The Times
- Owned by News UK, a subsidiary of News International, an enormous media conglomerate which also also publishes
- Long established, a British institution est. 1785
- Sister paper: The Sunday Times
- Circulation 2019: 417,298
- Compact format, easier to read!
- Vertically integrated industry
- Currently £1.80
- Daily newspaper
- Right wing
- Middle class, older audience
The Daily Mirror
- Tabloid newspaper
- Working class audience
- Owned by Reach PLC (previously Trinity Mirror)
- Founded in 1903
- Circulation 587,803 (2017)
- Sister paper Sunday Mirror
- Reach also publishes a range of local newspapers - diversification
- "The intelligent tabloid. #madeuthink"
- Cover price 80p
Underline
Explain how ownership shapes media products. Refer to The Daily Mirror [and The Times] to support your points
Plan
News values
Story placement
Ideology
The intelligent tabloid...
Political bias
Working class vs middle class mass audiences
The Times
- Page three discusses the cricket world cup, targeting a middle class older audience. Focuses on the England team, demonstrating an ethnocentric bias
- Highly politically motivated: front cover focuses on Brexit, an ongoing British political issue demonstrates the importance of politics to the target audience.
- Lexis is sophisticated and suggests a middle class audience
- Page two story focuses on nationalisation of privately owned jail, again assuming a middle class audience, who care about crime
- Stereotypical representations of non-british people, for example dancing indian woman in sari on page 3
- Double page splash image acoss 6 and 7 demonstrate Teresa May in a positive light, smiling and looking in control of a range of other politicians
- advantages: ensure sales from a conservative audience, cultivating a conservative ideology, meaning audiences are more likely to vote for the conservative government. This is advantageous for News International, as conservative governments tend to favour less taxation, less restrictions on trade, and similar 'pro-business policies'
Mirror
- Use of emotive language: brexit represented as a 'crisis'
- Emotive, informal lexis suggests an working class audience
- Big emphasis on puzzles, gossip and celebrity news
- Very large sport section
- Colloquial headlines feature political satire on brexit and political issues
- Bias through selection
- Mcdonalds advert reinforces working class target audience
- Level of reading comprehension: assumption that the audience have a low level of reading comprehension
- Minecraft article: reinforces a simplistic ideological perspective of the effects model: that videogames influence their audiences
- Alisha's glittering return: soft news, the use of a pun, informal lexis and informal mode of address