Newsbeat delivers its reports and stories with a very distinct style that involves an informal tone, quick overviews, upbeat links, and audience participation yet, by utilising Stuart Hall’s reception theory, we can see that the listeners may not interpret the message in the way the producers originally intended. Hall’s encoding / decoding model of communication offers three hypothetical positions – the preferred, negotiated, and oppositional readings. The preferred reading is how the media producer wants the audience to respond, for example how the Newsbeat producers want their short news stories to engage with their audience and inform them about the latest events around the world. The negotiated reading, when the audience responds by accepting and rejecting certain elements, can also be applied to Newsbeat, wherein some listeners may appreciate the fast content but then turn to other sources for the full stories behind the headlines.

Orson Welles’ preferred reading of War of the Worlds was that it was a fictional radio play to be enjoyed by the audience, its negotiated reading was that some listeners who heard the introduction knew how inappropriate and misleading the play would be considering that it was broadcast in a time shortly after the First World War and on the brink of the Second World War. The oppositional reading was supposedly from those who missed the introduction and created a “wave of mass hysteria” as they thought the play was reality.