Why should we and How can we Study the Media?

Authors Avatar

Why should we and How can we Study the Media?

Media are critically important in our lives.  We decide how, and sometimes whether to vote based on TV images of candidates and issues.  We learn about other countries and cultures around the world from movies, newspapers and the internet.  We may even come to know ourselves and our own cultures – to form our own identities – through interaction with music, film and television.  It is essential then, that we understand how media institutions and media images work so that we can become critical and discriminating producers and consumers of media.  Media texts are constructed, often by organisations; they use specialised language and have distinctive ways of telling stories.  They have distinctive narratives and genres and are primarily commercial.  The media have specific ways of looking at the world and consequently construct their own representation of reality.  These representations carry messages and values which are interpreted by audiences in a variety of ways, media industries and institutions have an influence on the products created.

 I believe that part of the reason why people study the media is because they are interested in the whole intellectual culture, and the part of it that is easiest to study is the media. It comes out every day. You can do a systematic investigation. You can compare yesterday’s version to today’s version. Many people would suggest that there is a lot of evidence about what’s played up and what isn’t and the way things are structured. You look at the media, or at any institution you want to understand. You ask questions about its internal institutional structure. You want to know something about their setting in the broader society. How do they relate to other systems of power and authority?

The media has so many different aspects to its structure. There are different media which do different things, like the entertainment/Hollywood, soap operas, and so on, or even most of the newspapers in the country and it would be suggested the majority of them are directing the mass audience.  For example, the Sun (the biggest selling newspaper in the UK).  The reason for this ‘mass audience direction’ is essentially and most importantly to make a larger profit.  However, I would argue that once the corporation has ‘entrapped’ the reader into reading their paper every day, they are then in a better position to persuade and influence the views of their readers. These sorts of media corporations are the ones with the big resources; they set the framework in which everyone else operates. The Times Newspaper Corporation is a clear example of this.   According to David Brinkley, (an American newscaster),

‘News is what I say it is.  It’s something worth knowing by my standards’

(Brinkley.D cited in Marris, 2002, p639)

Join now!

        It is not clear if this is merely arrogance or if he is trying to make a point about the definability of news, but it represents to many people the most likely explanation of news output.  In this case, the newscaster is the merely the visible point of the news production plant, the bit which we see.  However, he is only a small part of the process and really the news is handled by people biased and opinionated, just like the rest of us, but being in the position that they are, they have more power to control our opinions ...

This is a preview of the whole essay