You should refer to your newspaper Close Study Products, The i and The Daily Mail.
Noam Chomsky believes mass communication media and the government ‘are effective and powerful ideological institutions’ who rely on ‘propaganda’, ‘market forces’, and ‘self-censorship’ to indoctrinate their beliefs into their audiences. Both the Daily Mail and The I support this theory as they both project different ideological views of the world in order to reach a specific audience – The Daily Mail targets a rightist, conservative audience whereas The I targets a leftist, liberal audience.
The Daily Mail is a nationally daily tabloid newspaper launched in 1896 and is politically aligned with conservative values – the font of the newspaper title highlights this as it indexically implies this idea of archaic and dated, mirroring the perspective of the newspaper and supporting C.S. Peirce’s semiotic theory that indexical signs link to what they signify. The paper is owned by the global company DMGT, a long with many other papers, touching upon Curran and Seaton’s concerns with the media landscape falling under the control of just a handful of media conglomerates. They argue that through having direct control, proprietor owners have the power to censor news content that conflicts with their political view and instead highlight only what supports their ideology, allowing them to indoctrinate this belief into their mass audience, for example in the editorial section on page 18: ‘the truth is that Boris Johnson is by a country mile the best person to lead the tory government and the country at this time’ – this represents conservative party as superior to other candidates, therefore promoting rightists values to their mass audiences. The editorial section of the paper reinforces the authoritarian nature of the paper as it provides only one opinion on the current events taking place, mirroring the authoritarian nature of the conservative party. further to this, their endorsement of the conservative party almost every year since 1945conveys to audiences a sense of loyalty to the party and its ideology, therefore persuading them to feel the same. By having such a disposition, audiences are forced to believe only the values being presented to them, due to just how indistinct they are, linking to Paul Lazarfeld’s Two Step Flow of Communication Theory which highlights how media messages are not always just directly ‘injected’ into an audience but also filtered through influential opinion leaders, the editors of the paper and their right-winged perspective, who interpret a message and first and then relay them back to the mass audiences. Overall, it is clear that this paper constructs an ideological view of the world, conservative, in order to engage audiences by highlighting ideas of nationalism and idolising the elite, therefore appealing to their rightists target audience.
The I is a national daily ‘quality tabloid’ launched in 2010 and is politically aligned with liberal values – the title of the paper portrays the indexical sign of the letter ‘i’ which appears modern and signifies the idea of seeing and discovering, mirroring the libertarian perspective of the newspaper and supporting C.S. Peirce’s semiotic theory that indexical signs link to what they signify. Like Daily Mail, the paper is owned by DMGT – who bought in `2019 for almost £50 million. This relates to Jurgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action whereby the public sphere has become ‘dominated by an expanded state and organised economic interests’…’made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating the needs of society with the state’ – as DMGT is a global conglomerate who owns many companies and operates in 40 countries across the world and therefore have the power to indoctrinate their ideology into their millions of audience members. However, despite the authoritarian nature of its ownership, The i projects a more libertarian view of the world by embracing all different types of perspectives on all different types of events – for example in the ‘Opinion Matrix’ section of the paper, opinions and messages of all different types of readers ‘Tony Fitzjohn… Ian Birrel… John Burn-Murdoch…’ etc… are presented in order to give the common population a voice, therefore considering many kinds of ideology. The ‘Opinion Matrix’ section of the paper highlights how audience members can be seen as active, linking to Katz, Gurevitch, Haas’ uses and gratifications theory as they are actively selecting knowledge presented to them, interpreting it for themselves, and providing feedback to the paper itself. This highlights how the audience of The i seeks enjoyment, understanding self and the world, signifying that the paper’s aims of indoctrinating their liberal ideology have succeeded. Overall, it is clear that this paper constructs an ideological view of the world, liberalist, in order to engage audiences by highlighting their differing beliefs and perspectives and representing the common population therefore appealing to their leftist target audience.
