Back to basics: the four types of media question
Industry - how a media product makes money
Representation - how a group is re-presented by the producer to demonstrate their ideology
Audience - how the audience uses or interacts with a media product
Media language - how shot types, camera angles, MES etc make meaning for the audience
Representation
Which group is being represented in this article?
Working class people, specifically lower working class, the struggling working class.
Who is the target audience for this article?
The target audience for the Daily Mirror is working class people, and it targets a left wing audience through it's political bias.
What ideological perspective about this group is being constructed for the target audience? How?
That this family are unlikable, lazy, and bad with money. Therefore, it's their fault that they're poor. This ideological perspective is reinforced through the selection of images and the anchorage of MES
- Setting of a car boot sale is a sterotypically a working class environment, which has connotations of poverty and finacnial desperation
- The mother is wearing a handbag, which may suggest that far from being actually poor, she is spending money on hereself. This reinforces the narrative of the article.
- Additionally, she is wearing the bag round the front, which functions as a proairetic code, suggesting that she is showing off her wealth
- However, a polysemic interpretation is that the mother is vulnerable, and that she is taking care and control of her money, looking after it by keeping it in plain sight
- The man is wearing an Adidas tracksuit, which is a potentially expesive tracksuit. Once more the inclusion of this image constructs a representation of a family that have made poor finacial descisions
- The MES of the objects of the table further connote wealth. This includes a sterero, a keyboard, football shoes, and protien powder. However, the fact thayt they are selling these things constructs a narrative where the family have realised that these are not necesities, and must do things to make ends meet
- The family are clean, and are wearing nice clothes
- The Addidas trancksuit suggests stereotypical connotations of a working class lifestyle, involving council houses, being bad with money, and even crime
- Sterotypes are a widely held belief about a certain group of people, and they must be reinforced by being repeated multiple times in multiple situatuins
- The MES of the man's balding head and severe features further reinforces his status as a stereoypical working class person
- The MES of the cigarette in the woman's hand yet again further reinforces a stereotype that the working class are uncultured and bad with moeny
- The families car is small, modest and non-descript, which could be connotative of poverty
This entire article takes a highly voyeuristic mode of address which positions the audience in a judgemental position.
Regulatory issues
- IPSO are the regulatory organisation for UK newspapers
- The Daily Mirror is owned by Reach PLC, a horizontally integrated distributor of hundreds of UK newspapers
- However, despite being factually incorrect to a level that legally means that the newspaper has to apologise for it, the story is still being hosted, for financial reasons.
Why does the Daily Mirror encourage hatred of working class people?
- If the working class hate other working class people, does it make them feel better about themselves? Yes potentially! But it also means that working class people are more likely to blame other working class people for their issues. However, it is the ruling class, i.e. the government, the rich and those in power who actually cause widespread societal issues. If working class people are blaming the working class, then they are not blaming the people in power for their issues.
Does the Daily Mirror force the working class to fight against each other rather than facing their own issues? Does it reinforce hegemony?
- Marxist ideology - there are two types of people: the working class, and the ruling class. Everything in our society is based on the domination of the working class by the ruling class.
- George Gerbner: cultivation theory
- Intertextuality: where one media product makes reference to another media product