Timed Essay Question 5

 

Explain how political contexts influence individual producers within the newspaper industry.  Refer to The Guardian and the Daily Mail to support your answer.

In this essay I will explain how political contexts influence individual producers within the newspaper industry. In my answer I will refer to the Guardian and Daily Mail. The right-wing politics in the UK support a smaller state, greater roles for the free market and business, and lower Government spending. Whereas the left-wing politics in the UK believes the Government should play an acting role in our society, regulate the economy and provide welfare, left wing tends to be more liberal and forward thinking/moving.

Political contexts is where owners of newspapers will promote views they believe in through their writing. Newspaper companies have power without responsibility, this means they have the power to promote a particular ideology or political bias through their phrasing/reporting and can push that onto the audience without responsibility. The media companies are predominantly owned by white middle upper-class males and the majority in the UK will have a traditional, conservative ideology.

Most major newspapers have a right wing biased and will swing in favour of the conservatives and support the dominant ideology, The Daily Mail is a good example of this. The Daily Mail is traditionally a right winged newspaper. One front cover of theirs had a headline about tactical voting to keep the labour party out of government. The headline read “with one in four still undecided, make sure you use our tactical voting guide to keep Red Ed out”, Red Ed refers to Ed Miliband and in this context the word red is used to mock or belittle and has implications of communism. The Daily Mail often exaggerates or uses negative stereotypes in their headlines so that the audience who have a preferred reading of this text will react negatively to the situation at hand, for example an instance where asylum seekers and migrants were coming to the UK the Daily Mail headlined it as “4000 foreign murderers and rapists we can’t throw out”. This pushes the conservative and traditional view of them and us, if they’re not British, they are bad. These right winged newspapers are hostile to certain social groups or individuals and will promote negative stereotypes and stories of these social groups or individuals. The reader of this paper will share this ideology and this view of the world. Theorist Gerbner would argue that this is due to the audience having repeated exposure of this ideology over a long period of time causing them to cultivate these views as their own.

However, in our democratic society we have some left-wing voices who will promote the opposite to these other newspapers. Left winged newspapers often promote a more open and humanitarian view to news stories. They support and promote the social groups that the right-wing newspapers write negatively about, they challenge the right winged beliefs. Right winged papers often reference elite persons and consonance (stereotypes) with headlines that have a mocking tone/passive aggressiveness or uses violent choice of words such as ‘forced’, whereas left wing papers tend to have more conscious or impartial headlines. The Guardian is a good example of a left winged newspaper. When referring to a bombing of an eastern country the Guardian used the headline “The world stands disgraced” with an image of a child, which is powerful as children are often a symbol of innocence and vulnerability and using a picture of a crying child covered in blood is going to cause a high emotional response as many will be upset with this image. This image is a tool to challenge the right wing as it is related to the middle east conflict which most of the right wing believe in, whereas the left wing tends to be against conflict and war. The Guardian is more concerned with the impact to human life, whereas a right winged newspaper would more than likely be concerned with the impact this would have on the economy.

In conclusion, the companies who run the newspapers have the power to share and promote their political beliefs without being held responsible. The texts are written and consumed by those who agree with these opinions and political beliefs.