theories

Curran and Seaton – Power and Media Industries:

- What is the theory?

Newspapers should reflect the interests of an audience otherwise they will go out business. They should be liberal and anyone should be able to make one. However, this does not happen in practice and the press can be used as a propaganda tool to influence the audience.

Curran and Seaton: ‘diversity is in the public interest – but modern societies suffer from collective attention deficit disorders[…] 

the public interest has to work harder to be noticed, and we need agile but resourceful media.'

to do that

- The freedom to publish in a free market ensures the press reflects a wide range of opinions and interests in a society. If a viewpoint is missing in the press, this is because it lacks a sufficient following to sustain it in the market place. However, since the press has been industrialised, the ‘assumption that ‘anyone is free to start a paper’ is an ‘illusion’.Whilst the press used to be independent of outside financial  interests, most British press was bought up in the 1960s and 1970s by conglomerates. The press have become a subsidiary of these companies and harms their independence. Furthermore, anti-monopoly legislation has been ineffective, allowing the creation of large media monopolies, which allows individual companies a great deal of power when the desire to publicise a message to vast amounts of people is enacted.Curran found evidence that media owners did interfere and manipulate newspaper content at the expense of the independence of journalists and editors . Rupert Murdoch in 2003 strongly wanted a war with Iraq and its no coincidence that all of his 175 newspapers around the world that he owns supported this view in their articles

Livingstone and Lunt – Regulation: 

the idea that there is an underlying struggle in recent UK regulation policy between the need to further the interests of citizens (by offering protection from harmful or offensive material), and the need to further the interests of consumers (by ensuring choice, value for money, and market competition)

Hesmondhalgh – Cultural Industries 

' the book takes on new and vital targets, for example claims that the Internet is replacing television in everyday media consumption.... In the process, Hesmondhalgh provides us with an essential toolkit for making critical sense of the digital media age, and our places within it'