Habermas’ theory of the public sphere could be linked to both newspapers because they support the public sphere because they are newspapers. The public sphere is an area in social life where individuals can freely discuss societal problems. This links to the Daily Mail because newspapers get most of their news from sources who write into them who talk freely about issues gong on or their stories.

Similarities	Differences
Both Newspapers are printed Daily	First Issue of Daily Mail was in 1896 and First Issue of The I was in 2010
Both papers are printed copies and available digitally	Net worth of Daily Mail is 2 Billion and The I is worth less
The I was bought by the daily mail for £49 Million	Daily Mail produce 980,000 copies per day and the I produces 233,869 per day
Both papers offer subscriptions	Daily Mail produces a different paper on a Sunday (Mail on Sunday) but the I doesn’t

• The daily mail first issued their copies in 1896
• Originating in London.
• Owned by Daily Mail and General Trust
• Alfred Harmsworth and Harold Harmsworth founded the newspaper
• The weekday Daily Mail was increased in cost by 5p in September of 2018 it was its first increase since February 2016. The newspaper’s Monday to Friday editions will go up from 65p to 70p. The Daily Mail’s Saturday edition costs £1, while the Mail on Sunday costs £1.80
• Highest Circulated Daily Newspaper
• The mail on Sunday was launched in 1982
• Scottish and Irish versions of the newspaper were launched in 1947 and 2006
• Jonathan Harmsworth owns the newspaper now after inheriting it from his great grandfather: Harold Harmsworth
• Found that it’s average age of readers is 58
•  Lowest demographic for 15- to 44-year-olds 

Judith Butler is a philosopher and a gender theorist whose work influenced political philosophy and ethics and also the fields of third wave feminism. Butlers work was influenced by Jacques Le Can and her work is primarily known for having notable ideas on gender performance and gender as a social construction. Jacques Le Can invented the mirror theory. The Mirror Theory refers to an emotional action/reaction. Everyone you encounter is an emotional mirror of the love or the lack of love you express. In fact, they reflect back to you a part of yourself. It also explores how infants first look at themselves and identify that it’s them. Therefore this suggests that people view and interpret media in different ways and therefore giving different ideas about media. Another theorist that can be linked to the representation of genders is bell hooks. bell hooks is a theorist that said that we need to engage with popular culture in order to identify class struggle domination, renegotiation and revolution.

The music video “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke, which was published in 2013, quickly became a massive controversy, because of the third wave of feminism in the mid 1990s. The music video portrays women as highly sexualised and passive sex objects. The producers have clearly constructed a music video in order to get a message across about how women are represented in nowadays. However, society was not happy with this, and decided that this idea of women needs to change, not by taking the video down, but changing its stereotypes of culture, racism and sexism. Barker and Jane are english fiction writers, and according to their theories, the third wave of feminism is the ‘rebellion of younger women against what was perceived as the prescriptive, pushy and ‘sex negative’ approach of older feminists’ and enhance to characteristics of “sex positive”.

In response to the “Blurred Lines” music video, Auckland Uni produced a “parody” version of the hit single, in order to provoke/enhance the message of how women were represented in this music video. The video is a role reversal, where the women act like the men did and the men act like the women did in the original music video. The aim of producing this parody was to show how bizarre it would be to see men portrayed as women in music videos. This was able to portray that the use of new media technologies have been a clear demarcation for broadening out the arguments that are played out within feminism.

The forth wave of feminism began around 2012. The only difference compared from the fourth to the third, is that the forth wave feminism was more active, as we now have multiple foundations to support it, such as the “free the nipple” campaign, where Miley Cyrus got involved and gave her surpport for women.

The magazine “Oh Comely” was published by the independent publisher, Iceberg Press, which is a London based publisher. This magazine is about new ways of looking inside ourselves. It is a reimagination of women’s magazine, that constructs a representation of femininity with its focus on creativity and quickness. The front covers of Oh Comely show major themes of empowerment, as the female models stand with a strong, bold posture, with full face shots where they portray themselves as being independent. It is possible to apply Stuart halls theory of representation in this case as the absence of men creates an identity for the brand, as they are doing something out of the ‘ordinary’ by showing how women can have different representations and aren’t just objects, as you would see in various magazines and music videos, such as “Blurred Lines”.

From looking at the magazine “Oh Comely”, it is possible to clearly see a major contrast in the Men’s Health magazine, which was published by the company Hearst communications, where it pinpoints a focuses on the representation of men. This magazine supports Judith Butlers theory considering “a repertoire of acts”, suggesting that something can be learnt through a repeated action.

Hearst is a large conglomerate, owning other magazines such as Maire Claire and Elle. With Men’s Health being one of the world’s largest men’s magazine brands, it plays a big role in presenting genders and stereotypes. With its repetitive Men’s Health magazines, with all the men standing in the same position in each magazine making themselves look strong, bulky and strong it creates an ideology of the way men should be perceived. Overtime, when the magazines tend reach all audiences, it gives the audience an intended message on how they should look. This is enhanced by the various bold text that are featured in the front cover, “blast body fat” “new year muscle” etc. This magazine portrays how men should be perceived by audiences, making men feel like they have to look a certain way, encouraging them to become ‘bulky’ and ‘strong’.

Overall, Judith Butlers theory allows us to understand how gender can be presented through media institutions, and how societies stereotype different genders. Furthermore, the way gender is constructed through media can contrast each other. In the music video “Blurred lines”, it is seen that the women have been overly sexualized. The theorist Laura Muvely focuses on the Male Gaze. The ‘Male Gaze’ is the act of depicting women in the visual arts, from a masculine perspective. Muvley also focuses on how women are represented as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male view. This is clearly seen in “Blurred Lines”, through the use of minimal clothing and close up shots, making the women become identified as ‘sexual objects’. Which contrasts with the magazine “Oh Comely”, as it introduces women with long sleeved clothing and minimal makeup. Furthermore, it takes us away from the representation of women being seen as sexual objects, therefore creating a radical text for the reader, as they are used to large conglomerates and artists, such as Hearst, more specifically Men’s Health, creating a dominant ideology of how men and women should be seen.