6.2 Evidence Flashcards
Theories of the media and influences on media content
OFCOM’s research of viewing trends
Pluralist
“Today’s viewers and listeners have an ‘all-you-can-eat’ buffet of broadcasting and online content to choose from, and there’s more competition for our attention than ever.
“Our traditional broadcasters are seeing steep declines in viewing to their scheduled, live programmes – including among typically loyal older audiences – and soaps and news programmes don’t have the mass-audience pulling power they once had.
“But despite this, public service broadcasters are still unrivalled in bringing the nation together at important cultural and sporting moments, while their on-demand players are seeing positive growth as they digitalise their services to meet audience needs.”
Yih-Choung Teh, Group Director, Strategy and Research at Ofcom
Stats in favor of Cultural Hegemonic Journalism
Journalists are themselves mostly white and middle class, with more than 50% of them having gone to private schools. They thus present a conservative/ neo-liberal view of the world on autopilot.
Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Author Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and propaganda in the Global Media
Nick Davies
Davies’s book brings together evidence from academic research and his own experiences as a journalist.
The researchers examined the origins of 2,000 stories that had been carried by The Times, The Daily Telegraph , The Guardian , and The Independent, and in some cases−The Daily Mail. Davies reports the finding of Justin Lewis and his team at Cardiff University that 80% of the news stories he studied in British newspapers were ‘churnalism’. That is, they were made up wholly or mainly of material provided by others, such as government spin-doctors, press agencies and public relations departments of corporations and other organisations.
Many of these were published as provided, without any attempt to put them in context, to check facts or to make readers aware of what was going on. Only 12% were original stories written by the newspapers’ own reporters. The newspapers involved were the ‘quality’ newspapers, usually seen as better sources of information than the more popular tabloids.
This is the result partly of cost cutting by media owners, so that
there are fewer journalists, and the pressure of 24/7 continuous rolling news. Journalists are not allowed the time to investigate
stories themselves or to check facts. Davies argues that this situation means that people can be persuaded by the media to accept as fact stories that are claimed to be true but are false – as false as the idea that the world is flat.
An example of this is the claim that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, a false claim that led to the 2003 Iraq War in which US led forces invaded Iraq.
Davies thesis is that journalists themselves are not the reason for the increase in “falsehood, distortion and propaganda”—the problem is structural. Corporations, that operate under a logic of commercialism, have taken over newsrooms. Citing Rupert Murdoch—the founder and CEO of News Corp, as an example, Davies says that under the corporate model, there are fewer journalists working at newspapers and they have increased workloads. Journalists require time to make contacts, find new stories, and fact-check. Under time pressure they resort to recycling press releases and wire news, often without fact-checking.
Hack Attack
Nick Davies
(An account from The Guardian)
That leads to the second question raised by this book: did the exposure of the hacking scandal make any difference? Here, the answer is less certain. Murdoch was forced to close the NoW and call off his bid to take control of the whole of BSkyB, while the press in general had to face the Leveson inquiry and the threat of statutory regulation. But the NoW was replaced by the Sun on Sunday (albeit with sales of a million fewer copies); in the year after Davies broke the Dowler story, News Corp’s global profits rose 47% and its shares 23%; according to Forbes magazine, the Murdoch family’s net wealth is up from £4.4bn to £7.9bn. The future of press regulation became mired in confusion with newspapers setting up a new self-regulatory body outside the regulatory framework devised by parliament.
Phone hacking has, it seems, disappeared from newspapers’ repertoire, but how long will it be before they find new means of invading privacy? At the end of this book, Davies judges that he “won a really important battle” but not the war. “We did nothing,” he concludes, “to change the power of the elite.”
Henry Porter positively reviewed Hack Attack in The Guardian, calling it a “gripping account”. Porter wrote that “This book is important, not simply because it is written by a superb reporter who took on a seemingly invulnerable criminal conspiracy, or because it is, even after Leveson and the months of evidence in court, the best account we have of the phone-hacking scandal and the attendant police corruption and cover-ups. It is, as well, the story of modern Britain and how its standards and politics have been degraded by one man’s ruthless acquisition of power… Davies has laid it all bare in an exciting, clear and honest narrative…”
In The Daily Telegraph Peter Oborne described Davies as “Britain’s greatest investigative journalist” in his five star review of the book, adding that it was “as exciting as a thriller but far more important because it provides such a horrifying portrait of the media/political class that has governed Britain in recent years…This book should be compulsory reading in journalism schools and must be read by anyone who wishes to understand how British politics actually works.”
World Trends in Freedom Expression of and Media Development
UNESCO
This global report highlights several important recent trends:
* Freedom of expression through the media has been limited in some countries because of national security concerns, states of emergency and fears of terrorism. There were 56 shutdowns of entire social media websites, mobile networks or national internet access in 2016 and also increases in blocking and filtering of websites by governments. Around the world UNESCO found evidence from opinion polls that people valued media freedoms but thought that they were declining.
* Nearly half of the world’s population now has access to the internet. * Newspaper circulation has fallen nearly everywhere.
* Algorithm-based search results and social media have led to the creation of ‘echo chambers’ and ‘filter bubbles’, where people reinforce their beliefs and do not come into contact with the opinions of others.
* 530 journalists were killed between 2012 and 2016.
Problems arising from the internet and social media include cyberattacks, surveillance, hacking, intimidation and a rise in online
harassment, especially of female journalists.
study of the Mods and Rockers
Stanley Cohen
Stan Cohen’s (1972) first developed the concept of the ‘moral panic’ in his study of the relationship between the media and the Mods and Rockers in the 1960s.
The Mods and Rockers were two working class youth subcultures, the mods famously riding scooters and dressing in smart clothes such as suits, and the rockers riding larger motorbikes and dressing in leathers.
These were also two of the first youth subcultures in consumer society, and initially they existed peacefully side by side – they were really just about style and music and the members of each were primarily concerned with having a good time.
However, during one bank holiday weekend in Clacton in 1964, where both mods and rockers visited to party, there were some minor acts of Vandalism and some violence between the two groups, this then led to the media turning up at the next big Bank Holiday weekend in Brighton (also 1964) ‘ready’ to report on any disturbances.
Once again at Brighton there was also some minor vandalism and violence between the mods and rockers, but this time the media were present and produced (according to Cohen) some extremely exaggerated reports about the extent of the violence between the two groups.
This had the effect of generating concern among the general public and the police then responded to this increased public fear and perceived threat to social order by policing future mods and rockers events more heavily and being more likely to arrest youths from either subculture for deviant behaviour (whether violent or not).
A further consequence of the exaggerated media reporting was that the mods and rockers came to see themselves as opposed to each other, something which hadn’t been the case before the media exaggeration.
