presentation about power of media

Management Notes

Power of Media – Major Points Explained in Detail | Media and Society

Power of media.

Media power refers to the enormous influence and impact that print media, broadcast media, and digital media have in shaping public opinion, disseminating information, and driving social and cultural changes. A powerful tool for communication, education, entertainment, and mobilization, the media play a significant role in modern society.

By reaching vast audiences, shaping public discourse, and influencing individual and collective behaviors, it can influence the lives of individuals and communities.

A media outlet’s power lies in its ability to gather, create, and distribute information, frame narratives, and shape public opinion. In order to promote media literacy and responsible consumption of media content, we must understand the power of media.

The power of media can be explained in the following way:

Information Dissemination:

Media acts as a primary source of information for individuals, providing news, current affairs, and factual information. Media’s power comes from its ability to gather, verify, and disseminate information to a wide audience. Keeping people informed about local, national, and global events is the responsibility of journalists and news organizations.

People are able to make informed decisions, understand complex issues, and participate in democratic processes when the media provides timely and relevant news coverage.

Agenda Setting:

The media can set the agenda and determine the issues that need to be addressed and discussed. Public opinion and conversations are shaped and directed by media outlets’ coverage of specific topics, editorials, and investigative reporting.

In order to set the agenda, the media must frame issues, shape narratives, and shape public perceptions. In bringing attention to neglected or marginalized topics, media can shape public opinion and bring about societal change.

Influence on Public Opinions and Attitudes:

The media has a profound impact on public opinion and attitudes, influencing how individuals perceive their surroundings. News stories, documentaries, and opinion pieces can influence public sentiment and shape attitudes regarding social, political, and cultural issues through media outlets.

In order to influence public opinion, media must be able to present information, frame stories, and evoke emotions. Public discourse and societal norms may be influenced by media, which contributes to the formation of collective beliefs, values, and behaviors.

Educational Tool:

Media serves as an educational tool, providing a platform for knowledge sharing and learning. Educational programs, documentaries, and online platforms facilitate access to information and promote lifelong learning. The media can spread education, foster critical thinking, and contribute to the dissemination of knowledge from a variety of fields, including science, history, culture, and the arts.

It is the ability of media to engage audiences through visual and interactive formats that makes complex concepts more accessible to learners and enhances their learning experience that makes it a powerful educational tool.

Entertainment and Cultural Influence:

Media plays a significant role in shaping cultural values and trends as well as serving as a powerful source of entertainment. Popular culture is shaped by movies, television shows, music, and digital content, which influence societal norms, fashion, language, and lifestyle choices.

It is in the ability of media to capture the imagination, evoke emotions, and create shared experiences that media has the power to entertain and influence cultures worldwide. In addition to reflecting and reinforcing cultural values, media introduces new ideas, challenges social conventions, and provokes social change.

Mobilization and Activism:

The media is an essential part of social mobilization and activism. It provides a platform for people and communities to advocate for change and mobilize collective action as well as raise awareness of social issues. Protest organizers, activists, and communities have become increasingly reliant on social media platforms to organize, spread, and mobilize.

By amplifying voices, connecting like-minded individuals, and generating public support for social causes, media can play a significant role in social mobilization and activism. Coverage of social movements can highlight injustice, increase awareness, and inspire people to act.

Advertising and Consumer Behavior:

The media, especially advertising, play an important role in influencing consumer behavior. Through advertisement, media influences consumer behavior, purchase decisions, and brand perception. Advertising is shaped by the media’s ability to shape consumer desires, promote products and services, and stimulate economic activity.

The use of media platforms allows companies to reach potential customers and influence their buying decisions through persuasive messaging and creative storytelling.

Influence on Democracy:

The media plays a crucial role in democratic societies, serving as a check on the government and other powerful institutions. Transparency, accountability, and citizen participation are promoted by the media, which inform the public, scrutinize policies, and encourage political debate.

In democracy, media facilitates the free flow of information, encourages diverse viewpoints, and holds those in power accountable for their actions. In order to facilitate free exchange of ideas and opinions, media freedom and independence are essential for a functioning democracy.

The media has significant power and influence, but it is also responsible for maintaining ethical standards, accuracy, and fairness. Despite media power, there are challenges associated with it, including media bias, sensationalism, misinformation, and manipulation.

In order to navigate the vast media landscape, evaluate sources, and distinguish between reliable information and misinformation, individuals must be literate in media literacy and critical thinking. The ability to understand the power of media empowers individuals to be informed consumers and active participants in shaping society.

• Influence of Media on Society – Mass Media Influence | Media and Society
• Recent Posts

• Frito Lay SWOT Analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats | SWOT Analysis - January 11, 2024
• Fox News SWOT Analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats | SWOT Analysis - January 5, 2024
• Freshly SWOT Analysis – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats | SWOT Analysis - January 4, 2024

Share this:

Leave a comment cancel reply.

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

Power Of Media Presentation

The Power of Media: How It Shapes Public Opinion and Society

by Danny Ballan | Apr 7, 2023 | General Spotlights , Social Spotlights

• ·         Agenda Setting
• ·         Selective Reporting
• ·         Framing
• ·         Opinion Leaders
• ·         Social Media

The Impact of Media on Society

The role of the media in shaping public opinion.

From the time we wake up to the time we go to bed, we are constantly bombarded with news from the media, whether it be through television, newspapers, or social media. As a result, the media plays a crucial role in shaping our opinions on various topics, from politics to entertainment and beyond.

In this article, we will explore the ways in which the media influences public opinion and the impact it has on society as a whole.

· Agenda Setting

One of the most significant ways the media shapes public opinion is through agenda-setting. This is the process by which the media decides which topics and issues to cover and how they are presented to the public. Essentially, the media has the power to frame the conversation around certain topics, which can ultimately influence how people think about them.

For example, during election seasons, the media may focus heavily on certain candidates or issues, leading the public to form opinions based on what they see and hear. In this way, the media has the power to sway public opinion in favor of one candidate or political party over another.

· Selective Reporting

Another way the media can shape public opinion is through selective reporting. This is the process by which the media chooses which stories to report on and which to ignore. By selectively reporting on certain stories and ignoring others, the media can influence how the public perceives a particular issue.

For example, if the media only reports on negative news about a particular group or organization, the public may develop a negative perception of that group or organization, even if there is positive news that is not being reported. In this way, the media has the power to shape public opinion by selectively reporting on certain stories.

· Framing

Framing is the way in which the media presents information to the public. By framing information in a certain way, the media can influence how people interpret it. For example, if the media presents a story about a politician in a negative light, the public may view that politician negatively, even if there are positive aspects to their character or policy positions.

On the other hand, if the media presents a story in a positive light, the public may view the subject of the story in a more positive light. In this way, the media has the power to frame the conversation around certain topics, which can ultimately influence how people think about them.

· Opinion Leaders

Opinion leaders are individuals or groups that have a significant impact on public opinion. The media can play a role in shaping public opinion by highlighting the opinions of opinion leaders. For example, if a celebrity or influential public figure expresses an opinion on a particular topic, the media may give that opinion more weight and influence how the public thinks about the issue.

· Social Media

Social media has become an increasingly powerful tool for shaping public opinion. Through platforms like Twitter and Facebook, individuals can share their opinions and perspectives with a global audience. Social media also allows for the rapid dissemination of information, making it easier for individuals and groups to influence public opinion on a particular issue.

However, social media also has its downsides. With the rise of fake news and misinformation, it can be difficult to discern what is true and what is not. This can lead to the spread of false information and conspiracy theories , which can ultimately shape public opinion in dangerous ways.

The media’s influence on public opinion can have a significant impact on society. For example, media coverage of police shootings and racial inequality has led to a growing awareness of these issues and a call for change. Similarly, media coverage of environmental issues has led to increased awareness and action to address climate change .

However, the media can also have a negative impact on society . For example, sensationalized reporting can lead to a distorted perception of reality , leading to fear, anxiety, and even panic among the public. This can be particularly problematic in times of crisis, such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or pandemics, where the media’s coverage can exacerbate the situation and cause harm to individuals and communities.

Moreover, the media’s influence on public opinion can also have political implications. In democracies, the media plays a crucial role in shaping public opinion and influencing political outcomes. Media coverage of political campaigns, for example, can affect voters’ perceptions of candidates and their positions, ultimately influencing the election results.

However, the media’s influence on politics can also be problematic, particularly when it comes to issues of bias and partisanship. In recent years, the media has been criticized for promoting certain political agendas or ideologies and for perpetuating a polarized political environment.

The media plays a crucial role in shaping public opinion on a wide range of issues, from politics to social and environmental issues. Through agenda setting, selective reporting, framing, opinion leaders, and social media, the media has the power to influence how people think and feel about certain topics.

However, the media’s influence on public opinion is not without its drawbacks. Sensationalized reporting, fake news, and biased reporting can distort reality and perpetuate negative stereotypes and misconceptions. Moreover, the media’s influence on politics can be problematic, particularly when it comes to issues of bias and partisanship.

As media consumers, it is important to be aware of the media’s influence on our opinions and to critically evaluate the information we receive. By doing so, we can ensure that our opinions are based on accurate information and that we are not being unduly influenced by media bias or sensationalism.

• Media : Forms of communication that reach large audiences, such as television, newspapers, and the internet.
• Public Opinion : Views held by a group of people about a particular issue, product, or person.
• Society : A group of individuals living in a particular geographic area who share a common culture and institutions.
• Agenda Setting : The process by which the media decides which topics and issues to cover and how they are presented to the public.
• Selective Reporting : The process by which the media chooses which stories to report on and which to ignore.
• Framing : The way in which the media presents information to the public.
• Opinion Leaders : Individuals or groups that have a significant impact on public opinion.
• Social Media : Online platforms that allow users to create, share, and exchange information and ideas with others.
• Misinformation : False or inaccurate information that is spread unintentionally or deliberately.
• Fake News : Deliberately misleading or fabricated news stories.
• Sensationalized Reporting : Reporting that exaggerates or sensationalizes the facts in order to attract attention or increase viewership.
• Bias : Prejudice or favoritism towards a particular group or ideology.
• Partisanship : Strong support for a particular political party or ideology.
• Polarization : The process by which individuals and groups become more ideologically divided and less willing to compromise.
• Democracy : A system of government in which power is held by the people, usually through elected representatives.
• Natural Disasters : Events such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods that are caused by natural forces.
• Terrorism : The use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.
• Pandemics : An outbreak of a disease that spreads across a large geographic area and affects a large number of people.
• Environmental Issues : Problems related to the natural world, such as climate change , pollution, and habitat destruction.

Election Results : The outcome of an election, usually determined by the number of votes cast for each candidate or political party.

Get Vocabulary Voyages E-Book for Free!

Build your vocabulary today in the context of 40 beautiful stories about profound words with interactive elements, QR codes, exercises and more, for FREE ! You will get the FULL E-Book not just a preview!

I will also be sending you the weekly digest to share with you the latest content I add here on the website.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up today and get your weekly dose of English Plus content!

You have Successfully Subscribed!

We respect your privacy. Unsubscribe at anytime.

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

• Stay Informed: Top News Stories You Can’t Miss – Anpip Social Media - […] For more detailed information, you can read about The Power of Media: How It Shapes Public Opinion. […]

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Submit Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Danny Ballan

You may also like.

Parenting Around the World: Why There’s No One “Right” Way

by Danny Ballan | Apr 26, 2024

Ever wondered if your parenting style is the norm? Discover how diverse cultures shape child-rearing, from discipline to independence, and why understanding these differences matters.

Intersectionality: Why Everyone Needs This Tool for Social Justice

by Danny Ballan | Apr 12, 2024

What is intersectionality, and why does it matter for building a fairer world? Learn how your unique experiences shape your view of social issues.

The Refugee Crisis: Understanding the Impact on Host Countries

by Danny Ballan | Mar 29, 2024

What is the refugee crisis? Discover how it affects those fleeing conflict, and the challenges and opportunities it presents for host nations.

Recent Posts

The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve: Why We Forget & How to Fight It

Apr 27, 2024 | Know Yourself Daily

Do you forget things quickly? The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve explains this memory phenomenon. Learn how to combat it for better learning outcomes.

The Rainbow Serpent: Timeless Story of Creation and Connection

Apr 27, 2024 | Great Stories

Journey into the Dreamtime with the Rainbow Serpent, an Aboriginal Australian creation myth. Discover its vibrant story and lasting impact on culture.

“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost: Decoding Desire and Destruction

Apr 27, 2024 | Poetry Daily

Dive into Robert Frost’s chilling poem “Fire and Ice.” Explore its symbolism, debate over meaning, and the timeless questions it poses about human nature.

Albrecht Dürer: Renaissance Master and His Enduring Legacy

Apr 27, 2024 | Immortal People

Explore the life and works of Albrecht Dürer, a towering figure of the Renaissance. Discover his masterpieces, innovations, and impact on art history.

Apr 26, 2024 | Social Spotlights

The Digest 10: Why Bad News Travel Fast and Much More

Apr 26, 2024 | The Daily Digest

Explore a rich tapestry of wisdom in ‘The Digest’ from English Plus Podcast. This episode delves into why bad news travels fast, the unbreakable power of hope, and much more. Join us for thought-provoking discussions on historical idioms, resilience, and communication skills. Perfect for curious minds!

• Crossword Puzzles in Context (176)
• Common Mistakes in English (5)
• Cultural English (7)
• English For Specific Purposes (3)
• Focus on Business (8)
• Focus on Grammar (8)
• Focus on Literature (7)
• Focus on Skills (7)
• Focus on Speaking (7)
• Focus on Vocabulary (8)
• Focus on Writing (7)
• Grammar And Vocabulary (6)
• Idiomatic Expressions (8)
• Listening and Speaking (3)
• Reading and Writing (3)
• Common Mistakes in English (14)
• Daily Flash Facts (28)
• Daily Proverbs (64)
• Countries (11)
• Grammar (14)
• History (11)
• Literature (15)
• Science (15)
• Trivia (13)
• Vocabulary (14)
• Daily Quotes (63)
• English Usage Daily (14)
• Expression of the Day (28)
• Great Stories (3)
• Immortal People (3)
• Know Yourself Daily (28)
• Poetry Daily (18)
• Spotlights Daily (17)
• Word of the Day (28)
• A Very Short History of the World (16)
• Beyond Earth (2)
• Big Ideas Explained (11)
• Business Spotlights (40)
• Career Insights (26)
• Creative Writing Tips (19)
• Cultural Insights (26)
• Did You Know (24)
• English Plus Multimedia (4)
• Fact or Fiction (20)
• Frequently Asked Questions (23)
• General Spotlights (10)
• Gods and Heroes (31)
• Grammar Galaxy (2)
• Health and Fitness (30)
• Her Story (2)
• History Spotlights (44)
• Lessons from Everything (1)
• Lifelines (5)
• Literary Echoes (37)
• Mysteries Revealed (23)
• Planet Earth (20)
• Curriculum Development (3)
• Education Policy (3)
• Education Spotlights (31)
• Educational Technology (10)
• Higher Education (1)
• Language Learning Strategies (5)
• Learning and the Brain (10)
• Parent and Community (11)
• Teacher Development (2)
• Teaching Strategies (1)
• Podcasting (2)
• Polyglot (1)
• Arts and Literature (6)
• Danny's Poetry (3)
• Immortal Books (8)
• Immortals (6)
• Ink & Ashes (1)
• Literary Spotlights (1)
• Myths and Legends (7)
• NonFiction (1)
• Poet Diary (1)
• Poetry for Everyone (6)
• Project Orpheus (1)
• Short Stories (2)
• Short Stories for Everyone (5)
• Writing Tips and Techniques (9)
• Science Spotlights (50)
• Short Introductions (181)
• Social Spotlights (48)
• The Journey Within (59)
• Top Ten (10)
• War and Peace (27)
• 101 Series (1)
• Ask Danny (1)
• Bonus Episodes (1)
• Business English (44)
• Common Mistakes (7)
• Discussions (5)
• Down to Business (3)
• Education for All (1)
• English Express (21)
• English Plus Show (1)
• Fantastic Guest (4)
• Grammar (41)
• History (22)
• Know Thyself (2)
• Let's Talk Literature (5)
• Magazine Spotlights (1)
• Mythology (19)
• Our Story (1)
• Poetry (33)
• Pronunciation (4)
• Real Conversations (7)
• Science (20)
• Society and Culture (9)
• Stories (32)
• Technology (1)
• The Daily Digest (10)
• The Universe (1)
• Vocabulary Building (114)
• Vocabulary in Context (2)
• Vocabulary Voyages (3)
• Word Power (87)
• Writing (4)
• Featured Articles (8)
• Red Dead Redemption (1)
• The Last of Us (2)
• The Odyssey (1)
• Old Audio Series (7)
• Premium Episodes (2)
• Premium Series (6)

Pin It on Pinterest

Insert/edit link.

Enter the destination URL

Or link to existing content

Power of Media

Global media platforms, with access to over 3.8 billion people consuming their content daily, have unique opportunities to leverage their scale for positive societal impact. From the way technology is designed and used to the ways in which digital media is consumed, this initiative explores opportunities to come together across the world’s largest platforms to strengthen communities and to address societal challenges in the current context of the pandemic and socioeconomical landscape.

Launched at the Sustainable Development Impact Summit in September 2020, the World Economic Forum’s Power of Media initiative aims to help media organizations use the power of their platforms for positive impact by finding ways to enhance trust, improve diversity and representation in media, build social cohesion through entertainment, culture and sport, and build back a better and sustainable media ecosystem. The analysis will be centered around three main workstreams:

• Building a Sustainable Media Ecosystem
• Diversity and Representation in Content
• Social Cohesion through Entertainment, Culture and Sport

Goal:  Build support and increase public trust through effective awareness and education of ESG goals. Advance avenues for which brands and platforms can leverage technology, data and the power of communities for social good in health, digital literacy, justice and other areas of society.

Objectives:

•Influence a more trusted, informed and inclusive outlook on how platforms can be used for social good

•Advance public-private cooperation and bridge industry gaps between media, consumer, tech, and digital communications industries to drive new societal solutions that leverage the broad reach and power of media platforms

•Achieve tangible results in improving social justice, health, well-being, education, economic inclusion, and cohesion in society

World Economic Forum projects may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License , and in accordance with our Terms of Use .

Related Reports

Reflecting Society: The State of Diverse Representation in Media and Entertainment

This report assesses the state of diversity across content and creative production in five key sectors: gaming, TV and film, news and publishing, advertising and sport and sport media, an...

Further reading

4 ways media and entertainment could be more equitable and diverse

Examples of media, entertainment and sports brands that are bringing their diversity commitments to life.

Why diversity is critical to media and entertainment - and how to achieve it

Increasing diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) in the media and entertainment industry is the right thing to do - and can increase profits. Here's how.

Tokyo 2020: How social media has helped Olympic athletes find their voice

Gen Z athletes are connecting directly with millions of followers on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok to share thoughts, feelings and their personal wellbeing.

Racial abuse of England players exposes deep societal fractures and the need for change

After England lost in the 2020 UEFA European Football Championship, online abuse was targeted at three Black players. Here's how to combat racial abuse online.

How the power of sport can bring us together and drive social justice

During the COVID-19 crisis, people have come together to watch sports, and leagues have leveraged their platforms to address key social justice issues.

12.1 The Media as a Political Institution: Why Does It Matter?

Learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the importance of a free press both in the United States and abroad.
• Describe how the media acts as a watchdog and give examples.
• Understand and define how political information is mediated.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. —The 1st Amendment to the United States Constitution

The press is the only profession explicitly protected in the United States Constitution. Many attribute this protection to James Madison and his writings in the Federalist Papers , but the idea of a free press stretches back to well before Madison wrote out his ideas on what constitutes a perfect democracy. The origins of the free press in the United States can be traced back to Cato’s letters , a collection of essays written in the 1720s by two British writers, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon . Using the pseudonym Cato, they published their articles in the British press, criticizing the British monarchy for its corruption and tyrannical practices. Decades later, American colonists felt the effects of these letters during their own struggles against the Crown, 1 and in 1776, Virginia became the first state to formally adopt a constitutional provision to protect press freedom. 2 Why is the idea of protecting the press so embedded in the United States’ concept of government, and why is this concept so important? Do other nations protect the media to the same extent, or even more? The next section will examine these questions.

The Fourth Estate and Freedom of the Press

The importance of a free press can be boiled down to a sentence from esteemed University of Illinois at Chicago lecturer Doris Graber ’s seminal work Mass Media and American Politics : “The mass media . . . serve as powerful guardians of political norms because the American people believe that a free press should keep them informed about the wrongdoings of government.” 3 Another common way of defining the media’s role is to say that it acts as the fourth estate , or the unofficial fourth branch of government that checks the others. The term fourth estate is credited to Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle , who wrote, “Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporter’s Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.” 4 In other words, people look to the media—the fourth estate—to keep the government in check. The role of the media must be protected if it is to carry out that task.

Throughout US history, the media has fulfilled this role as intended. In the late 1960s, Rand Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg provided classified documents to the New York Times and the Washington Post proving that the government was concealing protracted military involvement in the Vietnam War. The New York Times withstood government pressure and a Supreme Court case to go on to publish a series of articles now known as the Pentagon Papers , which revealed the extent to which the American public had been lied to about the country’s progress in that war. The Watergate scandal is perhaps the most famous example of press freedom and the role of the press as watchdog (another term for the fourth estate ). In this instance, a government informant known as Deep Throat fed Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein confidential information about then president Richard Nixon’s corrupt campaign practices. An ensuing series of investigative pieces by the two journalists revealed multiple abuses of power in Nixon’s reelection campaign, and their reporting ultimately led to the indictment of multiple presidential aides and the eventual resignation of the president himself.

In this video clip, investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, editor Barry Sussman, and former executive editor Ben Bradlee recall how, when they worked for the Washington Post in 1972, they broke the story of the Watergate scandal, a story that started with an investigation of a break-in at a Washington, DC, hotel and led to a constitutional crisis, the resignation of President Richard Nixon, and almost 50 criminal convictions.

In the case of the Pentagon Papers, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the president’s argument—that prior restraint 5 was necessary in order to protect national security—was not enough “to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment ,” 6 and this is the most important First Amendment case because it addresses the sweeping right of the press and press protections in the 20th century. Watergate showed how a protected press is free to serve one of its main purposes, which is to reveal government misconduct. New Yorker staff writer Richard Harris wrote at the time that, “The press was potentially Mr. Nixon’s enemy—far more than the courts or Congress, because only the press could dig out and tell the story (whatever help reporters might get from the courts or Congress) in a way that would arouse the people to demand an accounting.” 7

Watchdogs do not have to be journalistic behemoths like the New York Times or the Washington Post. In the United Kingdom, a small, independent newspaper called the Rochdale Alternative Paper revealed decades-long abuse allegations against Liberal Party MP 8 Cyril Smith . The exposé in the paper, which had a circulation of 8,000 at its highest, 9 eventually led to both a police and an independent government investigation into a child abuse ring that involved several high-level government officials, including MP Peter Morrison, the private secretary to then prime minister Margaret Thatcher . 10 Another way to understand the watchdog function of the press is through the term muckraker , referring to reform-minded investigative journalists during the Progressive Era in the United States (late 1800s to early 1900s) who exposed the wrongdoings of industry leaders. One famous example of a muckraker was Upton Sinclair , who wrote the novel The Jungle based on the corrupt and inhumane practices in American meatpacking companies at the turn of the 20th century. The publication of The Jungle led to governmental action on food safety. In his 1919 work The Brass Check , Sinclair exposed the journalism industry’s penchant for yellow journalism , or journalism that relies on catchy titles and human interest stories to drive sales over well-researched articles or pieces on civic affairs. Sinclair was not afraid to take on media titans such as William Randolph Hearst , who owned the nation’s largest chain of newspapers at the time.

Watchdogs and muckrakers act as a check on government action and corruption. They play an important part in exercising the role of a free press as a cornerstone of a functioning democracy. As Yale University professor and member of the Council on Foreign Relations Timothy Snyder writes, “If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.” 11 The media allows the public to understand what is happening in government in order to hold elected officials accountable. Or, perhaps more simply put, “A free press is important because it is the freedom upon which all of our other freedoms are contingent.” 12

How free is the press? The answer is not black and white, as evidenced by the 2021 World Press Freedom Index . Published every year by Reporters Without Borders , the Freedom Index measures freedom in 180 countries “based on an evaluation of pluralism, independence of the media, quality of legislative framework and safety of journalists in each country and region.” 13 The map in Figure 12.3 below shows that the press is freer in some countries (in pink and purple on the map) than in others (in blue and green).

According to the index and as reflected in the map, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark have the freest presses in the world. Notably, Norway tries to discourage media concentration in order to ensure a variety of outlets, something that will be discussed in later parts of this chapter. The 2021 index ranked the United States 44th, after South Africa (32nd), Botswana (38th), and South Korea (42nd).

George Mason University professor Sam Lebovic explains that two main factors, the rise of concentration in ownership and increased state secrecy, are responsible for the inadequacy of press freedom in the United States, which is an ongoing and serious problem. 14 The modern US media faces unprecedented struggles against declining viewership and revenues, which work to limit the number of outlets and decrease the number of working journalists. At the same time, legislation such as the Patriot Act , passed after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, has made it more difficult for the press to verify state information because of increasing pressure on sources not to cooperate and prosecution of journalists who do ascertain information. In addition, the Trump administration further hampered press freedoms through the prosecution of news sources, public statements that discredited journalists, and encouragement of foreign leaders to take steps to restrict their own media. 15 The future of press freedom in America, while still unstable due to media concentration and surveillance laws such as the Patriot Act, may show some signs of improvement; in a speech on Press Freedom Day in 2021, President Joe Biden decried the imprisonment of 274 reporters worldwide, criticized the lack of local media outlets, and said that the United States “recognize[s] the integral role a free press plays in building prosperous, resilient, and free societies.” 16 Despite these laudatory comments about a free press, however, it is clear the United States faces challenges in protecting journalists’ ability to fulfill their roles.

A study of the United States and Latin America provides an example of how this idea of the importance of a free press is shared across cultures. In the study, journalists representing both cultures shared a common definition of a free press as one that functions without government pressure and to promote social and economic development. 17 This study considered whether or not a free press is related to increased economic development, a question that to date has not been conclusively answered. While the notion that political freedoms (such as freedom of the press) should naturally encourage economic growth and increased standards of living is a common one, current research has not found conclusive evidence either supporting or refuting the claim. 18

There is more of a consensus on the benefits of a free press when it comes to preventing corruption. Studies of press freedom around the world, conducted by scholars in England, Argentina, and Australia, confirm this theory. 19 In this way, the watchdog role that the press plays is based on democratic ideals and has real-world effects for the public.

The Mediated Nature of Political Information

The political information most people receive is mediated information . What does this mean? Unless they work directly in government, most citizen’s understanding of politics comes completely from the media, whether via television news, podcasts, or social media feeds. The media may be a gatekeeper, but it is also a storyteller. As such, it is important to realize that what people see in the media is actually a manufactured view of the political world. Journalists and others who create the news follow routines and are influenced by institutional values that manifest themselves in media content. As Columbia University professor Herbert Gans writes in his study of the American media, “The news does not limit itself to reality judgments; it also contains values, or preference statements. This in turn makes it possible to suggest that there is, underlying the news, a picture of nation and society as it ought to be.” 20 Gans acknowledges that professional journalists try to be objective, yet the news does in fact make judgments and value statements. For example, crime news alerts viewers to the idea that there are undesirable actors within society and that criminals should be punished. Judgments and value statements such as these are different from political bias; while some news outlets are overtly liberal or conservative, Gans’s study shows that the media produces stories with cultural values that people may not detect because they are so used to seeing stories presented this way. For example, according to Gans, ethnocentrism and altruistic democracy are two of the key enduring values in the news. Ethnocentrism in the news refers to the idea that the American media values the United States above all other nations. This manifests most obviously in war coverage, where the press rarely questions American involvement—and to do so would be unpatriotic. In a similar vein, Gans explains that the American news media emphasize an altruistic democracy , the ideal held up by the media that politics should be based on public service and for the public interest. 21 In these ways, the news makes statements about what is right and what is wrong and presents political news through these lenses.

Journalists also share other professional values as to what makes a “good” news story, such as proximity, negativity, scope (how big is the story?), timeliness, and unexpectedness (novelty). 22 Because journalists share these professional values, there is a certain homogeneous quality to the news, otherwise known as pack journalism . This means that people receive the same type of news story repeatedly, though this has been changing since the advent of online news, a topic that will be discussed later in the chapter. Journalists’ common ideas about what should be in the news and why color their coverage and presentation of the news—and, as a result, the public’s perception of politics.

It is important here to note that the concept of news values differs across countries—what is newsworthy in the United States may not be in other nations—and the role of the media differs as well. A study on the news in Japan found that strong cultural forces and local needs drive how news is produced and delivered. 23 Other scholars have found that Western news organizations highlight human interest stories, while Arabic news focuses more on social responsibility and Islamic values. 24 University of Leicester Professor Vincent Campbell echoes the sentiment that news organizations in different countries are fueled by different values and that this influences what stories their audiences see. In authoritarian countries, journalists focus less on performing the watchdog role and more on promoting state activities. 25 This is the case in countries such as North Korea and China, where the state government runs the media.

Related to the idea that the media in large part decides what is a good news story is the concept of the media’s gatekeeping role and its agenda-setting powers. In other words, according to agenda-setting theory , the media decides both what to ignore or filter out and what to show the public. As University of Texas professor Maxwell McCombs and University of North Carolina professor Donald Shaw write, “In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position.” 26 Whether it is a producer who selects the topics for the evening news or an algorithm that creates a social media news feed, people know what is “news” by what is fed to them, they know what is important based on how often it gets airtime, and they understand that there are lead stories and stories that don’t matter very much. The public doesn’t make these decisions; professionals within the news industry make them for the public. (Later parts of this chapter will discuss how this power dynamic has changed thanks to social media and how, in many ways, it is no longer media professionals who select what the public sees.)

If the media decides which stories to present, it also has a hand in deciding how stories are presented. According to framing theory , the way the media frames political information can affect people’s understanding of it. University of Illinois professor David Tewksbury and University of Wisconsin professor Dietram A. Scheufele explain:

“Artists know that the frame placed around a painting can affect how viewers interpret and react to the painting itself. . . . Journalists—often subconsciously—engage in essentially the same process when they decide how to describe the political world. They choose images and words that have the power to influence how audiences interpret and evaluate issues and policies.” 27

For example, a study on gubernatorial races found that female candidates were more likely to be framed in terms of personal characteristics than their male counterparts, who were more likely to be framed in terms of their positions on policy issues. 28 In a separate study, researchers found that one common way the Dutch national media framed news on the European Union (EU) was in terms of assigning responsibility for social problems to the government. This study suggests that the Dutch media’s presentation of political news reflects the public expectation that the government will provide social welfare programs. 29 By highlighting certain aspects of a story and ignoring others, frames can affect people’s judgments and opinions on policy issues, and just as with agenda setting, elected officials fight to make sure they are framed in the correct light.

The public, and individual viewers, should know that while the media is a critical tool that aids people’s political decision-making, it is guided by professional values that dictate the content. Individuals’ views on politics can sometimes be out of their control, but they can work to assemble a better picture of the world by turning to a variety of media outlets and becoming aware of what goes into story selection. While internal pressures (such as professional norms) or external forces (such as authoritarian governments) can influence how the media portrays information, ownership can also affect what the public sees. The next section will examine the different types of media—and, perhaps more importantly, who owns them and how this affects their role in the political world.

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

This book may not be used in the training of large language models or otherwise be ingested into large language models or generative AI offerings without OpenStax's permission.

Want to cite, share, or modify this book? This book uses the Creative Commons Attribution License and you must attribute OpenStax.

Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/introduction-political-science/pages/1-introduction

• Authors: Mark Carl Rom, Masaki Hidaka, Rachel Bzostek Walker
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: Introduction to Political Science
• Publication date: May 18, 2022
• Location: Houston, Texas
• Book URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-political-science/pages/1-introduction
• Section URL: https://openstax.org/books/introduction-political-science/pages/12-1-the-media-as-a-political-institution-why-does-it-matter

© Jan 3, 2024 OpenStax. Textbook content produced by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License . The OpenStax name, OpenStax logo, OpenStax book covers, OpenStax CNX name, and OpenStax CNX logo are not subject to the Creative Commons license and may not be reproduced without the prior and express written consent of Rice University.

• Search Menu
• Advance Articles
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Why Submit?
• About Communication, Culture and Critique
• About International Communication Association
• Editorial Board
• Advertising & Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

A definition of media power, contradiction.

• < Previous

Paradigms of Media Power

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Des Freedman, Paradigms of Media Power, Communication, Culture and Critique , Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 June 2015, Pages 273–289, https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12081

• Permissions Icon Permissions

Media power is a crucial, although often taken-for-granted concept. Does it express the economic impact of the industry, the political influence of particular “media moguls,” or the media's capacity to modify attitudes and beliefs? Does it refer to the ability of media to provide state or corporate actors with a valuable tool to assert their own dominance or to the diffusion of symbolic resources? Are we to believe that the media are increasingly the locus of power or that they constitute the space where power is decided? In order to address this dilemma, this article identifies 4 paradigms—consensus, chaos, control, and contradiction—that best express established ways of conceptualizing the flows and relationships related to media power.

There is an emerging, and healthy, public debate about the definition and implications of media power. From Mexico, where young people have taken to the streets to protest at the partisan coverage of the two main television networks, to the United Kingdom, where the Leveson Inquiry has daily revealed the intimate details of collusive relationships between top politicians, media executives, and police, the behavior of media corporations and executives has come under increasing scrutiny. In particular, the issue of concentrated media power—the grip of large media businesses over public discourse—is starting to preoccupy not just politicians, civil servants, and activists, but ordinary citizens concerned about the ability of communication conglomerates to stifle and distort wider democratic processes. Media power, as exercised by News Corp, Globo, Disney, or Google, is seen to be disturbing precisely because it hands definitional, analytical, and interpretive authority to unelected organizations and undermines the ability of citizens freely to acquire and exchange the material necessary to make informed decisions about public life. The media's political economy, in other words, gives them their privileged position in the world ( McChesney, 2000 ; Mosco, 2009 ).

But what sort of power does this refer to, particularly in the context of the classic tension between theories of power that stress domination and subordination and those that emphasize power in terms of the ability to structure action and outcomes (see Scott, 2001 )? While accepting that the power of the media—institutions, channels, texts, and practices that rely above all on symbolic interactions ( Thompson, 1995 )—needs to be understood both in its productive and legitimating roles, this article adopts Manuel Castells's definition of power as referring to “the relational capacity that enables a social actor to influence asymmetrically the decisions of other social actor(s) in ways that favor the empowered actor's will, interests and values” ( Castells, 2009 , p. 10). It further draws on Joseph Turow's argument that power involves “the use of resources by one organization to gain compliance by another organization” ( Turow, 1992 , p. 24) and his emphasis on the interconnections between the “power roles” embedded within the communications process and those of society as a whole. This means that the economic, political, technological, and cultural dimensions of media power are not insulated from but reinforce each other in their application to specific cases.

Media power refers, therefore, to the relationships—between actors, institutional structures, and contexts—that organize the allocation of the symbolic resources necessary to structure our knowledge about, and by extension our capacity to intervene in, the world around us. The crucial point here is that these relationships are situated in an environment in which access to media power—as with access to all kinds of resources at institutional and societal levels, including health, education, and employment—is fundamentally unequal and reflects structural disparities of power in wider society. Media power is both a consequence of and, increasingly, a precondition for continuing, and stratified, processes of social reproduction. It is not traceable to a single source (despite the undoubted impact of a Murdoch or a Berlusconi); it does not “belong” to Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Madison Avenue, or what used to be known as Fleet Street (although it is most certainly mobilized in all those contexts); it is not articulated solely at the textual level and neither does it emerge spontaneously out of the communicative interactions of ordinary people (even though many people may claim to be “empowered” by their use of media technologies). It is neither about gently persuading nor forcibly coercing individuals to do things they would otherwise choose not to do but about the material coordination of flows of information, communication, and culture such that persuasion and coercion, as well as expression and interpretation, are most effectively able to take place.

In recognition of this relational conception of media power, I want to identify four paradigms—of consensus, chaos, control, and contradiction—within which these different dimensions of media power coexist but where each of which theorizes the play of media power in quite different ways. These are perspectives, in other words, that map not simply how media power “works” but how one might conceive of it as a social process in its own right. As with any conceptual model, it is open to challenge—there may be additional paradigms, theorists may belong in more than one category, they may have been put into the wrong category, or perhaps there are simply too many connections between each of the categories to make them analytically meaningful—but I believe nevertheless that it will help clarify what is at stake in theorizing media power and therefore to develop a sufficiently robust analytical model to both understand and democratize the relationships to which it refers. The model is not intended to be a simple literature review but a more ambitious reframing of how we might approach the subjects and objects of media power.

Paradigms are useful ways of organizing together discrete elements into theoretical frameworks in order to analyze social phenomena; they are not naturally occurring categories but purposeful ways of ordering the world so as to better make sense of it ( Sparks, 2007 ). As such, they map quite closely onto pre-existing categories of media scholarship where the consensus paradigm may be considered to relate to liberal pluralist communication studies, the chaos paradigm to fan studies and cultural studies, the control paradigm to media political economy, and the contradiction paradigm to critical media industry studies and participatory perspectives. However, specific “disciplinary” approaches to media analysis should not be seen as homogeneous nor reduced to a particular orientation, not least in their attitude toward power. The four paradigms discussed in this article, while also not free of internal distinctions and ambiguities, nevertheless provide a more focused approach to questions of power and allow us better to examine the relationships between the economic, political, technological, and cultural forces that shape the dynamics of media power as they operate, albeit in quite specific ways, across different genres and platforms.

The consensus paradigm relates to a longstanding and highly influential notion of power that, in advanced liberal democracies, power is widely distributed, pluralistically organized, and contributes to a relatively stable social arrangement. Responding to criticism that American society in the mid-20th century was dominated by a military, political, and financial elite ( Mills, 1959 [1956]), pluralists argued that U.S. politics was instead a competitive arena in which different interests vied for power and influence but in which there was no single dominant voice, no undue concentration of power. In Robert Dahl's study of the political system of New Haven, Connecticut, Who Governs? , politics is dominated by coalitions, by rival groups of actors and interests, none of whom could be said to exercise complete control. According to Dahl (2005/1961) , “there was no clear center of dominant influence in the [political] order. No single group of unified leaders possessed enough influence to impose a solution” (p. 198), certainly not the economic or social “notables” who had only a limited and shifting impact on New Haven politics. Pluralist politics, argues Dahl (2005/1961) , is notable for its “dispersion of political resources,” the “disappearance of elite rule” (pp. 85–86), and the emergence of polyarchy, a benign mode of democratic politics.

Yet, despite the multiplicity of beliefs and the variety of channels through which to mobilize these beliefs, a degree of mutual understanding and harmony was still evident to Dahl inside American society. This was not imposed by the “notables” nor was it spontaneously present in the minds of citizens; instead, members of the political class and the bulk of citizens are engaged in an ongoing dialogue that “generates enough agreement on rules and norms so as to permit the system to operate” (2005/1961, p. 316). The consensus reached is not permanent and nor is it particularly stable but the process of consensus-building is nevertheless vital to the functioning of American democracy. Consensus, concludes Dahl (2005/1961 , p. 316), “is not at all a static and unchanging attribute of citizens. It is a variable element in a complex and more or less continuous process.”

This conception of consensus has long underpinned pluralist arguments concerning the integrative function of the free press as well as the exercise of sovereign power. Dahl acknowledges in Who Governs? the rather modest role of newspapers in fostering pluralism but perhaps the most famous expression of consensus in relation to media power are the rationales for media performance that are proposed in Four Theories of the Press ( Siebert, Peterson, & Schramm, 1963 /1956) to describe the American and British media systems. This remains the classic exposition of liberal advocacy of the “freedom of the press” primarily composed of a “libertarian” approach where newspapers are seen as “a partner in the search for truth” but where “[t]ruth is no longer conceived as the property of power” (1963/1956, p. 3). The libertarian model was modified in the 20th century to deal with the growing permeation of society by electronic media and a new “social responsibility” model emerged reflecting the view “that the power and near monopoly position of the media impose on them an obligation to be socially responsible” (1963/1956, p. 5). Both rationales, however, were predicated on an unyielding faith in market forces to nurture media systems that informed and entertained audiences, were based on professional values of independence and impartiality, and provided a necessary check on government power. A market-driven media is, from this perspective, one of the guarantors of a pluralist consensus.

This approach resonates in more recent accounts of the democratic role of the media. For example, in Dayan and Katz's (1992) notion of integrative “media events”—ceremonial coverage of “unique” public occasions such as state funerals, major sporting events, scandals, and political earthquakes—audiences are enthralled and transformed by the live coverage of these unprecedented events. “These broadcasts integrate societies in a collective heartbeat and evoke a renewal of loyalty to the society and its legitimate authority” (1992, p. 9). We can even identify the consensual dimension of media power in some nonmarket structures, for example, in accounts of public service broadcasting as an institution that serves to produce cohesive viewing and listening publics with distinctive identities but common interests. For Paddy Scannell (1989) , organizations such as the BBC “brought into being a culture in common to whole populations and a shared life of a quite new kind” (p. 138) and they remain a central part of British democratic life. Indeed, he attributes unprecedented generative power to the media: “What was public life before broadcasting?” he wonders (1989, p. 135).

A consensual media system also requires adequate competition between its different outlets and thus the free interchange of all players in an open market. Media economist Ben Compaine (2001) describes the patterns of ownership in the largely commercial U.S. media system as “extremely democratic” and notes that the media tend “to be run not to promote an ideology but to seek profit” (p. 4). Private ownership is therefore viewed as a steward of plurality with regulation, mostly confined to the broadcast sector, needed only as a last resort in order to deal with specific blockages (e.g., monopolies or oligopolies) and to redistribute media power across a wider number of players. Indeed, despite recent moves to liberalize media systems and to roll back curbs on ownership concentration ( Freedman, 2008a ), there remain restrictions on media ownership and forms of public media in almost all countries. This “mixed economy” approach reflects the enduring appeal of calls for “choice” of outlets and “variety” of media content in contemporary democracies, facilitated by a free market but underwritten by the use of limited state power.

In sum, this consensus paradigm relates to a liberal functionalist perspective on media, described by James Curran as one where the media's role is “to assist the collective self-realization, co-ordination, democratic management, social integration and adaptation of society” ( Curran, 2002 , p. 136). In the light of recent exposures of the illegal and unethical behavior of the press, desperate attempts to boost ratings at all costs, and the hypercommercialization and globalization of large parts of the media, this approach may appear better suited to an earlier period of media history. However, even with the emergence of digital technologies and “empowered” consumers, it is stubbornly resistant to change and remains the default language of policymakers wishing to nurture “open” and “competitive” media markets. Indeed, it is precisely this approach—in which economic liberalism is seen to promote individual liberty and democratic pluralism—that underpins the arguments of UK news proprietors seeking to maintain self-regulation in the light of the phone hacking crisis. For example, in one of its many attacks on calls for a new, tougher regulatory regime to promote ethical journalism, Britain's top-selling newspaper, the Sun , opined that: “Ours may be a rough old trade, sometimes scurrilous and always noisy. But without its freedom to dig dirt, embarrass the great and good, and tell unpalatable truths—and, yes, occasionally get it wrong—British democracy risks grievous damage” ( Sun , 2012 ). Despite warnings from theorists such as Onora O'Neill (2004 , p. 8) that “[a]ccording unrestricted freedom of expression not only to individuals but also to powerful institutions, the media among them, is not necessary for but damaging to democracy,” this form of media power continues to be invoked as a vital requirement for free speech and social cohesion.

Recent structural and geopolitical shifts have forced an updating of some of the foundational elements of pluralist accounts of power. While globalization and digitization have contributed to the erosion of fixed spatial boundaries and the rise of a disembedded and decentralized form of capitalism built on abundance and not scarcity, a range of events—for example, the collapse of Communism, the spread of democratization, the growth of public relations, and the weakening of deference toward elites—have precipitated a new and highly volatile paradigm: cultural chaos ( McNair, 2006 ).

The chaos paradigm is based not on the role of singular factors such as class, hierarchy, and wealth in sustaining unequal social relations, but on ideological diffusion and structural uncertainty. This reflects the dispersed and “fluid” properties of power in a digital age. According to McNair (2006 , p. 200), power

ebbs and flows between locations and centres, spreading amongst societies along the channels and pathways provided by communication media. Power pools . It evaporates, dilutes and drains away as environmental conditions change. Communication in the medium through which power resources are disseminated, and leaky channels of communication therefore mean less secure power centres.

Traditional systems of gatekeeping and ideological control have, therefore, largely broken down allowing for more interrogative forms of journalism and a flourishing of perspectives, including even the promotion of radical voices—such as Michael Moore and Naomi Klein—that would previously have been kept to the margins.

The paradigm finds its perfect expression in the collapse of an “old media” logic in the face of the digital media revolution, a situation in which business models, modes of production, and consumption patterns that were relatively stable for many years have now started to break down. We are shifting from being a population of established newspaper readers and viewers of scheduled television programs to an amorphous group of promiscuous consumers that takes its news from diverse outlets, watches television at times (and on platforms) that suit its convenience and not those of the networks, and generally cannot be relied upon to demonstrate brand loyalty for very long. Bob Garfield describes this as “The Chaos Scenario” ( Garfield, 2009 ) and argues that we are witnessing a seismic shift in media power relationships.

The first element of The Chaos Scenario . . . creates an inexorable death spiral, in which the fragmentation of audience and DVR ad skipping lead to an exodus of advertisers, leading in turn to an exodus of capital, leading to a decline in the quality of content, leading to further audience defection, leading to further advertiser defection and so on to oblivion. (2009, p. 38)

Although, judging by the revival of the advertising industry, an overall increase in television viewing and, perhaps most surprisingly, a recent increase in network news audiences in the United States ( Friedman, 2012 ), the death of “old media” is somewhat premature, the enormous growth of social media has clearly contributed to a tremendously uncertain, but no less refreshing, atmosphere of confusion in which power, it is argued, operates in far less hierarchical ways—proof, for its advocates, of the ability of forms of technological power to mediate, unsettle, or reconstititute social relationships.

The absence of governmental regulation of Internet content has unquestionably produced a kind of chaos, but as one of the plaintiffs' experts put it with such resonance at the hearing: “What achieved success was the very chaos that the Internet is. The strength of the Internet is that chaos.” ( ACLU vs. Reno, 1997 )

The Internet has since grown from an anarchic toddler to a snarling teenager with the ability still to unsettle everything around it. Larry Downes claims that disruptive technologies such as the Internet, based on very low transaction costs and virtually infinite capacity, undermine established business practices and that, “[c]onfronted with the weird economics of information, the core principles of public law, private law, and information law are being turned upside down” ( Downes, 2009 , p. 269).

Not everything is to be welcomed in this brave new world but, generally speaking, theories of chaos are seen to express more adequately the fractured and decentralized forms of media power facilitated by digital technologies. Jeff Jarvis (2009) describes this as a “power shift” (p. 11) in which “the shift from mass [to niche] is really a shift of power from top to bottom, center to edge, them to us” (p. 67). Wired editor Chris Anderson (2009) makes a similar point about what he sees as an “inversion of power” (p. 99) from traditional manufacturers and advertisers who are rapidly losing control to newly empowered audiences: “The collective now controls the message” (p. 99). According to Anderson, we are seeing the transformation of power from label to band, publisher to author, price to free, “watercooler” moments to dispersed sharing, mass to niche and rigid to elastic while, for Tapscott and Williams (2008) in their description of “Wikinomics,” digital “weapons of mass collaboration” are “ushering us toward a world where knowledge, power, and productive capability will be more dispersed than at any time in our history” (p. 12).

This corresponds to McNair's conception of a far more fluid social and ideological environment in which traditional mechanisms for ensuring compliance have broken down under the impact of both communicative abundance and an increasing unwillingness to “tow the line.” This has significant political consequences as, for Henry Jenkins (2006) , the process of convergence makes it much harder for elites to impose their authority. He contrasts “old media's” “power to marginalize” with today's bottom-up “power to negate” (2006, p. 278) that is facilitated by new peer-to-peer networks, characterized by “presumption,” and underpinned by a collapse of deference. “Democracy has always been a messy business” he argues, but today's “politics of parody,” in which citizens use digital tools in creative and autonomous ways to express their cynicism toward “official politics,” is a perfectly logical response to the changing dynamics of authority (2006, p. 293). The most dramatic illustration of this view of dispersed media power—and of the interconnections between political, economic, and technological contexts—is to be found in claims made about the “revolutionary” role of social media in the Arab Spring of 2011, the emergence of “Twitter Revolutions” and the rise of networked protest that culminated in the Occupy movement ( Mason, 2012 ). Indeed, Manuel Castells (2009) has famously described this form of protest as “media counterpower.”

In his view of power as a highly volatile and diffuse phenomenon, McNair appears to oscillate between a Foucauldian approach, where power is seen as productive and all-pervasive, and a “new economy” version of earlier pluralist accounts where, for example, Cater (1965) writes about the “mobile and transitory” nature of power in highly segmented decision-making situations (p. 4) just as Freeman (1965, p. 25) highlights the “complex and pluralistic committee matrix within which so many decisions are reached in a decentralized fashion.” Moreover, McNair admits that the chaos paradigm is not immune from the influence of powerful gatekeepers in the sense that key actors remain determined to stamp their authority on the digital world. The problem is that, given digital abundance and ideological fragmentation, they will find it virtually impossible to secure this objective: “The chaos paradigm does not abolish the desire for control; it focuses on the shrinking media space available for securing it ideologically” ( McNair, 2006 , p. 4).

This is an interesting point, although just how difficult it is to secure some semblance of order online is up for debate. As the web grows into adulthood, the desire to control it is increasingly evident and the search for order increasingly important. In a situation in which the Internet is expected to contribute some $4.2 trillion to the GDP of the world's 20 biggest economies ( Boston Consulting, 2012 ), it is not surprising that we see attempts to regulate the chaos and to classify the confusion: Google categorizes the web, Wikipedia orders knowledge, and Facebook organizes friendships. This is partly a matter of the cyclical nature of technological evolution ( Spar, 2001 ; Wu, 2011 ), where technologies pass through different stages of development from anarchy and uncertainty through consolidation to the reestablishment of rules and the reallocation of property rights. It is also, however, evidence of the profoundly contradictory nature of technological innovation under capitalism—that it benefits the public so long as it rewards those who own or control it—and is thus likely not to stay permanently in a state of chaos.

premised on economic determinacy, whereby ruling elites are presumed to be able to extend their control of economic resources to control of the cultural apparatuses of media, including the means of propaganda and public relations, leading to planned and predictable outcomes such as pro-elite media bias, dominant ideology, even “brainwashing.”

While this simplifies and caricatures many of the arguments of “control theorists,” it does at least point to some of the mechanisms and impacts that are relevant to this conception of media power: the capturing of media agendas, the commodification of innovation, the deployment of propagandistic techniques, and the circulation of partisan media content aimed at securing compliance with existing social relations. Furthermore, McNair's emphasis on the paradigm is certainly justified considering the influence that it has long exerted over critical academics and audiences and its status as a comprehensive account of the media's failure to perform the task attributed to them by pluralists: to hold power to account.

However, it vastly exaggerates the homogeneity of those who are said to operate within the paradigm and glosses over important distinctions in a field characterized by a wide range of different perspectives. There are instead many different varieties of what McNair suggests is a fairly uniform approach to media influence on the part of these critical theorists. The “hardest” edge of the paradigm is best expressed by the propaganda model as developed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988) in Manufacturing Consent . For them, the mainstream news media are a crucial tool for legitimizing the ideas of the most powerful social actors and for securing consent for their actions: They are the ideological lynchpins of the dominant class and thus a crucial constituent of state power. Through a combination of capitalist property relations and an orientation on profit, the existence of advertising as a key source of capital, the domination of elite sources, sustained attacks on any material that challenges these sources and elite agendas, and the construction of an “enemy” (whether Communism or Islamism) around which populations (and media agendas) can unite, the mainstream media environment is structured in such a way as to control dissent and steer public action toward the interests of ruling elites. Herman and Chomsky (1988) provide detailed empirical analysis of, for example, news media coverage of U.S. interventions in Central America and South-East Asia to make a convincing case that the “societal purpose of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state” (p. 298).

David Edwards and David Cromwell of Media Lens, an online group dedicated to correcting the distortions of corporate news, adopt the propaganda model in their rebuttal, primarily, of “liberal” news outlets (such as the Guardian and the BBC) that, they argue, provide effective cover for what is, overwhelmingly, a partisan and conservative set of interests. Interestingly, the problem lies not simply with a corporate media system, described by Edwards and Cromwell (2006) as constituting “a propaganda system for elite interests” (p. 2), but with the individualism and complicity of citizens who refuse to withdraw their support for instruments of class rule that are instead disguised as professional journalistic values. “Control is maintained,” they insist (p. 187), “not by violence, but by deception, self-deception, and by a mass willingness to subordinate our own thoughts and feelings to notions of ‘professionalism’ and ‘objectivity.’” The media, according to this perspective, are seamlessly integrated into existing structures of power with the result that “media performance overwhelmingly promotes the views and interests of established power” (p. 178).

It can be argued that the propaganda model constitutes the most hard-hitting section of a broader theoretical movement at the heart of the control paradigm—media political economy—that assesses the structuring relationships between economic organization, political contexts, institutional structures, textual possibilities, and consumption patterns across media genres ( Murdock & Golding, 2005 ). For Vincent Mosco, political economy actually “asks us to concentrate on a specific set of social relations organized around power or the ability to control other people, processes and things, even in the face of resistance” ( Mosco, 2009 , p. 24). This is a highly productive line of inquiry that attempts to knit together what are often seen as disparate elements of the social world through, above all, privileging the material relations of power that shape the possibilities and contours of media at any one time ( Curran, 2002 ; Garnham, 1990 ; Golding & Murdock, 2000 ; McChesney, 2000 ; H. Schiller, 1989 ; D. Schiller, 2007 ; Smythe, 1981 ). It is based on the notion, paraphrasing Marx somewhat, that forms of social consciousness correspond to the sum total of capitalist relations of production and have led to illuminating critiques of vast areas of media output (see Wasko, Murdock, & Sousa, 2011 , for a comprehensive selection).

Of course there are many other approaches within the control paradigm that refute any notion of a uniform, top-down, smooth exercise of power but that does not mean that they escape from its overall logic. For James Carey (1992) , power refers to the ability to hegemonize definitions and allocations not of economic phenomena but of reality that he describes as a “scarce resource” (p. 87): “Once the blank canvas of the world is portrayed and featured, it is also pre-empted and restricted” (p. 87). Pierre Bourdieu (1991) conceives of symbolic power in terms of its ability to construct reality and endow it with almost magical qualities: the “power of constituting the given through utterances, of making people see and believe, of confirming or transforming the vision of the world and, thereby, action on the world and thus the world itself” (p. 170). Even more significantly, Bourdieu sees symbolic power as a highly efficient means of naturalizing certain preferred interpretations of the world and of legitimizing classifications based on those with most access to that power.

Symbols are the instruments par excellence of “social integration”: as instruments of knowledge and communication . . . they make it possible for there to be a consensus on the meaning of the social world, a consensus which contributes fundamentally to the reproduction of the social order. (1991, p. 166)

This is not the comfortable, democratic consensus discussed by Dahl and his fellow pluralists nor the rather more frazzled and energetic expressions celebrated by chaos theorists but a distilled version of class interests. Whether this process works in relation to the media by including or marginalizing specific perspectives, shaping and framing social narratives, influencing what narratives are told in the first place, or privileging certain individuals with greater symbolic resources (and therefore life chances) than others, it seems to me that this is still part of a quite pervasive and critical “control” paradigm.

The final paradigm, and the one that most effectively addresses both the relational and material aspects of media power, is a modification of the control paradigm. While it accepts that media power is an interested force, a set of relationships intimately tied to the reproduction of existing relations of power more generally, it seeks to avoid the functionalism with which control theorists are often (and sometimes rightly) associated. Far from media institutions working seamlessly as “totalitarian structures of power” as recent advocates of the propaganda model have argued ( Edwards & Cromwell, 2006 , p. 187), they are rather a series of groups and institutions that, while overwhelmingly tied to powerful interests (and of course the hacking scandal provides an exemplary illustration of this), are not immune from the movements and ideas that circulate in society at any one time and that seek to challenge these power structures ( Kumar, 2008 ). Crucially, as the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci (1985) , reminds us, “[a] given socio-historical moment is never homogeneous; on the contrary, it is rich in contradictions” (p. 93). What significance does all this have for the study of media power?

To provide a meaningful answer, we need to go back to Marx's conception of contradiction as a key feature of capitalist society. Throughout his writing, Marx combines a tribute to the revolutionary achievements of capitalism with an analysis of why it is systematically unable to make available the full potential of these achievements to its subjects. While the capitalist class has played a “most revolutionary part” in human history, it has done this, not because of the “genius” of individual scientists and technologists or the bravery of pioneering entrepreneurs but because it is a system based on a structural need to innovate, expand, and accumulate.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. ( Marx, 1975 , p. 36)

Yet just as Marx was enthralled by capitalism's dynamism, he was appalled by the means by which it is obliged to sustain itself: through destructive competition between different companies, intensive exploitation in order to extract maximum profits, increased alienation as workers are systematically separated from the fruits of their labor, and a disastrous lack of coordination that leads to bouts of overproduction and regular periods of crisis. These processes are for Marx the terrible price to be paid by the majority of people for the wonderful technological advances experienced—albeit unequally—under capitalism.

The [capitalist] division of labour results in concentration, co-ordination, co-operation, antagonism of private interests and class interests, competition, the centralization of capital, monopolies and joint stock companies—so many contradictory forms of unity which in turn engenders all these contradictions.

Contradiction, as Ellen Meiskins Wood (2002 , p. 278) puts it, is therefore “capitalism's basic operating principle, in a way that is true of no other social form. It is the source, at one and the same time, of both the capitalist system's unique dynamism and its constant self-subversion.” While other theorists identify contradiction as a feature of all social systems, especially in terms of the relationship between humans and nature (e.g., Giddens, 1979 ), Wood insists that capitalism alone is predicated on such an inflammable and generative set of tensions.

These contradictions are played out at the level of both institutions and ideas, material as well as symbolic practices. Gramsci, in trying to understand the failure of revolutionary movements of the interwar period, discussed how there was a battle going on in the minds of ordinary people between what he called “common sense,” ideas generally distilled from the capitalist class, and “good sense,” the formation of a more progressive set of ideas developed in the course of struggling against that class. In particular, he spoke of a dual consciousness that reflects this ongoing battle. The worker

has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his practical activity, which nonetheless still involves understanding the world in so far as he transforms it. His theoretical consciousness can indeed be historically in opposition to his activity. One might almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which really unites him with his fellow-workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one, superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed. ( Gramsci, 1971 , p. 333)

This is particularly helpful in thinking about the media as a set of institutions and practices that are implicated in the regular advocacy of “common sense” and the transmission of ideas “inherited from the past.” But the model also suggests that, when pushed to do by popular mobilizations and mass struggles, the media may be able (albeit in fragile and temporary ways) to articulate strands of “good sense” and enhance prospects for change ( Ytterstad, 2012 ).

This is especially the case in moments when capitalist hegemony, understood by Gramsci to refer to the various forms of class leadership at any one time, is threatened and unstable. James Carey notes the importance of these interruptions of “normal” practice: “The production and reproduction of society is never guaranteed, automatic or mechanical, and the problematics of the phenomenon are often best revealed in moments of conflict and contradiction and in the rare but powerful episodes of coercive violence, social disorder and chaos” ( Carey, 1992 , p. 110). There have been several examples of how, in recent years, small portions of the mainstream media, despite their frequent involvement in the amplification of powerful voices and reproduction of existing relations, have also provided space to more critical or “marginal” perspectives (e.g., in relation to class, gender, or ethnicity). For example, in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq when UK audiences were clearly not satisfied with official explanations and media frames justifying a war, and marched in their millions urging the government not to invade, the popular tabloid title, the Daily Mirror , took up a radical stance in relation to the rush to go to war ( Freedman, 2008b ). Other examples include sympathetic coverage of the 1997 strike by UPS workers by mainstream media in the United States ( Kumar, 2008 ), favorable reporting in the Danish media of environmental campaigning ( Ytterstad & Eide, 2011 ), or even the recent appearance of an opinion piece by anticapitalist Occupy representatives in the pages of the business daily Financial Times (Occupy London, 2012 ). None of these examples occurred because of any inherent pluralism in the mainstream media. The degree to which there are different positions expressed in the media relates to the need, in a competitive market, to address (in however skewed a way) both the interests of different audiences and the existence of conflicts among capitalist elites as well as pressure placed on mainstream media by countervailing forces.

There are, as a result, multiple contradictions within the commercial media: a simultaneous desire for a narrow consensus and yet a structural imperative for difference; a situation in which audiences are treated as commodities but in which they do not always play this role; a tendency for those who work within the media not to rock the boat (for self-protection and advancement) but, in exceptional periods, to do precisely this. We need, therefore, a methodological approach that tackles the mainstream's embedding in elite networks of power and compensates for the control paradigm's “inability, or perhaps reluctance, to acknowledge how these contradictions account for instances of creativity, resistance and change” ( Havens, Lotz, & Tinic, 2009 , p. 238; see also Hesmondhalgh, 2013 , p. 45). We need to integrate analysis of the “quotidian practices and competing goals” of the media industries ( Havens et al., 2009 , p. 236), with the larger political and economic contexts in which these practices take place and we should neither reduce one to the other nor pretend that microlevel interactions are immune from the impact of the tensions that mark the dynamics of broader social forces.

An approach to the media that focuses on their internal contradictions can highlight not simply the ways in which everything from Hollywood movies to network news and from social media to soap operas to are involved in generating “common sense” but also how popular mobilizations—not in the discursive sense discussed by some media scholars (e.g., Fiske, 1989 )—might help produce forms of “good sense” inside the media. Recognizing and acting upon these contradictions is necessary, as Mike Wayne (2003 , p. 261) puts it, “if we are to avoid sliding into some species of functionalism or pessimism.” This requires an approach to media power that emphasizes structure and agency, contradiction and action, consensus and conflict; an analytical framework that recognizes the existence of unequal power frameworks but acknowledges that they are not forever frozen; and a perspective that takes seriously the activities of producers and audiences while recognizing the existence of uneven consciousness. In short, the contradiction paradigm is needed to compensate for the misplaced optimism of pluralism, the occasional functionalism of the control paradigm, and the unwarranted celebrations of the chaos scenario. Media power, according to this perspective, may be comprehensive but it is nevertheless always unstable and contestable.

Media power is a pervasive but difficult concept. It is too often used as shorthand for the political influence of a particular media mogul or the cultural impact of a specific technology or the affective dimension of a particular text; media power is viewed either as an irrepressible force or a diversion from more substantial threats to democracy and citizenship. This article has instead attempted to develop an understanding of media power as referring to those relationships that help organize the deployment of the symbolic resources that play a vital role in ensuring social reproduction. These relationships, however, cannot be separated from the material inequalities of society at large: Not all audiences are equally desirable to advertisers; not all individuals have the same capacity to start up a publishing venture despite being formally “free” to do so; not all readers have the same access to editors and owners should they wish to complain about something; indeed, not all citizens are able to afford the £250,000 necessary to secure a private dinner with British prime minister David Cameron in order to discuss urgent matters of public policy ( Leigh, 2012 , March 27).

Nick Couldry (2003) is absolutely right to argue that media power needs regularly to be reproduced in order to naturalize its authority so as to make its news credible and its fictions relevant and he is completely justified in focusing on the “universe of beliefs, myths, and practices that allows a highly unequal media system to seem legitimate” (p. 41). Critical media industry scholars are also completely justified in examining how “particular media texts arise from and reshape midlevel industrial practices” ( Havens et al., 2009 , p. 237). But media power refers, quite crucially, to more than the cultural processes by which established patterns of media power come to be accepted. It is also about the material relations that underlie this inequality and which then structure the complex operations of media as power holders in their own right. So just as we need to concentrate on the more “intimate” parts of media power—the circulation of meaning, the production of texts, and the characteristics of media forms—we also need to highlight and evaluate those elements that are crucial in shaping the role and impact of media in public life more generally: questions of ownership and control, policymaking and regulation, corporate strategy, and definitions of the public interest.

The paradigms I have provided are, to a greater or lesser extent, coherent frameworks for assessing these interrelationships from a range of different material positions. The consensus approach continues to provide policymakers and industry voices with a “common sense” narrative about the balance between state and market in contemporary communications systems; the chaos paradigm allows digital optimists better to theorize the nonlinearity and multidimensional nature of power flows in a digital and dispersed communications environment that challenges the logic of a centralized coordinating structure; and the control paradigm has long provided critics of a market system with a vocabulary with which to identify the democratic deficit caused by private ownership and unaccountable state coordination of the media. Proponents of the contradiction school, while sympathetic to the critiques of the control paradigm, focus on forms of contradictory consciousness together with the instability and contingency of existing forms of media control. Perhaps no single model can do justice to the heterogeneity of media flows and the complexity of power but the contradiction paradigm, with its emphasis on both the constitution of and the cracks in media power, provides the most persuasive account of how best to challenge the traditions, institutions, and practices that underpin it.

ACLU vs. Reno , 521 US 844 ( 1997 ). Retrieved October 27, 2014, from http://www.pas.rochester.edu/∼mbanks/CDA/decision/dalzell.html

Anderson , C. ( 2009 [2006]). The longer long tail: How endless choice is creating unlimited demand . London, England : Random House Business Books .

Google Scholar

Google Preview

Boston Consulting ( 2012 ). The internet economy in the G-20: The $4.2 trillion growth opportunity . Boston, MA : Author .

Bourdieu , P. ( 1991 ). Language and symbolic power . Cambridge, England : Polity .

Carey , J. ( 1992 ). Communication as culture: Essays on media and society . London, England : Routledge .

Castells , M. ( 2009 ). Communication power . Oxford, NY : Oxford University Press .

Cater , D. ( 1965 ). Power in Washington: A critical look at today's struggle to govern in the U.S.A . London, England : Collins .

Compaine , B. ( 2001 , November 8). The myths of encroaching global media ownership . openDemocracy . Retrieved from http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-globalmediaownership/article_87.jsp

Couldry , N. ( 2003 ). Beyond the hall of mirrors? Some theoretical reflections on the global contestation of media power . In N. Couldry & J. Curran (Eds.), Contesting media power: Alternative media in a networked world (pp. 39 – 54 ). Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield .

Curran , J. ( 2002 ). Media and power . London, England : Routledge .

Dahl , R. ( 2005 ). Who governs? Democracy and power in an American city (2nd ed.). New Haven, CT : Yale University Press (Original work published 1961).

Dayan , D. , & Katz , E. ( 1992 ). Media events: The live broadcasting of history . Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Downes , L. ( 2009 ). The laws of disruption: Harnessing the new forces that govern life and business in the digital age . New York, NY : Basic Books .

Edwards , D. , & Cromwell , D. ( 2006 ). Guardians of power: The myth of the liberal media . London, England : Pluto .

Fiske , J. ( 1989 ). Television culture . London, England : Routledge .

Freedman , D. ( 2008a ). The politics of media policy . Cambridge, England : Polity .

Freedman , D. ( 2008b ). The Daily Mirror and the war in Iraq . In A. Biressi & H. Nunn (Eds.), The tabloid culture reader (pp. 70 – 80 ). Maidenhead, England : Open University Press .

Freeman , J. L . ( 1965 ). The Political Process : Executive Bureau – Legislative Committee Relations . New York : Random House .

Friedman , W. ( 2012, March 19 ). TV news shows spike in viewers, ratings . http://www.mediapost.com . Retrieved from http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/170550/tv-news-shows-spike-in-viewers-ratings.html

Garfield , B. ( 2009 ). The chaos scenario , Nashville, TN : Stielstra .

Garnham , N. ( 1990 ). Capitalism and communication . London, England : SAGE .

Giddens , A. ( 1979 ). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and contradiction in social analysis . London, England : Macmillan .

Golding , P. , & Murdock , G. ( 2000 ). Culture, communications and political economy . In J. Curran & M. Gurevitch (Eds.), Mass media and society (3rd ed., pp. 70 – 92 ). London, England : Arnold .

Gramsci , A. ( 1971 ). Selections from the prison notebooks . London, England : Lawrence & Wishart .

Gramsci , A. ( 1985 ). Selections from cultural writings . London, England : Lawrence & Wishart .

Havens , T. , Lotz , A. , & Tinic , S. ( 2009 ). Critical media industry studies: A research approach . Communication, Culture, and Critique , 2 , 234 – 253 .

Herman , E. , & Chomsky , N. ( 1988 ). Manufacturing consent . New York, NY : Pantheon .

Hesmondhalgh , D. ( 2013 ). The cultural industries (3rd ed.). London, England : SAGE .

Jarvis , J. ( 2009 ). What would Google do? New York, NY : Collins Business .

Jenkins , H. ( 2006 ). Convergence culture . New York : New York University Press .

Kumar , D. ( 2008 ). Outside the box: Corporate media, globalization, and the UPS strike . Urbana : University of Illinois Press .

Leigh , D. ( 2012, March 27 ). David Cameron admits to private dinners for Tory donors . Guardian , p. 1 .

Marx , K. ( 1973 [1858]). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy . London, England : Allen Lane .

Marx , K. ( 1975 [1848]). Manifesto of the communist party . Peking, China : Foreign Languages Press .

Mason , P. ( 2012 ). Why it's kicking off everywhere: The new global revolutions . London, England : Verso .

McChesney , R. ( 2000 ). Rich media, poor democracy . New York, NY : New Press .

McNair , B. ( 2006 ). Cultural chaos . New York, NY : Routledge .

Mills , C. W. ( 1959 [1956]). The power elite . New York, NY : Galaxy .

Mosco , V. ( 2009 ). The political economy of communication (2nd ed.). London, England : SAGE .

Murdock , G. , & Golding , P. ( 2005 ). Culture, communications and political economy . In J. Curran & M. Gurevitch (Eds.), Mass media and society (4th ed., pp. 60 – 83 ). New York, NY : Hodder Arnold .

O'Neill , O. ( 2004 ). Rethinking freedom of the press . Dublin, Ireland : Royal Irish Academy .

Occupy London. ( 2012 , January 25). How Hayek helped us to find capitalism's flaws . Financial Times , p. 13 .

Scannell , P. ( 1989 ). Public service broadcasting and modern public life . Media Culture and Society , 11 ( 2 ), 135 – 166 .

Schiller , H. ( 1989 ). Culture, Inc.: The corporate takeover of public expression . New York, NY : Oxford University Press .

Schiller , D. ( 2007 ). How to think about information . Urbana : University of Illinois Press .

Scott , J. ( 2001 ). Power . Cambridge, England : Polity .

Siebert , F. , Peterson , T. , & Schramm , W. ( 1963 ). Four theories of the press . Chicago : University of Illinois Press (Original work published 1956).

Smythe , D. ( 1981 ). Dependency road: Communications, capitalism, consciousness, and Canada . Norwood, MA : Ablex .

Spar , D. ( 2001 ). Ruling the waves: Cycles of discovery, chaos and wealth from the compass to the internet . New York, NY : Harcourt .

Sparks , C. ( 2007 ). Globalization, development and the mass media . London, England : SAGE .

Tapscott , D . & Williams , A . ( 2008 ). Wkinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything . London : Atlantic .

Sun ( 2012 , October 31). The Sun Says . Sun , 8 .

Thompson , J. ( 1995 ). The media and modernity: A social theory of the media . Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press .

Turow , J. ( 1992 ). Media systems in society: Understanding industries, strategies, and power . New York, NY : Longman .

Wasko , J. , Murdock , G. , & Sousa , H. ( 2011 ). The handbook of political economy of communications . Oxford, England : Blackwell .

Wayne , M. ( 2003 ). Marxism and media studies: Key concepts and contemporary trends . London, England : Pluto .

Wood , E. M. ( 2002 ). Contradictions: Only in capitalism? In L. Panitch & C. Leys (Eds.), Socialist register (pp. 275 – 293 ). Woodbridge, England : Merlin Press .

Wu , T. ( 2011 ). The master switch . New York, NY : Vintage .

Ytterstad , A. ( 2012 ). Norwegian climate change policy in the media: Between hegemony and good sense . PhD dissertation. University of Oslo, Oslo.

Ytterstad , A. , & Eide , E. ( 2011 ). The tainted hero: Frames of domestication in Norwegian press representation of the Bali climate summit . International Journal of Press/Politics , 16 ( 1 ), 50 – 74 .

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Recommend to Your Librarian
• Advertising and Corporate Services

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1753-9137
• Copyright © 2024 International Communication Association
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

• Class Notes

Digital Exclusives

• Blog Network
• School News
• Alumni Spotlight

Show Your Logic

Avoid conflict and build trust by establishing the “why” behind decisions and sharing it with colleagues.

Asking Questions, Unlocking Solutions

How reframing a problem creates value for customers

The Future of Fast Food

Alumni dish on the industry's digital transformation.

On a meteoric rise through the fiercely competitive luxury retail market, high-end handbag brand Anima Iris has been picked up by Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, and even Beyoncé. With geometric and bold designs, founder Wilglory Tanjong G22 WG22 expresses her ancestry in a fashionable and sustainable way. The bags are made in Senegal by expert craftspeople who have honed their techniques over decades and draw inspiration from centuries of heritage. The leather and other materials are sourced through local African business merchants. Anima Iris is environmentally friendly and employs a zero-waste model that ensures all materials are used and that no two products are the same.

Bilt Rewards

Bilt Rewards launched in 2021 and achieved immediate success in its first year. The startup credit-card rewards program by founder and CEO Ankur Jain W11 makes redeeming points from purchases easy with a unique twist — the card can be used toward rent payments. Jain explains that renters today are living with inflation and rising rent costs, resulting in many who now must pay close to 50 percent of their earned income on rent. Bilt helps this generation build credit while earning rewards that open up affordability in other areas of their lives, such as travel experiences and eventual home ownership.

An organic coconut butter with its early roots in Venture Lab’s Food Innovation Lab can now be found in 1,300 stores, including national chains Sprouts and Wegmans. Couple-turned-business-partners Breanna Golestani WG23 and Jared Golestani WG23 founded Kokada in 2020 to provide a healthier alternative to sugar-laden snacks and spreads typically found at the grocery store. Kokada offers a range of coconut butters that are all peanut-free and sugar-free and designed to be enjoyed as a dip, with a treat, or as part of a meal. The company gives back two percent of all sales to SERVE, a certified NGO based in Sri Lanka, where its ingredients are sourced.

Flagler Health

Developed by Albert Katz WG23 and Will Hu GED19, Flagler Health combines patient data and the power of AI to help physicians recommend treatments to their patients. (“It’s like giving a calculator to a mathematician,” says Katz.) Backed by $6 million in funding, Flagler Health now serves more than 1.5 million patients and recently launched a new product that provides remote patients with exercises to keep joints moving pre- and post-op. The startup made the Poets & Quants “Most Disruptive MBA Startups of 2023” list and was a finalist in Penn’s 2023 Venture Lab Startup Challenge.

Catching Eyes in the Attention Economy

New research shows how to use language to capture audience attention, from word choice to building suspense.

Juggling multiple vendors can be daunting for a small-business owner. Certa, led by CEO Jagmeet Lamba WG07 and CFO Dudley Brundige WG07, streamlines relationships with third-party vendors, making onboarding up to three times faster. The platform itself can reduce IT labor needs, allowing users to create personalized workflows. The company also has its own AI technology — CertaAssist — that can fill out supplier questionnaires, consolidate intake requests, and create data visualizations. Certa’s clients include Uber, Instacart, and Box, whose executives have reported reduced cycle times and operating costs after using the procurement software.

United for a Brighter Future

Dean Erika James reflects on opportunities for the Wharton community to come together and lead.

On the Scene

From Hong Kong to New York, Wharton alumni unite for Impact Tour gatherings, GOLD events, good music, and more.

Sigo Seguros

Spanish remains the most widely used language in the U.S. behind English, with an estimated 41 million current speakers. But Hispanic immigrants still face cultural barriers when they arrive in the States. Nestor Hugo Solari G19 WG19 and Júlio Erdos C10 ENG10 G19 WG19 created Sigo Seguros, a bilingual Texas-based car insurance technology company, to better serve this population. “Our differentiated product starts with a deep understanding of our community and its needs,” says Solari. The Spanish-language mobile and web portals, coupled with quick payback periods, are particularly appealing to working-class drivers. The “insurtech” company raised $5.1 million in additional pre-seed funding in 2023.

Supercharge Your Startup

Resources to help you jump-start your venture’s growth

Cancer can bring your life to a screeching halt. Along with the burden of navigating through new medical terminology and uncertainty, a positive diagnosis can generate feelings of loneliness and isolation. CancerIQ was founded by Feyi Olopade Ayodele W05 WG12 to offer a supportive and more strategic solution for health-care providers working with patients in early cancer detection and prevention. As a software platform, CancerIQ offers hyper-personalized care plans and assesses risks in patients by avoiding the one-size-fits-all approach. The tool focuses on early detection with more precise screening. CancerIQ has been implemented in more than 200 clinic locations across the U.S.

Every day seems to bring a new way to send, receive, or manage money. Managing cash flow on numerous platforms has become quite onerous, non? Au contraire . Piere, an AI-powered app founded by Yuval Shmul Shuminer W19, analyzes past transactions to create a customized budget in two taps. It’s a peer-to-peer facilitator (for such tasks as getting reimbursed for a group meal) and a spending tracker in one. Since Intuit shut down its popular Mint budgeting app, Piere is reported to be the ideal successor: News outlets have featured the app as part of the “loud budgeting” social media trend, and financial publications highlight it as a valuable tool for monitoring spending.

Heidi Block WG95 and her family first got hooked on pickleball during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when they played the sport together at home in New Jersey to pass the time and stay active. But when Block couldn’t find apparel specifically designed for pickleball, she decided to make her own. Along with her eldest son, Max, she founded Play-PKL, an online retailer selling premium pickleball equipment and stylish outfits for recreational players. The site also offers tips and lessons for beginning pickleballers.

The power of media on culture

According to all researches on field, the impact of mass media on our daily life is stronger and stronger, especially on particular aspect of our life.

Consumes are the first target of the bombarding media messages coming from TV spots, movies, online ads and even twitters from companies that produce particular goods.

Today, if you have a TV or a computer or even none of these but you simply have a mobile like an iPhone, you are targeted as a consumer and by consequence you might get to receive constant messages and emails that invite you to buy a particular product or to visit a particular website.

Digital magazines

Today, most people like to get updates about news from online magazines. These are a sort of digital newspapers with pictures and written content and, what’s more, featuring videos that visitors can watch. So, it’s about a more complete and global kind of information than simply reading a newspaper.

Digital information is often considered as a free kind of information due to the fact that in the web there are no rules to write and to give out info. This is the reason why most people tend to think that all goes in the web is true and free from any manipulation.

However, this is not always true. Manipulation is always possible, and probably even harder to know.

Digital platforms

Today, the web is also the place where virtual platforms can improve and increase every day. New platforms are given birth for the joy of new consumers. This increases the competition in the web and consumers can have a better choice of product and service to purchase.

In the recent years, the most flourishing industry is the gambling industry with many new products manufactured each year.

You can just click here to see how the bingo games improved in the last decades. Today, bingo represents one of the most played and practiced games in the web and it’s not by case. Actually, bingo is very easy to play ( you don’t have to learn any particular rule) and you can even get bonuses and other kinds of promotions.

After registering on Luckytouchbingo you get a welcome bonus from the platform as a first gift and more bonuses are available in the annual calendar. Check out what days are more profitable to play bingo and start to have fun.

A Family Affair

How Hannah and Malick Diop WG09 collaborated with a famous relative to disrupt the beauty and entertainment industries

A Look Inside the Ever-Changing World of Modern Media

Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff WG96 discusses the digital media landscape, opportunities and hurdles for the year ahead, and an early internet bet that paid off big.

Identifying Bias in Media and Ourselves

A conversation with Wharton professor and Penn Media Accountability Project head Duncan Watts made me think differently about how to interpret news and my own interpersonal relationships

A Call to Action on the Climate Crisis

In his new documentary, Barry Hershey W64 explains how human-caused emissions are triggering nature’s own warming loops and why we must care about it.

Home Blog Design Multimedia Presentation: Insights & Techniques to Maximize Engagement

Multimedia Presentation: Insights & Techniques to Maximize Engagement

Effective public speaking is a crucial skill often overlooked. Multimedia presentations, such as digital stories, offer an opportunity to cultivate this skill. When appropriately executed, they blend visuals, text, and compelling speech in any setting. This article explores multimedia presentation, focusing on its definition, components, and the advantages it brings to the table.

Table of Contents

What is a Multimedia Presentation?

Types of mediums used in a multimedia presentation, advantages of multimedia presentation, how to create a multimedia presentation.

• How to Deliver a Multimedia Presentation?

Recommended Templates for Multimedia Presentations

Final words.

Multimedia originates from the combination of “multi” and “media,” where “multi” denotes “many” [1]. It represents a medium facilitating the seamless transfer of information between locations. Multimedia encompasses the computer-assisted integration of various elements like text, drawings, still and moving images (videos), graphics, audio, animation, and other forms of media [1]. It allows the expression, storage, communication, and digital information processing.

A multimedia presentation goes beyond traditional slides to convey information. It is a dynamic approach that enhances engagement and boosts information retention among the audience. With the use of technology, it requires thoughtful design, pacing, and interactive components. Multimedia presentations deliver information through various channels, offering a multi-sensorial experience. As a consequence, they accommodate different learning preferences.

To create a truly immersive experience, multimedia presentations leverage different mediums. Video clips offer dynamic visual content, infographics provide concise information, audio snippets add a layer of narration, and animations bring concepts to life. The synergy of these elements elevates the overall impact of the presentation.

Multimedia presentations employ diverse mediums to construct a comprehensive and immersive experience.

Video Clips

Video content consists of photographic images displayed in apparent motion at speeds ranging from 24 to 30 frames per second, and even higher values depending on the topic. The term “video” denotes a moving image accompanied by sound, commonly seen in television broadcasts [2]. Text can be incorporated into videos through captions or embedded in images, as seen in slide presentations. It provides a captivating element to the presentation. 

By incorporating motion and imagery, video clips enhance audience understanding and retention, as they can be introduced as a refreshing break during the course of the presentation. It offers the presenter a moment to regroup, especially in lengthy presentations. Videos can emotionally engage audiences through narratives, but their inclusion alone doesn’t guarantee benefits. For effective integration, videos have to follow the narrative of the speech the presenter is sharing. This implies that no random video can be added to a multimedia presentation, and presenters should also take extra care in unrequired effects that don’t contribute to the overall impact of the speech (i.e., abusing VFX or unprofessional transitions).  

Now we know why and how videos help a presentation, those who are unfamiliar can learn how to embed a video on a Google Slide .

Infographics

Infographics contribute to the attractiveness of multimedia applications. In numerous situations, the audience prefers visuals over extensive text. It aids in the clarification of concepts and provides background information. In contrast to regular graphics, infographics are commonly acknowledged as a better medium to communicate data extracted from charts and graphs [3]. Their visually appealing format ensures clarity without overwhelming the viewer, making data more digestible.

Text [4] is used in multimedia presentations because it is a familiar media channel. It includes characters of different sizes and styles, making words, phrases, and paragraphs. The text requires less effort compared to a video. But this doesn’t mean presenters shouldn’t care about formatting.

Different fonts and sizes in text matter. Using the wrong font shows a lack of professionalism. Multimedia uses text to share information or enhance other media. Therefore, fonts and sizes can be varied for a cohesive aesthetic.

Graphic Design effects, like text on portrait, are mighty in presentations. This technique, featuring phrases alongside visuals of well-known public figures, enhances interest and reinforces key messages.  Choosing the right colors and contrast in text design has a psychological appeal. It increases the audience’s interest.

Text design should also consider those with visual impairments.  Hence, the text to be used has to follow specific guidelines. Multimedia follows this by presenting text in various formats. This helps everyone understand the message quickly. They make information accessible instantly.

Audio Snippets

Adding audio into a media presentation gives users information that may be challenging to convey through other mediums. Certain types of information, like a motivational speech or enlightening music, are best conveyed through audio. It is a common practice in the motivational presentation niche to use audio as a resource to accompany exercises, like meditational practices, group activities, and storytelling techniques in which the audience has to place themselves in the shoes of the “character” in the story, and the list goes on.

Research indicates that presenting information through multiple senses improves retention [6]. Importantly, audio can make communication accessible for users who present visual impairments.

Animation is a series of static images rapidly flipped through, creating the illusion of movement [5]. Animation involves making a still image appear to be in motion. It enhances the visual appeal of a presentation. Animation is used for illustrating concepts related to movement, such as playing a guitar or hitting a golf ball. These actions are challenging to depict accurately with static images or text alone.  

Likewise, animated sequences can guide employees to respond correctly to different threat scenarios. For instance, showing threat scenarios through animation can enhance employees’ ability to recognize and respond to potential risks. Through movement and visual storytelling, animated templates contribute to a deeper understanding of intricate ideas.

Multimedia presentations emerge as a powerful tool for effective communication, offering engagement, retention, and adaptability in professional and educational settings.

Enhanced Engagement

Multimedia presentations excel in captivating audiences through a customized approach to diverse learning preferences. Multimedia presentations stimulate interest and maintain active engagement by integrating visuals and audio.

Improved Information Retention

Research conducted by Saini and Baba underscores the efficacy of multimedia presentations in enhancing information retention [7]. The combination of visual and auditory stimuli helps understanding quickly. It improves the audience’s ability to grasp and remember key concepts.

Professional Appeal

In professional settings, adopting multimedia presentations contributes to elevated sophistication. This method showcases a commitment to deliver information dynamically and accessibly. Thus, presentation on multimedia positively reflects on both the presenter and the organization.

Flexibility in Communication

Multimedia presentations offer flexibility in conveying complex concepts . Incorporating various mediums allows presenters to adapt their communication style to suit the nature of the information. It makes it more accessible to a broader audience.

Increased Accessibility

The inclusion of diverse mediums enhances accessibility for a wider audience. Visual elements cater to visual learners, while auditory components appeal to those who learn best through listening. This inclusive approach ensures that the message resonates with different audiences.

Enhanced Persuasion

The dynamic nature of multimedia presentations facilitates a persuasive delivery . Engaging visuals, coupled with compelling narration, influence opinions. It effectively conveys the presenter’s message, making it more memorable and impactful.

Real-time Demonstration

Multimedia presentations enable real-time demonstration of concepts and ideas. Whether showcasing product features or illustrating complex processes, integrating videos, animations, and live demonstrations leave a lasting impression.

Adaptability to Technological Advances

By using multimedia presentations, presenters showcase adaptability to technological advances [8]. Multimedia presentation aligns with contemporary communication trends. It positions the presenter as forward-thinking and responsive to evolving methods of information delivery.

Crafting an effective multimedia presentation involves thoughtful planning and execution. A well-structured and engaging multimedia presentation is created by following several steps

Define Presentation Objectives

The goals and objectives of the presentation must be clearly outlined [9]. A presenter should identify the key message that is conveyed to the audience. This initial step guides the selection of multimedia elements based on the nature of the content. For instance, data presentations involve the use of infographics. On the other hand, motivational presentations may require photos, illustrations, and videos. Likewise, Business presentations may include interactive graphs and infographics.

Audience Research

Understand the target audience to customize content. Choose multimedia elements that resonate with them [9]. Consider the audience’s demographics, preferences, and expectations to create a presentation that captures their interest.

Select Media Channels

Choose appropriate multimedia channels, such as GIFs, videos, infographics, and animated charts, per the defined objectives. Different media channels convey information in distinct ways. Selecting the right ones enhances the overall impact of the presentation. Otherwise, the presenter can learn about design ideas in detail from SlideModel.

Write the Presentation Story

Develop a structured storyboard outlining the sequence of content, visuals, and multimedia elements. The story should have a logical flow. It captures the audience’s attention and maintains their interest throughout the presentation.

Select a SlideModel Template

Use a SlideModel template to maintain consistency and professionalism in design, including fonts, colors, and layout. Templates provide a cohesive visual identity. These templates reinforce the message and facilitate a clear understanding of the content. There are plenty of templates available that can assist in creating a multimedia presentation.

Create Narrations or Captions

Develop concise and focused content that supports the key message. This contributes to the overall narrative. Narrations provide spoken explanations, while captions offer written context. Narrations or captions should complement the visuals. They provide context and enhance the audience’s understanding.

Create Deliverables

Deliverables include the finalized presentation file. It ensures compatibility with the chosen presentation software. Generate deliverables for the multimedia presentation. Optimize files for seamless integration and playback. Pay attention to file sizes and formats.

Transitions and Timings

Incorporate smooth slide transitions for a seamless flow between content. Avoid excessive transitions that may distract from the message. Set appropriate timings to maintain a well-paced presentation. Keep the audience engaged.

Speaker Notes

Prepare speaker notes to guide the presenter during the delivery. Attention must be paid to timing and the use of multimedia elements. Speaker notes serve as a roadmap. It ensures a confident and well-timed presentation.

How to Deliver a Multimedia Presentation

Delivering a multimedia presentation with impact involves a strategic approach.

Testing Presentation on Arrival

Prioritize testing upon arrival to prevent any technical inconveniences. Verify the compatibility of multimedia elements and the presentation software with the venue’s system. A smooth technical setup is essential for a flawless multimedia presentation.

Timing of Multimedia Elements

Study the timing of multimedia elements.  Especially when introducing videos. Allocate time for a Q&A session post-presentation. This strategic timing ensures audience commitment, thus providing a platform for clarifications and discussions.

Avoid Inconsistent Perceptual Mediums

Leverage various perceptual channels, like hearing and vision, to enhance comprehension. Clarify infographics through spoken explanations. Steer clear of concurrent speech and sound sources to prevent interference and distractions. Seamless integration of multiple media sources is paramount for an effective presentation [10].

Professional Tone

Uphold a professional and authoritative tone throughout the presentation. Stay away from overly casual language to underscore the gravity of your message. Opt for a direct approach, aligning with the formality expected in a multimedia presentation.

Body Language

Pay attention to your body language, a critical aspect of multimedia presentations. Show confident and open postures. It reinforces the verbal communication. Effective body language contributes to the audience’s understanding.

Strategic Pauses for Multimedia Absorption

Introduce strategic pauses at key junctures to allow the audience to absorb multimedia information. Recognize that multimedia elements often require additional processing time. Strategic breaks enhance understanding. This prevents information overload and ensures a smooth flow throughout the presentation.

Visual Commitment through Multimedia

Pay close attention to the effective use of multimedia elements. Use body language to complement multimedia content. It will enhance the audience’s connection with the presentation. Effective visual engagement is crucial for a successful multimedia delivery.

1. Pitch Deck for Multimedia Presentation PowerPoint Template

If you are looking for multimedia presentation examples, in this article, we used one slide of this investor pitch deck to showcase why graphics matter in first impressions. Customize this presentation template to meet the requirements of your company; it just takes a couple of clicks!

Use This Template

2. Multimedia Annual Report PowerPoint & Google Slides Template

Rather than delivering a plain MS Excel sheet, create your report presentation by using this presentation on multimedia format template. Entirely customizable, you can adapt the presentation theme to any color scheme you choose. Download it today and make your annual report presentation the highlight of this year!

3. CV Template for Interview Meetings with Multimedia Effects

Long gone are the days in which resumes were a blank piece of paper with text and a bad-quality photo. Impress recruiters with a well-designed curriculum vitae by harnessing the advantages of multimedia presentations.

4. Collection of Infographic PPT Templates for Multimedia Presentations

For those who don’t know where to start with infographics, this slide deck has it all. Bubbles, demographics, iceberg metaphor, funnels, and more. Access now and customize the graphics in this high-quality infographics template for PowerPoint – fully compatible with Google Slides and Keynote.

Multimedia presentations are at the forefront of the transformation of public speaking. Using various mediums, presenters create engaging experiences for their audience. Integrating multimedia elements in business or academia raises presentations to new heights.

[1] Li, Z.N., Drew, M.S. and Liu, J., 2004. Fundamentals of multimedia (pp. 253-265). Upper Saddle River (NJ): Pearson Prentice Hall. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57105399-fundamentals-of-multimedia

[2] Bowen, C., 2017. Grammar of the Edit . Routledge. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/546377

[3] Siricharoen, W.V., 2013, May. Infographics: the new communication tools in digital age. In The international conference on e-technologies and business on the web (ebw2013) (Vol. 169174). https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Waralak-Siricharoen/publication/256504130_Infographics_the_new_communication_tools_in_digital_age/links/0c9605232e6f666b1f000000/Infographics-the-new-communication-tools-in-digital-age.pdf

[4] Malhotra, R. and Verma, N., 2020. An impact of using multimedia presentations on engineering education. Procedia Computer Science , 172 , pp.71-76.

[5] Pavithra, A., Aathilingam, M. and Prakash, S.M., 2018. Multimedia and its applications. International journal for research & development in technology , 10 (5), pp.271-276.

[6] Henmon, V.A.C., 1912. The relation between mode of presentation and retention. Psychological Review , 19 (2), p.79. https://ia600708.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/28/items/crossref-pre-1923-scholarly-works/10.1037%252Fh0072137.zip&file=10.1037%252Fh0072813.pdf

[7] Saini, G. and Baba, M.M., 2023. Psychological expedient of multimedia in blended learning and metamemory satisfaction. The Learning Organization . https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/TLO-11-2022-0130/full/html

[8] Lauer, C., 2009. Contending with terms: “Multimodal” and “multimedia” in the academic and public spheres. Computers and composition , 26 (4), pp.225-239. https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=1dd08158225c41e82243a7efe74e61c140293775

[9] Hosseini, Z. and Kamal, A., 2013. How to design effective multimedia presentations. In 7th International Symposium on Advances in Science and Technology (7th SASTech 2013) Pp (pp. 7-8).

[10] Sutcliffe, A.G., 1999. A design method for effective information delivery in multimedia presentations. New review of hypermedia and multimedia, 5(1), pp.29-58. https://doi.org/10.1080/13614569908914707

Like this article? Please share

Design, Presentation Approaches Filed under Design

Related Articles

Filed under Google Slides Tutorials • April 23rd, 2024

How to Align Objects in Google Slides

Optimize your layouts by learning how to align objects in Google Slides presentations. Step-by-step guide with screenshots.

Filed under Design • March 27th, 2024

How to Make a Presentation Graph

Detailed step-by-step instructions to master the art of how to make a presentation graph in PowerPoint and Google Slides. Check it out!

Filed under Presentation Ideas • February 29th, 2024

How to Make a Fundraising Presentation (with Thermometer Templates & Slides)

Meet a new framework to design fundraising presentations by harnessing the power of fundraising thermometer templates. Detailed guide with examples.

Leave a Reply

Power Of Media PPT: Definition, Types, and History

Power Of Media PPT: Definition, Types, and History Free Download : The influence of the media on our lives is enormous; in addition to providing us with amusement, it also influences how we view important societal issues and helps us acquire those ideas.

Also See: Women Empowerment PPT Free Download

Current events awareness is aided by print and electronic media. In the age of knowledge, we cannot ignore how the media, whether it be print or electronic, affects our daily life.

Can you image living without the ability to read newspapers or change channels on a television? The day when individuals enjoyed their leisure time by cycling, playing sports outside, and other activities like these has long since passed.

Also See: Social Media PPT  

Table of Content For Power of Media PPT Presentation

• Introduction
• Types of Media
• History of Media
• Power of Media

Related Posts

Social media marketing ppt presentation seminar free, biomedical waste management ppt presentation free, monkey and the cap seller story ppt presentation free download, 1210 electrical engineering(eee) seminar topics 2024, 112 iot seminar topics-internet of thing presentation topics 2024.

330 Latest AI (Artificial Intelligence Seminar Topics) 2024

No comments yet, leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

• Customer Favourites

Power Of Media

Powerpoint Templates

Icon Bundle

Kpi Dashboard

Professional

Business Plans

Swot Analysis

Gantt Chart

Business Proposal

Marketing Plan

Project Management

Business Case

Business Model

Cyber Security

Business PPT

Digital Marketing

Digital Transformation

Human Resources

Product Management

Artificial Intelligence

Company Profile

Acknowledgement PPT

PPT Presentation

Reports Brochures

One Page Pitch

Interview PPT

All Categories

• You're currently reading page 1

Stages // require(['jquery'], function ($) { $(document).ready(function () { //removes paginator if items are less than selected items per page var paginator = $("#limiter :selected").text(); var itemsPerPage = parseInt(paginator); var itemsCount = $(".products.list.items.product-items.sli_container").children().length; if (itemsCount ? ’Stages’ here means the number of divisions or graphic elements in the slide. For example, if you want a 4 piece puzzle slide, you can search for the word ‘puzzles’ and then select 4 ‘Stages’ here. We have categorized all our content according to the number of ‘Stages’ to make it easier for you to refine the results.

Category // require(['jquery'], function ($) { $(document).ready(function () { //removes paginator if items are less than selected items per page var paginator = $("#limiter :selected").text(); var itemsperpage = parseint(paginator); var itemscount = $(".products.list.items.product-items.sli_container").children().length; if (itemscount.

• Business Plan Word (1)
• Business Plans (4)
• Business Slides (3768)
• Circular (106)
• Cluster (38)

The Significance and Impact of the Media in Contemporary Society

• First Online: 10 March 2018

Cite this chapter

• Faith Gordon 3  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies ((PSLS))

1105 Accesses

This chapter explores the significance of the media and the impact it has on the meaning-making processes in contemporary society. It draws on key national and international academic literature and previous studies on the role and functions of the media. This includes the key theoretical debates on deviancy amplification, folk devils and moral panics. It assesses the media’s impact on criminal justice policies and on public opinion of, and support for authoritarian ideologies and policies. In particular, it will focus on exploring how the media can influence popular culture and the impact of media portrayals of crime on societal perceptions, responses and reactions directed towards social groups, in particular children and young people ‘in conflict with the law’.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info
• Durable hardcover edition

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

It has long been acknowledged that the media are difficult to capture and define (Craig 2004 : 3). As outlined in Chap. 1 , the terms ‘media’ or ‘mass media’ refer to the traditional definition of the media, as consisting of newspapers (the print media), radio (broadcast media) and news bulletins and programs (televised media). While choosing to focus on the contemporary media, this book acknowledges from the outset that there is an extensive body of work existing on the historical origins of the media; mass communication and its impact, and the role of technological development (see Downing 1980 ; Frost 2000 ; Curran 2002 ).

There has been much criticism of pluralist theories on the media, including the arguments that pluralism is an ideological justification for the media and that the basis of the theory is not grounded in evidence. Rather the pluralist model assumes that the content of the media is diverse, without presenting evidence to reinforce or prove this theory (see Blumler and Gurevitch 1995 ).

Rupert Murdoch’s ownership of a range of media outlets in the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (US) is a prime example of the concentration of power and the influence of owners on media content (see Golding and Murdock 1991 ; Horrie 2003 ; Cole 2005 ). Further to this, academics such as Barker ( 1999 : 46) argue that conglomeration has aided a general concentration of media ownership, with research such as Bagdikian’s ( 2004 ) stating that the US media were controlled by 50 corporations in the 1980s, and by 2003 this had been reduced to five controlling the majority of the 178,000 media outlets. Significantly as Tait ( 2012 : 518) observes, the ‘scale and intensity’ of the phone hacking scandal in 2011, saw the resignation of the chief executive of one of the UK’s most influential newspaper groups, the resignation of one of the UK’s most senior police officers, the arrest of Andy Coulson, who had acted as the then Prime Minister, David Cameron’s head of communications, the resignation of two senior executives from key companies in the Murdoch empire, as well as the collapse of the takeover deal in relation to BSkyB and the closure of the News of the World (see also Keeble and Mair 2012 ; McKnight 2012 ; Watson and Hickman 2012 ).

As Barrat ( 1994 : 61) notes, the majority of media organisations are influenced by ‘a variety of commercial influences’, including the need to be profitable and also obtaining revenue through ‘advertising’. Some media outlets are part of the public sector, such as the BBC and they have the requirement ‘to provide a public service’, by ‘informing, educating, and entertaining audiences’ (Barrat 1994 : 61).

Tait’s ( 2012 : 520) analysis of the phone hacking scandal asserts that it has ‘revealed some fundamental issues in British political communications, the political system and the practice and regulation of journalism’. His analysis also documents ‘a secret history’ between Murdoch and British politics (Tait 2012 : 520–523).

Semiology provides a suitable vehicle for studying the meanings behind media content (see O’Connor 1989 ; Hall 1997 ; Berger 1998 ; Barker 2000 ; Schirato and Yell 2000 ). In contemporary literature it is now referred to as semiotics and was first developed by the Swiss linguist, Saussure, who proposed that meaning was ‘produced through … language systems’ (Schirato and Yell 2000 : 19). He focused on the ‘linguistic sign’, which he divided into the ‘signifier’, ‘the signified’ and the ‘sign’ (Schirato and Yell 2000 : 19).

As the findings of a number of content analysis studies highlight, the media exaggerate the levels of crime, in particular violent crime in the UK (see Ditton and Duffy 1983 ; Schlesinger and Murdock 1991 ; Williams and Dickinson 1993 ; Callanan 2005 ; Greer 2005 ; Reiner 2007 ).

Dorfman and Schiraldi’s ( 2001 ) research found that 76 percent of the public said they formed their opinions about crime from the media, whereas 22 percent reported that their knowledge of crime was formed through their personal experiences.

Bibliography

Aggleton, P. (1987) Deviance , London: Tavistock Publications.

Google Scholar  

Albertazzi, D. and Cobley, P. (2010) The Media: An Introduction (Third Edition), Essex: Pearson Education Limited.

Allan, S. (1999) News Culture , Buckingham: Open University Press.

Ang, I. (1990a) ‘Culture and Communication’, European Journal of Communication , Volume 5, Number 2, pages 239–260.

Ang, I. (1990b) Desperately Seeking the Audience , London: Routledge.

Archers, J. and Jones, J. (2003) ‘Headlines from History: Violence in the Press, 1850–1914’, in E. A. Stanko (ed.) The Meanings of Violence , London: Routledge, pages 17–32.

Bagdikian, B. H. (2004) The New Media Monopoly , Boston, USA: Beacon Press.

Barker, C. (1999) Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities , Buckingham: Open University Press.

Barker, C. (2000) Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Barrat, D. (1994) Media Sociology (Fourth Edition), London: Routledge.

Barthes, R. (1977) ‘“The Photograph Message”, Translated by Stephen Heath, 1977, An Excerpt’, in V. Goldberg (ed.) Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to Present , Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, pages 15–31.

Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity , Translation by Mark Ritter, London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Becker, H. (1963) Outsider: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, New York and London: Free Press.

Becker, H. (1967) ‘Whose Side Are We On?’, Social Problems , Volume 14, Number 3, pages 234–247.

Berger, A. A. (1998) Media Analysis Techniques (Second Edition), London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Berrington, E. and Honkatukia, P. (2002) ‘An Evil Monster and a Poor Thing: Female Violence in the Media’, Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention , Volume 3, pages 50–72.

Article   Google Scholar  

Bessant, J. and Hil, R. eds. (1997) Youth Crime and the Media: Media Representations of and Reactions to Young People in Relation to Law and Order , Hobart, Australia: Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies.

Bignell, J. (1997) Media Semiotics: An Introduction , Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Blumler, J. and Gurevitch, M. (1995) The Crisis of Public Communication , London: Routledge.

Book   Google Scholar  

Box, S. (1983) Power, Crime, and Mystification , New York, USA: Tavistock.

Braham, P. (1982) ‘How the Media Report Race’, in M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran and J. Woollacott (eds.) Culture, Society and the Media , London: Methuen, pages 274–275.

Branston, G. and Stafford, R. (2003) The Media Student’s Book (Third Edition), London: Routledge.

Briggs, A. and Cobley, P. eds. (1998) The Media: An Introduction , Essex: Addison Wesley Longman.

Briggs, A. and Cobley, P. eds. (2002) The Media: An Introduction (Second Edition), Essex: Addison Wesley Longman.

Brown, S. (1998) Understanding Youth and Crime: Listening to Youth? , Buckingham: Open University Press.

Bryant, J. and Zillmann, D. (2002) Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research , London: Routledge.

Caliendo, S. M. (2011) ‘Race, Media and Popular Culture’, in S. M. Caliendo and C. D. Mcllwain (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Race and Ethnicity , Oxon: Routledge, pages 73–81.

Callanan, V. J. (2005) Feeding the Fear of Crime: Crime-related Media and Support for Three Strikes , New York, USA: LFB Scholarly.

Camargo Heck, M. (1980) ‘The Ideological Dimension of Media Messages’, in S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis (eds.) Culture, Media, Language , Oxon: Routledge, pages 122–127.

Chibnall, S. (1975) ‘The Crime Reporter: A Study in the Production of Commercial Knowledge’, Sociology , Volume 9, Number 1, pages 49–66.

Chibnall, S. (1977) Law and Order News: An Analysis of Crime Reporting in the British Press , London: Tavistock Publications.

Cicourel, A. (1968) The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice , New York: The Free Press.

Cohen, A. (1955) Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang , London: Collier-Macmillan.

Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (First Edition), Oxford: Martin Robertson.

Cohen, S. (1980) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (Second Edition), Oxford: Martin Robertson.

Cohen, S. and Young, J. eds. (1981) The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media (Second Revised Edition), London: Constable.

Cole, P. (2005) ‘The Structure of the Print Industry’, in R. Keeble (ed.) Print Journalism: A Critical Introduction , Oxon: Routledge, pages 21–38.

Conboy, M. (2006) Tabloid Britain: Constructing a Community Through Language , London: Routledge.

Cormack, M. (2000) ‘The Reassessment of Ideology’, in D. Fleming (ed.) 21st Century Media Studies Textbook , Manchester: Manchester University Press, pages 93–95.

Corner, J. and Hawthorn, J. eds. (1993) Communication Studies: An Introductory Reader (Fourth Edition), London: Arnold Publishers.

Cornwell, B. and Linders, A. (2002) ‘The Myth of “Moral Panic”: An Alternative Account of LSD Prohibition’, Deviant Behavior , Volume 23, Number 4, July–August, pages 307–330.

Craig, G. (2004) The Media, Politics and Public Life, New South Wales, Australia: Allen and Unwin.

Croteau, D. and Hoynes, W. (2003) Media Society: Industries, Imagery, and Audiences , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Curran, J. (1998) ‘Newspapers: Beyond Policy Economy’, in A. Briggs and P. Cobley (eds.) The Media: An Introduction , Essex: Longman, pages 81–96.

Curran, J. (2002) Media and Power, London: Routledge.

Curran, J. and Seaton, J. (1992) Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (Fourth Edition), London: Routledge.

Curran, J., Douglas, A. and Whannel, G. (1980) ‘The Political Economy of the Human-Interest Story’, in A. Smith (ed.) Newspapers and Democracy , Cambridge: MIT Press, pages 288–347.

Curran, J., Gurevitch, M. and Woollacott, J. (1988) ‘The Study of the Media: Theoretical Approaches’, in M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran and J. Woollacott (eds.) Culture, Society and the Media , London: Routledge, pages 11–29.

Devereux, E. (2003) Understanding the Media , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Devereux, E. (2007) Understanding the Media (Second Edition), London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Ditton, J. and Duffy, J. (1983) ‘Bias in the Newspaper Reporting of Crime News’, British Journal of Criminology , Volume 23, Number 2, pages 159–165.

Dorfman, L. and Schiraldi, V. (2001) Off Balance: Youth, Race and Crime in the News , New Hampshire, USA: The Police Policy Studies Council.

Downes, D. and Rock, P. (2007) Understanding Deviance , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Downing, J. (1980) The Media Machine , London: Pluto Press Limited.

Durham, A. M., Elrod, H. P. and Kinkade, P. T. (1995) ‘Images of Crime and Justice: Murder and the “True Crime” Genre’, Journal of Criminal Justice , Volume 23, Number 2, pages 143–152.

Dyer, R. (1993) The Matters of Images: Essays on Representations, London: Routledge.

Eldridge, J., Kitzinger, J. and Williams, K. (1997) The Mass Media Power in Modern Britain , London: Oxford University Press.

Entman, R. M. (1993) ‘Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm’, Journal of Communication , Volume 43, Number 4, pages 51–58.

Ericson, R. V., Baranek, P.M. and Chan, J. B. L. (1987) Visualizing Deviance: A Study of News Organization , Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

Ericson, R. V., Baranek, P. M. and Chan, J. B. L. (1999) ‘Negotiating Control: A Study of News Sources’, in H. Tumber (ed.) News: A Reader , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pages 297–307.

Erikson, K. T. (1962) ‘Notes on the Sociology of Deviance’, Social Problems , Volume 9, Number 4, pages 307–314.

Erikson, K. T. (1966) Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance , New York, USA: John Wiley and Sons.

Farnen, R. F. (1990) ‘Decoding the Mass Media and Terrorism Connection: Militant Extremism As Systematic and Symbiotic Processes’, in C. R. Sander (ed.) Marginal Conventions, Popular Culture, Mass Media and Social Deviance, Ohio, USA: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, pages 98–116.

Farr, K. A. (2001) ‘Women on Death Row: Media Representations of Female Evil’, in D. E. Eber and A. G. Neal (eds.) Memory and Representation: Constructed Truths and Competing Realities , Ohio, USA: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, pages 73–87.

Fiske, J. and Hartley, J. (1989) Reading Television , London: Routledge.

Fowler, R. (1994) Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press , London: Routledge.

France, A. (2007) Understanding Youth in Late Modernity , Berkshire: Open University Press.

Franzese, R. J. (2009) The Sociology of Deviance: Differences, Tradition, and Stigma , Illinois, USA: Charles C. Thomas Publisher.

Frost, C. (2000) Media Ethics and Self-Regulation , Essex: Longman.

Gado, M. (2008) Death Row Women: Murder, Justice, and the New York Press , California, USA: Greenwood Publishing Group.

Gallagher, M. (1982) ‘Negotiation of Control in Media Organizations’, in M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. Curran and J. Woollacott (eds.) Culture, Society and the Media , London: Routledge, pages 148–171.

Galtung, J. and Ruge, M. H. (1965) ‘The Structure of Foreign News: The Presentation of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus Crises in Four Norwegian Newspapers’, Journal of Peace Research , Volume 2, Number 1, pages 64–91.

Galtung, J. and Ruge, M. H. (1982) ‘Structuring and Selecting News’, in S. Cohen and J. Young (eds.) The Manufacture of News: Deviance, Social Problems and the Mass Media (First Edition), London: Constable, pages 52–64.

Gieber, W. (1999) ‘News Is What Newspapermen Make It’, in H. Tumber (ed.) News: A Reader , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pages 218–223.

Glover, D. (1984) The Sociology of the Mass Media, Cornwall: Causeway Press Limited.

Golding, P. and Elliott, P. (1999) ‘Making the News’ (Excerpt), in H. Tumber (ed.) News: A Reader , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pages 102–111.

Golding, P. and Murdock, G. (1991) ‘Culture, Communications, and Political Economy’, in J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds.) Mass Media and Society , London: Edward Arnold, pages 15–32.

Goode, E. and Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994) Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance , Oxford: Blackwell.

Goode, E. and Ben-Yehuda, N. (2009) Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (Second Edition), West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

Goodwin, A. (1990) ‘TV News: Striking the Right Balance?’, in A. Goodwin and G. Whannel (eds.) Understanding Television , London: Routledge, pages 42–59.

Gorton, K. (2009) Media Audiences: Television, Meaning and Emotion . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Green, D. A. (2008a) ‘Suitable Vehicles: Framing Blame and Justice When Children Kill a Child’, Crime Media Culture , Volume 4, Number 2, August, pages 197–220.

Green, D. A. (2008b) When Children Kill Children: Penal Populism and Political Culture , Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Greenslade, R. (2003) Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits from Propaganda , London: Macmillan.

Greer, C. (2005) ‘Crime and Media’, in C. Hale, K. Hayward, A. Wahidin and E. Wincup (eds.) Criminology , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pages 152–182.

Gross, L. (1992) ‘Out of the Mainstream: Sexual Minorities and the Mass Media’, in E. Seiter, H. Borchers, G. Kreutzner and E. M. Warth (eds.) Remote Control: Television, Audiences and Cultural Power , London: Routledge, pages 130–149.

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., and Roberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order, London: Macmillan.

Hall, S. (1986) ‘Media Power and Class Power’, in J. Curran, J. Ecclestone, G. Oakley and A. Richardson (eds.) Bending Reality: The State of the Media , London: Pluto Press Limited, pages 5–14.

Hall, S. (1997) ‘Discourse, Power and the Subject’, in S. Hall (ed.) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices , London: SAGE Publications Limited, pages 41–74.

Hall, S. and Scraton, P. (1981) ‘Law, Class and Control’, in M. Fitzgerald, G. McLennan and J. Pawson (eds.) Crime and Society , London: RKP, pages 460–498.

Hart, A. (1991) Understanding the Media: A Practical Guide , London: Routledge.

Haydon, D. and Scraton, P. (2000) ‘‘Condemn a Little More, Understand a Little Less’: The Political Context and Rights Implications of the Domestic and European Rulings in the Venables - Thompson Case’, Journal of Law and Society , Volume 27, Number 3, pages 416–448.

Herman, E. (1990) ‘Media in the U.S. Political Economy’, in J. Downing, A. Sreberny-Mohammadi and A. Mohammadi (eds.) Questioning the Media , London: SAGE Publications Limited, pages 75–87.

Herman, E. S. and Chomsky, N. (1988) The Political Economy of the Mass Media, New York, USA: Pantheon.

Horrie, C. (2003) Tabloid Nation: From the Birth of the Daily Mirror to the Death of the Tabloid , London: Carlton Publishing Group.

Jewkes, Y. (2004) Media and Crime , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Keeble, R. L. and Mair, J. eds. (2012) The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism on Trial , Suffolk: Arima Publishing.

Khabaz, D. V. (2006) Manufactured Schema: Thatcher, the Miners and the Culture Industry , Leicester: Matador.

Kidd-Hewitt, D. (1995) ‘Crime and the Media: A Criminological Perspective’, pages 9–24, in D. Kidd-Hewitt and R. Osborne (eds.) Crime and the Media: The Post-Modern Spectacle , London: Pluto Press.

Kitsuse, J. I. (1962) ‘Social Reaction to Deviant Behavior: Problems of Theory and Method’, Social Problems , Volume 9, Number 1, pages 247–256.

Knight, V. (2016) Remote Control Television in Prison , Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Krinsky, C. ed. (2008) Moral Panics over Contemporary Children and Youth , Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

Lacey, N. (1998) Image and Representation: Key Concepts in Media Studies , Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press Limited.

Lashmar, P. (2010) ‘The Journalist, Folk Devil’, Paper Presented at the Moral Panics in the Contemporary World , International conference, Brunel University London, 10–12 December.

Lemert, E. M. (1951) Social Pathology: A Systematic Approach to the Theory of Sociopathic Behavior , New York: McGraw-Hill.

Lemert, E. M. (1967) Human Deviance, Social Problems, and Social Control , Englewood Cliffs, USA: Prentice Hall.

Lilly, J., Cullen, F. T. and Ball, R. A. (2011) Criminological Theory: Context and Consequences , (Fifth Edition), London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Machin, D. and Niblock, S. (2006) News Production: Theory and Practice , London: Routledge.

Marsh, I. and Melville, G. (2009) Crime, Justice and the Media , Oxon: Routledge.

Masterman, L. (1990) Teaching the Media , London: Routledge.

Mawby, R. C. (2010) ‘Chibnall Revisited: Crime Reporters, the Police and “Law-and-Order News”’, British Journal of Criminology , Volume 50, Number 6, pages 1060–1076.

McKnight, D. (2012) Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation of Political Power , UK: Allen and Unwin.

McNair, B. (1994) News and Journalism in the UK , London: Routledge.

McNair, B. (2009) News and Journalism in the UK (Fifth Edition), London: Routledge.

McQuail, D. (1972) Sociology of Mass Communications , Harmondsworth: Penguin Publishers.

McQuail, D. (1991) ‘Mass Media in the Public Interest: Towards a Framework of Norms for Media Performance’, in J. Curran and M. Gurevitch (eds.) Mass Media and Society , London: Edward Arnold, pages 68–81.

McQuail, D. (2000) McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory (Fourth Edition), London: SAGE Publications Limited.

McRobbie, A. (1994) Postmodernism and Popular Culture , London: Routledge.

McRobbie, A. and Thornton, S. (1995) ‘Rethinking “Moral Panic” for Multi-mediated Social Worlds’, British Journal of Sociology , Volume 46, pages 559–574.

McRobbie, A. and Thornton, S. (2002) ‘Rethinking “Moral Panic” for Multi-mediated Social Worlds’, in J. Muncie, G. Hughes and E. McLaughlin (eds.) Youth Justice: Critical Readings , London: SAGE Publications Limited, pages 68–79.

Mercer, C. (1992) ‘Regular Imaginings: The Newspaper and the Nation’, in T. Bennett, P. Buckridge, D. Carter and C. Mercer (eds.) Celebrating the Nation: A Critical Study of Australia’s Bicentenary , Sydney, Australia: Allen and Unwin, pages 26–46.

Merton, R. K. (1968) Social Theory and Social Structure , New York, USA: The Free Press.

Moores, S. (1993) Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption , London: SAGE.

Morley, D. (1997) Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies, London: Routledge.

Muncie, J. (2006) ‘Labelling’, in E. McLaughlin and J. Muncie (eds.) The SAGE Dictionary of Criminology (Second Edition), London: SAGE Publications Limited, pages 229–231.

Muraskin, R. and Domash, S. F. (2007). Crime and the Media: Headlines vs. Reality , New Jersey, USA: Pearson Education.

Murdock, P. and Golding, P. (1977) ‘Capitalism, Communication and Class Relations’, in J. Curran, M. Gurevitch and J. Woolacott (eds.) Mass Communication and Society , London: Edward Arnold, pages 12–43.

Naylor, B. (2001). ‘Reporting Violence in the British Print Media: Gendered Stories’, The Howard Journal , Volume 40, Number 2, pages 180–194.

Newburn, T. (2007) Criminology , Devon: Willan Publishing.

Nichols, B. (2010) Introduction to Documentary (Second Edition), Indiana, USA: Indiana University Press.

North, L. (2009) The Gendered Newsroom: How Journalists Experience the Changing World of Media , Cresskill, USA: Hampton Press, Inc.

O’Connor, A. (1989) ‘The Problem of American Cultural Studies’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication , December, pages 405–413.

O’Sullivan, T., Dutton, B. and Rayner, P. (2003) Studying the Media (Third Edition), London: Arnold Publishers.

Osgerby, B. (2004) Youth Media , Oxon: Routledge.

Pearson, G. (1983) Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears , Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Perry, D. K. (2002) Theory and Research in Mass Communication Contexts and Consequences (Second Edition), New Jersey, USA: Laurence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Publisher.

Potter, W. J. (2010) Media Literacy , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Poynting, S., Noble, G., Tabar, P. and Collins, J. (2004) Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other , Sydney Institute of Criminology Series, Number 18, Sydney: The Sydney Institute of Criminology.

Prus, R. and Grills, S. (2003) The Deviant Mystique: Involvements, Realities and Regulation , Westport, USA: Praeger Publishers.

Radway, J. (1984) Reading the Romance , Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Regoli, R., Hewitt, J. and DeLisi, M. (2011) Delinquency in Society: The Essentials , London: Jones and Bartlett.

Reiner, R. (2007) ‘Media-made Criminality: The Representation of Crime in the Mass Media’, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Fourth Edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pages 302–340.

Robson, G. (2004) “No One Likes Us, We Don’t Care”: The Myth and Reality of Millwall Fandom , Oxford: Berg.

Schirato, T. and Yell, S. (2000) Communication and Culture: An Introduction , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Schissel, B. (1997) Blaming Children: Youth Crime, Moral Panics and the Politics of Hate , Nova Scotia, Canada: Fernwood Publishing.

Schissel, B. (2006) Still Blaming Children: Youth Conduct and the Politics of Child Hating , Nova Scotia, Canada: Fernwood Publishing.

Schissel, B. (2008) ‘Justice Undone: Public Panic and the Condemnation of Children and Youth’, in C. Krinsky (ed.) Moral Panics Over Contemporary Children and Youth , Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, pages 15–30.

Schlesinger, P. (1987) Putting ‘Reality’ Together: BBC News , London: Methuen and Company.

Schlesinger, P. and Tumber, H. (1994) Reporting Crime: The Media Politics of Criminal Justice , Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Schlesinger, P. and Murdock, G. (1991) ‘The Media Politics of Crime and Criminal Justice’, British Journal of Sociology , Volume 42, Number 3, pages 397–420.

Scraton, P. (2004) ‘Streets of Terror: Marginalisation, Criminalisation and Moral Renewal’, Social Justice , Volume 3, Numbers 1–2, pages 130–158.

Scraton, P. (2008) ‘The Criminalisation and Punishment of Children and Young People: Introduction’, in P. Scraton (ed.) Current Issues in Criminal Justice , Volume 20, Number 1, pages 1–13.

Shawcross, W. (1992) Rupert Murdoch: Ringmaster of the Information Circus , London: Random House.

Sheptycki, J. (2003) ‘Against Transnational Organized Crime’, in M. E. Beare (ed.) Critical Reflections on Transnational Organized Crime, Money Laundering and Corruption , Canada: University of Toronto Press, pages 120–144.

Shipman, M. (2002) ‘The Penalty Is Death’: US Newspaper Coverage of Women’s Executions , Missouri, USA: University of Missouri Press.

Silverstone, R. (1999a) Why Study the Media? London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Silverstone, R. (1999b) Television and Everyday Life . London: Routledge.

Simpson, B. (1997) ‘Youth Crime, the Media and Moral Panic’, in J. Bessant and R. Hil (eds.) Youth Crime and the Media: Media Representations of and Reactions to Young People in Relation to Law and Order , Hobart, Australia: Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies, pages 9–16.

Slattery, M. (2003) Key Ideas in Sociology , Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes Limited.

Springhall, J. (2008) ‘“The Monsters Next Door: What Made Them Do It?” Moral Panics Over the Causes of High School Multiple Shootings (Notably Columbine)’, in Krinsky, C. (ed.) Moral Panics Over Contemporary Children and Youth , Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, pages 47–70.

Surette, R. (1998) Media, Crime and Criminal Justice: Images and Realities (Second Edition), California, USA: Wadsworth.

Tait, R. (2012) ‘Never Waste a Good Crisis: The British Phone Hacking Scandal and Its Implications for Politics and the Press’, in H. A. Semetko and M. Scammell (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Political Communication , London: SAGE Publications Limited, pages 518–527.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Tannebaum, F. (1938) Crime and the Community , New York: Columbia University Press.

Taylor, I., Walton, P. and Young, J. (1973) The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance , London: Routledge and Kegan Paul plc.

Thompson, K. ed. (1997) Media and Cultural Regulation , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Thompson, K. (1998) Moral Panics: Key Ideas , London: Routledge.

Tierney, J. (2010) Criminology: Theory and Context (Third Edition), Harlow: Longman.

Tolson, A. (1996) Mediations: Text and Discourse in Media Studies , London: Arnold Publishers.

Unger, S. (2001) ‘Moral Panic Versus the Risk Society: The Implications of the Changing Sites of Social Anxiety’, British Journal of Society , Volume 52, June, pages 271–291.

van Dijk, T. A. (1991) Racism and the Press: Critical Studies in Racism and Migration , London: Routledge.

van Zoonen, L. (1996) Feminist Media Studies , London: SAGE Publications Limited.

Waddington, P. A. J. (1986) ‘Mugging as a Moral Panic: A Question of Proportion’, British Journal of Sociology , Volume 37, June, pages 245–259.

Waiton, S. (2008) The Politics of Antisocial Behaviour: Amoral Panics , London: Routledge.

Watson, T. and Hickman, M. (2012) Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain , London, UK: Penguin.

West, D. J. (1976) The Young Offender , Middlesex: Penguin Books Limited.

Whale, J. (1980) The Politics of the Media (Revised Edition), Glasgow: William Collins Sons and Co. Limited.

White, R. (2002) Understanding Youth Gangs , Canberra, Australia: Australian Institute of Criminology.

Wilkins, L. T. (1964) Social Deviance: Social Policy, Action, and Research , London: Tavistock.

Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams, P. and Dickinson, J. (1993) ‘Fear of Crime: Read All About It? The Relationship Between Newspaper Crime Reporting and Fear of Crime’, British Journal of Criminology , Volume 33, Number 1, pages 33–56.

Wright Mills, C. (1976) The Sociological Imagination , New York: Oxford University Press.

Wykes, M. (2001) News, Crime, and Culture , London: Pluto.

Young, J. (1971) The Drugtakers: The Social Meaning of Drug Use , London: McGibbon and Kee.

Young, J. (2008) ‘Moral Panics’, in L. Kontos and D. C. Brotherton (eds.) Encyclopedia of Gangs , California, USA: Greenwood Publishing Group, pages 174–176.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

University of Westminster History, Sociology and Criminology, London, UK

Faith Gordon

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Gordon, F. (2018). The Significance and Impact of the Media in Contemporary Society. In: Children, Young People and the Press in a Transitioning Society. Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60682-2_2

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60682-2_2

Published : 10 March 2018

Publisher Name : Palgrave Macmillan, London

Print ISBN : 978-1-137-60681-5

Online ISBN : 978-1-137-60682-2

eBook Packages : Law and Criminology Law and Criminology (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

This page uses frames, but your browser doesn't support them.

The Power of Representation: Women in Media and Entertainment

• March 11, 2024
• Comments Off on The Power of Representation: Women in Media and Entertainment

by Alisha | Mar 11, 2024 | BLOG , EDUCATION

In the realm of media and entertainment, the transformative impact of women’s representation reverberates through visual narratives, societal attitudes, and personal empowerment. So let’s look at the profound influence of women in film, television and other media forms.

Authentic portrayals of the lives of women in media contribute significantly to dismantling age-old stereotypes that have confined women to narrow roles. As strong, complex characters emerge on screen, they challenge preconceived notions and redefine the narratives around femininity. Pioneering figures like Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, and Ava DuVernay have played instrumental roles in breaking barriers, paving the way for greater diversity and inclusion in the industry.

Groundbreaking moments in social media, such as the rise of the #MeToo movement, showcase the power of media in addressing and rectifying systemic issues. The influence extends beyond our screens, shaping cultural perceptions and sparking important conversations about gender equality. One notable example of a viral moment that sparked a crucial discussion about women’s equality is the “Ask Her More” campaign during the red carpet events of major award shows. Initiated by the Representation Project, the campaign aimed to shift the focus of interviews with female celebrities from their appearance and fashion choices to their accomplishments, opinions, and work in the industry.

This movement gained momentum as various actresses and influential figures expressed their support, emphasizing that women should be asked about more than just their outfits. The viral spread of the campaign led to increased awareness and discussions about the subtle but pervasive gender biases embedded in media coverage, particularly during high-profile events.

Celebrities, both male and female, used their platforms to promote the hashtag #AskHerMore on social media, encouraging a broader and more meaningful dialogue around women’s achievements and the importance of recognizing their contributions beyond physical appearance. The campaign illustrated how a simple shift in questioning could have a powerful ripple effect, challenging societal norms and prompting a reevaluation of the way women are portrayed and discussed in the media.

However, challenges persist, with underrepresentation, unequal pay, and stereotyping still prevalent in the industry. Opportunities for improvement lie in fostering mentorship programs, promoting diverse storytelling, and advocating for equal opportunities. By addressing these challenges head-on, the media and entertainment industry can continue to be a force for positive change.

Ultimately, the representation of women in media is a two-way mirror, reflecting and influencing societal attitudes. Recognizing this, steps can be taken to ensure a more inclusive and empowering future. Industry stakeholders, content creators, and audiences all play pivotal roles in demanding and creating content that reflects the rich diversity of women’s experiences. By doing so, we contribute to a narrative that not only mirrors the reality of women’s lives but also empowers and inspires generations to come.

Quick Coping Strategies to Combat Stress

by Alisha | Apr 8, 2024 | BLOG , EDUCATION

We know that life can sometimes feel like a rollercoaster, leaving you feeling frazzled and overwhelmed through its ups and downs. But fear not – we’ve got some awesome stress-busting strategies to help you conquer those rough patches with confidence and...

Women’s Health Matters: Navigating Healthcare Disparities

by Alisha | Mar 18, 2024 | BLOG , EDUCATION

Opening the book on the intricate landscape of women’s health unveils a complex narrative shaped by disparities in access, quality of care, and the pervasive influence of socio-economic and cultural factors.The challenges that women encounter in their pursuit of...

Get the latest.

Want our most valuable insights delivered to your inbox?

LIKE THIS ARTICLE? DONATE!

Each of your donations go toward funding the programs at Martin De Porres Youth & Family Services uses to help youth in the community transition to adulthood, receive mentorship, and rehabilitate adjudicated youth.

Alisha is a writer, administrative coordinator, youtuber, and general creative hobgoblin! Alisha likes vintage dresses, novelty purses, statement earrings, a good book and can usually be found crouched over a gaming controller.

• Privacy Policy

site categories

• Joe Biden Stings Trump At White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “Donald Has Had A Few Tough Days Lately. You Might Call It Stormy Weather”

Breaking News

White House Correspondents’ Weekend Saw A Surreal Mix Of Celebrity And Power Players — And A Backdrop Of Protest And Disruption

By Ted Johnson

Ted Johnson

Political Editor

More Stories By Ted

• Colin Jost Roasts Donald Trump On Trial And Riffs On Joe Biden’s Age During WHCA Dinner Gig
• How To Watch The White House Correspondents’ Dinner With POTUS & Colin Jost On TV & Livestream

The chants and shouts of pro-Palestinian demonstrators disrupted the entry to the Washington Hilton for this year’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, but once inside, attendees were greeted with what has become the usual scene: Celebrities on the red carpet, a crush for the security line and glitterati packed into a cavernous ballroom.

Related Stories

Donald Trump Bemoans "Really Bad" WHCD, Biden & Colin Jost After All Mock Much Indicted Ex-POTUS

Colin Jost Roasts Donald Trump On Trial And Riffs On Joe Biden's Age During WHCA Dinner Gig

The protests outside — now ubiquitous at any public event, much less one that mixes politics, the media and Hollywood — were barely heard inside the Hilton, where security was tight. In fact, given the tumult going on inside the news business, the footprint of the dinner and the many surrounding parties and fetes reflected a bit of a desire to put on a happy face or just take a breather.

WHCA President Kelly O’Donnell told the crowd, “Here at home there are different challenges: Online threats, hostility vented at reporters on the job, and anxiety is about a paycheck.” That said, her message was still upbeat in that it made the case for journalists, and the White House press corps in particular, in a free society.

Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Jon Hamm, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Chris Pine, Lorne Michaels and Lara Trump were among those at the Comcast-NBCU party, where guests could pose for pictures on the Weekend Update set. One of the rooms in the residence was themed to the Olympic Games in Paris this summer, another opportunity for linear TV to get a ratings bump in a year when an election-year viewer spike has been a bit of a disappointment.

Their broadcast rivals also put on fetes before the dinner.

Networks even stepped with coverage of the event, with CNN featuring several hours of commentary and interviews, including attendee Rachel Brosnahan. They event went back to past hosts

“It’s surreal. There’s no way to describe it,” Darrell Hammond, a previous entertainer, told CNN.

The annual Garden Brunch, at the Beall-Washington House and co-hosted by Tammy Haddad, typically draws the the most eclectic crowd of boldfaced names throughout the weekend, this year including Anthony Fauci, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Kellyanne Conway, Sophia Bush and Oksana Markarova, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States.

The Deadline-Netflix breakfast earlier in the morning, featuring a Q&A discussion on The Diplomat with Keri Russell, Rufus Sewell, Debora Cahn and Irish Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason, drew guests including Fauci, Samantha Power, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Melissa Fitzgerald, CNN’s Sam Feist and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. The event was held at the Irish ambassador’s residence.

Two nights before, WME kicked off the weekend with an event with Puck, a conversation with Aaron Sorkin. Guests included former speaker John Boehner, former Rep. Tim Ryan, Jon Favreau, Sherrilyn Ifill and Kai Bird.

On Friday night, the MPA honored O’Donnell at its Eye Street headquarters, with a number of her colleagues in attendance including Andrea Mitchell, Peter Alexander, Kristen Welker and Hallie Jackson, as well as Fran Drescher and FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel.

CAA toasted Jost and its journalist clients at an event at La Grande Boucherie, with guests including Chris Pine, Johansson, Savannah Guthrie, Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon and Dana Walden.

UTA held its annual late-night bash at Fiola Mare, with guests including Ashley Biden and Naomi Biden, José Andrés, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Jen Psaki and Kara Swisher.

Earlier in the day, the focus was on AI as ther Washington AI Network hosted a lunch featuring a conversation with Haddad and Joelle Pineau, vice president of research at Meta. Guests included Lynda Carter, Chris Krebs and Symone Sanders Townsend, and the event included the demonstration of Spotty, a robot dog.

As upbeat as this glimpse into the future was, Jost closed his dinner gig with a quip about what is facing journalists in the brave new world.

“I would like to recognize all the print journalists in this room,” he said. “Your words speak truth to power. Your words bring light to the darkness. And most importantly, your words train the AI programs that will soon replace you.”

Must Read Stories

Joe biden & colin jost roast donald trump; red carpet + party photos.

CBS Axes Series After 3 Seasons; Lachey “Gutted”; Stars, Creators React

Zendaya’s ‘challengers’ looks to hit $15 million in its opening set, 86 top “career producers” launch collective to address fees, benefits & more.

Subscribe to Deadline Breaking News Alerts and keep your inbox happy.

Read More About:

No comments.

Deadline is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Deadline Hollywood, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

• Investigates
• Houston Life
• Newsletters

WEATHER ALERT

7 warnings, 2 watches and 5 advisories in effect for 21 regions in the area

Rise of esports in houston creates new career paths for digital media students.

Holly Galvan , Digital Content Producer

With over 1500 attendees, this weekend the Texas Showdown will attract enthusiasts and professionals alike to test their skills and claim victories in the world of fighting games. More than just a hobby, gaming has evolved into a legitimate career path, with institutions like the University of Houston offering digital media programs tailored to the diverse aspects of gaming, reflecting the industry’s exponential growth and influence.

Professor Tony Liao , overseeing the UH Digital Media program, noted the program’s constant monitoring of professional gaming’s changing dynamics.

Recommended Videos

“There has been a Coog eSports Team here on campus for several years and many of the Digital Media students are active members of that organization,” Liao said. “We have to keep an eye on any broader industry trend within Digital Media because that is what we have to prepare our students for moving forward, whether that is game design, 3-D modelling, character animation, and augmented/virtual reality.”

In the Digital Media program, Liao said they teach courses in content strategy and development, augmented reality, social media applications, and electives in simulation and gaming.

“These are not courses that would teach someone how to be a better gamer necessarily, they do that outside of class, but could tap into their interests using gaming as a context for development and because some of these competitive gamers run their own Twitch Streams and Youtube Channels, so it can be an important topic to teach them things like business/audience analytics,” he said. “Across UH we also offer Interactive game development and game art and animation in the computer science program, so there’s a number of courses students can take at different points of entry to the gaming industry.”

• More coverage from the University of Houston

In the world of professional gaming, where augmented and virtual reality technologies intersect, there are currently few opportunities for aspiring VR gamers because most games are played on computers and consoles.

“However, there are many popular VR games that are gaining traction and that people can play in multiplayer environments, so we are starting to see some of the same attention paid to those, such as popular twitch channels for people who play Beat Saber on impossible levels as for more traditional games,” Liao said. " I think as more of these AR/VR games become a little more accessible, immersive, and intuitive to play/compete in, we will continue to see more evolution toward these titles. Huge titles that a lot of competitive gamers play like Madden have made it to VR, for example.”

Can you share any success stories or examples of former students who have leveraged their education in digital media to pursue careers in gaming?

Liao shared some career paths former UH students have taken leveraging their education and hobbies into careers.

“We’ve had some Digital Media students and Coog eSports members continue on to work for platforms like LeagueSpot, competitive organizations like the NECC, and others on the content creation/game graphics side of things,” Liao shared. “A couple have also continued on to coaching other eSports teams at different places, so the rise of eSports as a whole is creating careers that didn’t exist a couple of decades ago.”

Liao pointed out that digital media can benefit gamers, but it’s similar to other industries where only a few have the talent for professional sports.

SEE ALSO: University of Houston tackling food insecurity through Cougar Cupboard

“However, the interest and weight that they bring creates other jobs, and that’s how Digital Media can help with that. For example, we send many Digital Media students to work at the Houston Rockets, UH Athletics Department, and other sports marketing departments. Them being a fan of the sport and playing it certainly helps them be better media producers, but their job is on the Digital Media/Content Strategy/Marketing side,” Liao said. “Organizing events around eSports and even being eSports announcers, those are important jobs that people can do now, which of course starts from being a gaming fan but comes about as students discover what they are good at and what they ultimately want to do.”

Liao shared that Digital Media is bigger than gaming and students want to be broader in what they end up learning.

“Professional gaming is just as competitive as any other field, but so is game development. The market is very top-heavy with most of the attention going to well-established games, and even older games, so it’s not something to undertake lightly,” Liao explained. " If you’re determined to go in that direction, there may be some more specialized/intensive programs you might want to go to. At UH we’ll teach you to be a broader media strategist and games is one context for that, to understand theories of attention, economics, marketing, etc.”

• Andretti Indoor Karting & Games in Katy is 88,000 square feet of entertainment

The UH Digital Media program is keeping a close eye on gaming as a potential area to grow in Liao said, because they keep getting students coming in and saying they want to do this.

“We’ve been thinking about partnerships with area groups and even building dedicated spaces for this on campus, so if anyone is interested we’re open to talking more about it,” he shared. “In my AR/VR lab we have a variety of new headsets, tracking devices, and games hooked up, as well as haptic vests and other accessories, so students have access to those things and we’re definitely experimenting in that space.”

Start here, Houston!

Copyright 2024 by KPRC Click2Houston - All rights reserved.

About the Author

Holly galvan.

Holly joined the KPRC 2 digital team in March 2024, leveraging her eight years of expertise in blogging and digital content to share her passion for Houston. Outside of work, she enjoys exploring the city's vibrant scenes, all while balancing her roles as a wife and mother to two toddlers.

Haiti transitional government takes power as gangs hold capital 'hostage'

• Medium Text

'COMPLEX INTERREGNUM'

Sign up here.

Reporting by Harold Isaac and Steven Aristil in Port-au-Prince and Sarah Morland, Kylie Madry, Valentine Hilaire, Sarah Kinosian and Stephen Eisenhammer in Mexico City; Editing by Rosalba O'Brien and Daniel Wallis

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. New Tab , opens new tab

World Chevron

Blinken speaks to Azeri, Armenian leaders about peace talks

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has spoken to the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan and reaffirmed Washington's support for a peace treaty between the South Caucasus neighbors, the State Department said on Sunday.