Galtung and Ruge - News Values

Galtung and Ruge talk about different terms for news values and they can be applied to news articles. These terms are:

Clay Shirky - End of Audience

Clay Shirky says that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible.

His work also focuses on the rising usefulness of networks. Using technologies such as peer-to-peer sharing, wireless, software and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere.

Shirky's Quotes:

“We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12share things with each other online.”

“The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with.More media always means more arguing.”

Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser is a french philosopher who developed Marxist theories. He discusses ideology in his work, looking at the way in which people lose their individuality and become subjects based on ideological views. This means that ideologies are circulated by agencies (the media) and help to construct peoples' identities. But because this is so subtle and covert, members of society do not realise this is happening. Althusser believes we are controlled by the ruling classes. Their ideas of what's right or wrong, what we should do and what we should not. inevitably brainwashing us until we believe that these ideologies are the way of life. This helps explain why there are pre-defined ideas about gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality. Ideological agencies are believed to be several establishments in society that reinforce stereotypes and discrimination. These include religion, education, the family, the mass media and popular culture. Althusser goes on to say about how ideology interpolates us or hails us as subjects. and that we are no longer individuals but subjects that are categorised. And that we begin to join groups to be with others who live by certain sets of rules. For example students live by a certain set of rules which are not necessarily correct but students act and behave in the way you believe is required.

George Gerbener

George Gerbener who was a professor of communication and founder of cultivation theory was born in Budapest lived in Hungary and emigrated to the United States in late 1939 believed in the same thing as Elizabeth Newton and made additional evidence to support the point and made a theory called Cultivation theory which suggest that exposure to television, over time, subtly 'cultivates' 'Viewers' perceptions of reality. Gerbener and Gross Assert."Television is a medium of the socialisation of most people into standardised roles and behaviours. Its function is in a word, enculturation".


Mean world syndrome is a term coined by George Gerbner to describe a phenomenon whereby the violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. Mean world syndrome one of the main conclusions of cultivation theory.


His theory also stated how being told something over and over again (Drip-Drip theory) and being told narrow truths for long periods of time can lead to behaviour in that manner such as being scared of teenagers after reading bad aggressive articles about teenagers or being violent after having too much exposure to violent video games this acts as a sort of sponge of information that slowly soaks up information and makes a certain belief come to light.

Elizabeth Newson

Elizabeth Newton the developmental psychologist who died aged 84 challenged the orthodoxy of her profession by observing children at play and what would affect or change their minds. She as a result of James Bulger's murder case (Slide case is shown below) investigated violent TV on young people. She suggested that such exposure of violent killings etc... create a 'drip-drip' effect amongst young people. She also talks about how such violence is becoming desensitised so children see such behaviour as 'normal' and they are socialised into accepting the deviant behaviour. Newson's finding had a major influence over censorship and resulted in the act of 1985 video recordings (labelling) which resulted in all videos and DVD's being given a British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) age certificates.

Albert Bandura

Albert Bandura and the hypodermic syringe model- Albert Bandura is a psychologist who has made many theories about different subjects such as the social cognitive theory, therapy and personality psychology. He also talks about the hypodermic syringe model which suggests that the audience accepts the message 'injected' into them by the mass media. This model believes that there is a direct correlation between violent behaviour shown on TV, computer games, etc... and anti-social and criminal behaviour in real life.

An experiment Bandura carried out and recorded young woman beating up a bobo doll by punching the clown, kicking it, sitting on it, and hitting it with a little hammer and so on. She also shouted various aggressive phrases to the doll. After he recorded the session he showed it to groups of small children and then let sit in the room with the doll and all the toys used to attack the doll by the young woman. Bandura watched as the kids beat the daylights out of the Bobo doll, they punched, kicked, shouted, sat on the doll and hit the doll with little hammers. This shows that the children imitated the young lady in the film and shows that the children changed their behaviour in response to what they had seen on the TV. Bandura did this with a real clown and also did the same experiment with the doll and the clown but by being nice and the kids still imitated the action.

The experiment allowed Bandura to conclude that violent media content could lead to imitation or copycat violence. Also McCabe and Martin also looked at this experiment and concluded that this was only because the violence was shown as being heroic. Which brings across the 'disinhibition effect'.

Stuart Hall

Stuart hall is a cultural theorist and believes in his theory that all media can be taken in three different ways.

• Dominant Reading- Reader fully accepts the preferred reading (audience will read the text the way the author intended them to) so that he code seems natural and transparent.

• Negotiated Reading- The reader partly believes the code and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes modifies it in a way which reflects their own position, experiences and interests.

• Oppositional Reading- The readers social position places them in an oppositional relation to the dominant code. They reject the reading.

Hall was concerned with media power, including how it propagates particular social values, ideologies (in other words framing public debate surrounding certain issues; e.g. the role of women in society, asylum and immigration, the welfare system, the monarchy etc...)

He believes that the mass media create and define issues of public concern and interest through audience positioning.

Polysemy is the capacity for a text to have multiple meanings. It is to do with how individuals interpret and decode readings in different contexts and cultures.

Steve Neale

Steve Neale is a media theorist and a British analytic philosopher and specialised in the philosophy of language. Steve Neale believes in his theory that genre is made up of certain repetition and difference made in such a way that people know what genre something is by watching it but not get bored for it being the same as another film like it. The repetition allows people to categorise the type of media into a group which it relates to such as horror or action which allows people to watch or read the media from other media entries that relate to the title. (Picture is of Steve Neale taken on March 11th 2007)