Active Audience – Engages, interprets and responds to a media text in different ways and is capable of challenging the ideas encoded in it. 

Passive Audience – More likely to accept the messages encoded in a media text without challenge and are therefore more likely to be directly affected by the messages. 

Extension: Explain the ways in which media products are thought to impact on audiences cognitively, affectively and behaviourally? 

Media products can impact audiences because they can provide them with dramaticised information that they believe is factual and real.