Harold Lasswell – Book after WW1 about propaganda techniques in war
Hypodermic model – ‘Subtle poison’ ideologies being ‘injected’ into the ‘veins’ of a passive audience- Lasswell
the SENDER is transferring a MESSAGE, through a MEDIUM (eg Print, radio, TV, etc) that has a direct effect on the RECEIVER.
Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Zuboff was a student of Skinner
Negative adverts in elections
Facebook altering their page layout for trump election
‘The most serious threat … is the power this technology gives one man to impose his views and values on another.’
Alexander Nix – former CEO of Cambridge Analytica and a former director of the Strategic Communication Laboratories Group
Persuade people with emotions not facts
In 2018 Cambridge Analytica was dissolved after undercover video footage showed Nix claiming his company was using honey traps, bribery stings, and prostitutes, among other tactics, to influence more than 200 elections globally for his clients.
WHO The mail on sunday – Says What Left positive message supporting the work of the NHS – Channel Newspaper – To Whom British public – With What Effect positive effect informing them of good work and use of tax money within the public interest.
Shannon and Weaver 1949
Two Step Flow of Communication (active consumption)
The Theory of Preferred Reading :At around the same time Stuart Hall, working at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), at the University of Birmingham, was also 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. Hall was working at a time of great societal upheaval and unrest in the UK (read this article as a useful insight) and was therefore committed to understand the relationship between power, communication, culture, control and . . . behaviour management.
Founded on October 26th 2010, The i is the sister paper to the independent.
Founded in 1896, The daily mail is the highest circulated daily paper in the UK
Both papers are owned by the ‘daily mail and general trust’
Both papers are owned by the ‘daily mail and general trust’
The i attempts to be unbiased but does lean left.
The daily mail is a right wing paper
Both papers specialize in news journalism however the i also focuses on opinion, culture and lifestyle journalism.
Both papers specialize in news journalism however the daily mail also focuses on investigative and culture journalism.
Oliver Duff is a British journalist who has been the editor of the i newspaper since June 2013. He is currently the youngest editor (37 years old) of a UK national newspaper. Having a young editor encourages new and healthy ideas being published in the paper.
Geordie Greig (59 years old) is an English journalist and editor of the Daily Mail. He was editor in 2020 when it eclipsed The Sun to become the best-selling newspaper in the UK. having an older editor could encourage old fashioned ideas being published in the paper.
6. Do they have a similar readership reach
The daily mail has a readership of 2.2 million people compare to 500,000 viewers for the I.
7. Do they have a similar readership profile / target audience?
Around 60 percent of the consumers are male and 40% female read the I compared to 54% female and 46% male for the daily mail
The I has 400,000 people a week over 35 in 2014 reading the paper and 100,000 below 35.
For the daily Mail 29% are AB Adults 629,000 (29%)
ABC1 Adults 1,405,000 (64%)
The image above shows that the Daily mail is aimed more towards the middle class
8. How are they currently doing? Increasing or decreasing sales and revenue?
Daily Mail down 16.5% due to the coronavirus meaning high-street stores where shut reducing the circulation of the papers. The decline of circulation of the i was exacerbated by the cessation of the distribution of bulks, free copies, to locations including airports, gyms and railway stations.
Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, a great-grandson of one of the original co-founders, is the current chairman and controlling shareholder of the Daily Mail
The Daily Mail’s main target audience is lower-middle-class British women
The Daily Mail is a British daily tabloid formatted newspaper founded in 1896.
The Monday to Saturday edition of the Daily Mail circulates 1,158,192 copies and has a daily readership of 2.2 million.
Geordie Greig is the Editor of the Daily Mail, and also Editor of Mail Newspapers. For six years until 2018 he was Editor of The Mail on Sunday.
MailOnline is the website of the Daily Mail and of its sister paper The Mail on Sunday. MailOnline is a division of dmg media, which is owned by Daily Mail and General Trust plc
Lord Rothermere was a friend of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and directed the Mail’s editorial stance towards them in the early 1930s.
It is the United Kingdom’s highest-circulated daily newspaper.
A survey in 2014 found the average age of its readers was 58, and it had the lowest demographic for 15- to 44-year-olds
The independence of broadcasting from the state has recently been seen as the most important condition of the services accountability.
The interests of the government had come, by the late 1970’s, to be seen as inimical to those of broadcasting.
Beveridge suggested that ‘the work of broadcasting should be regarded as a public service for a social purpose.’
Broadcasting in Britain – monopoly – duopoly – always depended on an assumption of commitment to an undivided public good.
Broadcasting and broadcasting institutions cannot be understood merely as a collection of separate program ‘texts’. Judging broadcasting organisations by their product ‘was … relevant but not adequate’
Jurgen Habermas and the concept of the Public Sphere
Jurgen Habermas and the concept of the Public Sphere – arguments: that the media should work in the public’s interest and not purely in a commercial interest, that mass media has reduced the effectiveness of the public sphere though the concentration of ownership, and that in order to have democracy we must have an informed and aware society. “A public sphere between the private domain and the state in which a public opinion was formed and ‘popular’ supervision of government was established”
James Curran & Jean Seaton – the theory of the liberal free press
The media needs a form of regulation or they can post whatever they want and it won’t matter if it’s real or not so we have a filter what media goes through also known as “flack” so the government could stop negative information against them to never be published for the public as well as watchdogs who are mainly anonymous people who keep an eye out for the public to ensure there is no corrupt people or media. FREE PRESS should be free from interference/ ownership/political control
Noam Chomsky – the 5 filters that manufacture consent
Noam Chomsky co-wrote wrote the the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. This book spoke about the five filters that manufacture consent. One to five of these filters are; Size, ownership and profit orientation. Two; The advertising license to do business. Three; the media elite. Four; Flak and the enforcers, and Five; Anti communism.
Louis Althusser – interpellation & Ideological State Appraratus
Althusser discusses the idea that social structures such as education, religion, culutre, the arts, etc. construct our individual identity. He says that these social structures follow the dominant ideology of the ‘ruling power’ ie. government and interpellate an ideological identity. This theory looks at issues of ownership, power, control, behavior management in organisations
Antonio Gramsci – the concept of hegemony / hegemonic struggle
Hegemony is a tug of war for power, and that the balance of power can be changed, how certain cultural forms predominate over others, which means that certain ideas are more influential than other. Post colonialism articulates a desire to reclaim, re-write and re-establish cultural identity and thus maintain power of The Empire.
Media concentration / Conglomerates / Globalisation (in terms of media ownership)
A company owning a large number of companies in a media based industry eg. film, television, radio
Vertical Integration & Horizontal Integration
A single parent company owning multiple companies within an industry eg. film industry
Horizontal – Owned companies at the same stage of the industry eg. multiple production companies
Vertical – Owned companies at different stages of the industry eg. production, distribution, exhibition
Gatekeepers
A secretary who controls who gets an appointment with a president of the company is an example of a gatekeeper.
Regulation / Deregulation
government stopping large monopolies from forming / continuing to make it more fair for smaller businesses
Free market vs Monopolies & Mergers
a single person or company that owns the majority of a industry. positive and negative effects
Neo-liberalism and the Alt-Right
Surveillance / Privacy / Security / GDPR
‘ for every individual who succeeds, there are many who do not. For many, it will be the result of a perfectly reasonable personal decision that the commitment and determination required is not for them’ ~ Creative Britain (2008)
Media working practices
Journalistic practices
Althusser says that we are socially constructed and what socially constructs us is ‘despite its diversity and contradictions . . . the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of ‘the ruling class’,’ In relation to journalistic practices, they are effected by this ‘ruling class’ and in turn construct our society. For example, Murdoch visited his editor of the sun after writing a report supporting Tony Blair saying he got it all wrong , making him rewrite it supporting the entire labour party and their ideologies as well as Blair.
Journalistic practices: Noam Chomsky presents his thoughts on how the mass media works against democracy’s best interests in his documentary Manufacturing consent, this relates to the leveson inquiry, a judicial public inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press following the News International phone hacking scandal. The Murdoch dynasty was also affected by the inquiry, it was found out that his company was paying the police for information, however nothing came of it. This can also relate to Hesmondhalgh’s theory, he points out that societies with profitable cultural industries tend to be dominated by large companies, have minimal government regulation and significant inequality between rich and poor.
