Week 1

Question 1

What is mass communication?

Answer 1

The imparting and exchange of information on a wide scale to a large range of people

Question 2

2. What did the original definition of mass communication depend on ?

Answer 2

depended on objective features of mass production reproduction and distributions.

Question 3

3. What made the original mass production of technology and factory-like forms of organization obsolescent

Answer 3

They have been made by social and technological change

Question 4

4. What are the four processes of public communication

Answer 4

The four processes of public communication are the

Transmission model
The ritual and expressive model
The publicity model
And the reception model

Question 5

5. What does the study of mass communication is trying to answer

Answer 5

Who says what to whom
Through what channel
And with what effect

Question 6

13. What is the weakness of the transmission model

Answer 6

One of the weaknesses is the limitation of communication to the matter of transmission

Question 6

15. What is a ritual view of communication

Answer 6

It is the communication linked to such terms as sharing participation association fellowship and the possession of a common faith.

Question 7

17. What does the expressive model depend on

Answer 7

It depends on the share understanding and emotions

Question 8

20. What is the publicity model, and what is it used for

Answer 8

It is to catch and hold visual and auroral attention
And it is used to gain audience revenue

Question 9

21. What is the necessary condition for a celebrity

Answer 9

The fact of being known is often more important than the content of what is known and is the only necessary condition for a celebrity

Question 10

22. What is media logic

Answer 10

Devices for gaining and keeping attention by cathing the eye arousing emotions and stimulating interest

Question 11

25. What is the reception approach

Answer 11

When media messages are always open and polysemic and are interpreted according to the context and the culture of recievers

Question 12

26. What is a spin

Answer 12

Media messages given a preferred reading

Question 13

What is the transmission modal?

Answer 13

sender message channel and many potential receiver

Question 14

The reformed transmission modal

Answer 14

is event and voices in society channel/communicator role messages then the receiver

Question 15

What does the ritualistic modal depend in

Answer 15

Ritual or expressive communication depends on shared understandings and emotions.

Question 16

• Attention-gaining is

Answer 16

The time spent attending to one media display by one person cannot be given to another, and available audience time is finite

Question 17

Communication in the display-attention mode exists only in

Answer 17

Communication in the display-attention mode exists only in the present. There is no
* past that matters, and the future matters only as a continuation or amplification of the present. Questions of cause and effect relating to the receiver do not arise.

Question 18

The essence of the ‘reception approach’ is to …..

Answer 18

The ‘reception approach’ is to locate the attribution and construc­ notion of meaning (derived from media) with the receiver.

Question 19

‘Polysemic’

Answer 19

‘polysemic’ (having multiple meanings)

Question 20

communicators choose to encode for

Answer 20

communicators choose to encode for ideological and institutional purposes and·to-manipulate

Question 21

receivers(‘decoders’)”are not

Answer 21

obliged to accept messages as sent but can and do resist \ ideological influence by applying variant or oppositional readings, according to their \ own experience and outlook. This is described as ‘differential decoding.’

Question 22

Genres

Answer 22

(such as ‘news: ‘pop music: ‘sports reports: ‘soap operas’, ‘police/detective series) which have a face-value meaning and inbuilt guidelines for interpretation by an audience.

Question 23

The term ‘gatekeeping’

Answer 23

decisions regarding whether or not to allow a particular news report to pass through the ‘gates’ of a news medium into the news channels

Question 24

the gatekeeping concept has many weaknesses.

Answer 24

the gatekeeping concept has many weaknesses. Weak points are its implication of one (initial) gate area and one central set of selection criteria, its simple view of the ‘supply’ of news, and its tendency to individualize decision­ making.

Question 25

Subsequent research demonstrated that the content of news media tends
consistently to

Answer 25

Subsequent research demonstrated that the content of news media tends
consistently to follow a predictable pattern and that different organizations behave similarly when confronted by the same events and under equivalent conditions. A condition for this generalization is one of limited diversity within the media system as a whole.

Question 26

News value

Answer 26

news value, which is an attribute of a news event that trans­ forms it into an intriguing ‘story’ for an audience;

Question 27

The organizational factors of news value

Answer 27

The collection of news has to be organized, and there is a bias towards events and news stories that fit the time-frame and the machinery of selection and retransmission. This favours recent events that occur near the reporting facilities (often in cosmopoli­ tan centres with good communications) and with availability of creditable sources

Question 28

The social-cultural influences of foreign news value

Answer 28

The social-cultural influences on foreign news selection stem from certain western values that focus on individuals and involve an interest in elite people and also negative, violent or dramatic happenings.

Question 29

. Clarity of meaning

Answer 29

mainly refers to the lack of ambiguity of meaning for the audi­ence.

Question 30

Consonance means .

Answer 30

Consonance means that an event fits into established frames of interpreta­tion and that there are no competing alternative frames.

Question 31

The gatekeeping framework is also based mainly on the assumption that

Answer 31

that there is a given, finite, knowable reality of events in the ‘real world, from which it is the task of the media to select according to appropriate criteria of reality reflection, significance or relevance.

Question 32

The main factors that influence even­tual news choice

Answer 32

The main factors that influence even­tual choice can be considered under the headings of people, ‘place’ and ‘time’, usually in one combination or another

Question 33

. News is often reports of what

Answer 33

. News is often reports of what prominent people say about events rather than reports of the events themselves

Question 34

The nearer the location of news events is to the city, region or nation of the intended audience

Answer 34

The nearer the location of news events is to the city, region or nation of the intended audience, the more likely it is to be noticed.

Question 35

Two attributes of news account for a large amount of selection.

Answer 35

Two attributes of news account for a large amount of selection. These are the ‘importance’ of the event country and the ‘proximity’ to the home media.

Question 36

The news beat is

Answer 36

news reporting on a particular subject area

Question 37

Timeliness is

Answer 37

Timeliness is an essential ingredient of novelty and relevance

Question 38

time underlies

Answer 38

time underlies the typification of events as news.

Question 39

The main types of news are .

Answer 39

The main types of news are ‘hard news’, dealing with immediate events, and ‘soft news’

Question 40

There are three other categories of news:

Answer 40

There are three other categories of news: ‘spot’ (very new, immediate, just breaking) news, ‘developing’ news and ‘continu­ ing’ news.

Question 41

There is also a time dimension, according to which news can be classi­ fied as

Answer 41

There is also a time dimension, according to which news can be classi­ fied as ‘pre-scheduled’, ‘unscheduled’ or ‘unexpected’, and ‘non-scheduled’. The first refers to ‘diary’ events that are known about in advance and for which coverage can be planned. The second refers to news of events that happen unexpectedly and need to be disseminated immediately - the most difficult for routine handling, but not the largest category of news. The third relates to news (usually soft) that is not tied to any particular time and can be stored and released at the convenience of the news organi­ zation.

Question 42

The typification of events in this way narrows

Answer 42

The typification of events in this way narrows the range of uncertainty, but also encourages the tendency to rely on ‘continuing’ news and on pre-scheduled or non­ scheduled event news, thus telling against uniqueness and novelty.

Question 43

A key event.

Answer 43

refers to the kind of event that becomes a big news story because of some unusual degree of public resonance and significance in symbolizing some deeper public crisis or anxiety.

Question 44

The term ‘media hype’

Answer 44

news wave, triggered by one specific event and expanded by the self-reinforcing processes within the news production of the media’.

Question 45

The term ‘agenda-setting’

Answer 45

Agenda setting describes the “ability (of the news media) to influence the importance placed on the topics of the public agenda”.

Question 46

The priming ‘effect’

Answer 46

which exposure to one stimulus influences how a person responds to a subsequent, related stimulus.

Question 47

The concept of the ‘spiral of silence’ concerns

Answer 47

The concept of the ‘spiral of silence’ concerns the interplay between four elements: mass media, interpersonal communication and social relations, individual expres­ sions of opinion, and the perceptions which individuals have of the surrounding ‘cli­ mate of opinion’ in their own social environment

Question 48

The main assumption of spiral of silence are

Answer 48

The main assumption of the spiral of silence is
* Society threatens deviant individuals with isolation.
* Individuals experience fear of isolation continuously.
* This fear of isolation causes individuals to try to assess the climate of opinion at all times.
* The results of this estimate affect their behavior in public, especially their willingness or not to express opinions openly.

Question 49

The spiralling effect referred to.

Answer 49

In brief, the theory proposes that, in order to avoid isolation on important public issues (such as political party support), many people are guided by what they think to be the dominant or declining opinions in their environment. People tend to conceal their views if they feel they are in a minority and are more willing to express them if they think they are dominant. The result is that those views that are perceived to be dominant gain even more ground and alternatives retreat still further. This is the spiralling effect referred to.

Question 50

News is

Answer 50

• News is timely: it is about very recent or recurrent events.
• News is unsystematic: it deals with discrete events and happenings, and the world seen through news alone consists of unrelated happenings.
• News is perishable: it lives only when the events themselves are current, and for pu poses ofrecord and later reference other forms of knowledge will replace news.
• Events reported as news should be unusual or at least unexpected, qualities that are more important than their ‘real significance’.
• Apart from unexpectedness, news events are characterized by other ‘news values’ that are always relative and involve subjective judgements about likely audience interest.
• News is mainly for orientation and attention direction and not a substitute for knowledge.
• News is predictable.