Comparative Table
| THEME | NEWSBEAT | WAR OF THE WORLDS |
| OWNERSHIP | BBC – PSB, government, director general in charge – 1st one – Lord Baron Reath, trans-national, multi-media company, not a monopoly – more of an oligopoly, concentration of ownership. BBC has a slightly left- leaning ideology. | CBS – private company, conglomerate, cross-media conglomerate, trans-national? example of concentration of ownership – just a few companies own everything – oligopoly? cartel? Vertical integration |
| HABERMAS | Transformation of the public sphere – BBC intention is to inform, educate, and entertain. BBC is public + non-profit, all money is put back into shows. This supports Habermas’ theory that the BBC is paternalistic, providing what you need rather than what you want. | Commerical profit is a poor ethos – not in the spirit of Habermas’. There is an idea that private organisations do not care about viewers, and instead only care about profit. |
| CHOMSKY | Chomsky talks about how adults are more impressionable to believing falsities, whereas young people are more aware of the truth. | Some people can’t distinguish truth from fiction – universal grammar |
| REGULATION | Ofcom, BBC charter governed by parliament. New technologies mean BBC is faced with more competition | Federal communications department, not necessarily in the public interest |
| AUDIENCE (ACTIVE / PASSIVE) | active (Audience participation – online accessibility) | passive (Audience were passive in the way they received the information) |
| AUDIENCE (LAZARSFELD – two-step flow theory) | Getting popular guests on the show who bring in viewers | Orson Welles – opinion leaders |
| AUDIENCE (HALL) Stuart Hall – theory of preferred reading. suggested that media texts contain a variety of messages that are encoded (made/inserted) by producers and then decoded (understood) by audiences. | Encoded message – of the broadcast being a joke, was not taken on, and instead, peoplemtook it seriously. | |
| NEW TECHNOLOGY | ||
| CROSS MEDIA CONVERGENCE | ||
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