AUDIENCE - Hall (Reception Theory)

Evaluate the usefulness of one of the following theories in understanding how cultural and historical circumstances can affect audience interpretations of news stories:

Receptions theory argues that media producers encode ‘preferred meanings’ into texts, but these texts may be ‘read’ several different ways: the dominant-hegemonic reading, the negotiated reading and the oppositional reading. Hall acknowledges the power of producers to encode meaning, but also the way that cultural and historical experiences shape audience reactions and influence the way they decode texts.

The dominant-hegemonic reading occurs when audiences are ideologically aligned with the publication, and in agreement with its messaging. The Daily Mail’s messaging in response to funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, clearly understood the patriotic and royalist ideology of its readership in response to this historically and cultural momentous event. Their banner headline read “Our hearts are broken;” the use of the collective pronoun encoding a shared (preferred) reading of the event. The Guardian’s messaging was far more ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so, using a very traditional image of the Queen’s coronation photograph and the dates of her birth and death. The polysemic nature of the image almost denied a preferred reading, forcing or arguable allowing readers to adopt their own position with regards to the event. Here then Hall allows us to see how one publication can encode a specific reading of a significant historic event, safe in the knowledge that its readers are ideologically aligned with its messaging, while another can attempt neutrality because it values its reputation for journalistic integrity.

A potential flaw in the usefulness of applying Hall’s theory is that it fails to acknowledge that news audiences tend to select brands that reflect their own political or ideological bias and are therefore more likely to accept the preferred meaning and adopt a dominant position. Take the reaction to the Brexit vote and the subsequent legal wrangling that took place in its aftermath. On 4^th of November 2016, The Daily Mail front cover branded the judges involved “Enemies of the People.” It is difficult to believe that ALL British readers would accept this as a dominant reading, and we know that it received over 1000 complains to IPSO indicating that many formed an oppositional reading. However, readers of the Daily Mail have actively selected the brand precisely because of this type of messaging so this incendiary headline was accepted and perhaps even welcomed by many as a reinforcement of their cultural values around the Brexit vote.

A particular strength of Hall’s theory is its acknowledgment of the influence of cultural and historical forces on the way that audiences read texts. In the case of both the Queen’s funeral and the reaction to Brexit, we might look at the way that historical experience shapes the audience response. For example, the encoded messaging around the Queen’s funeral was almost identical across all publications, perhaps suggesting something about the universality of the Queen’s cultural and historical impact on the nation. Brexit on the other hand was the very definition of a divisive issue, with populations divided in their response based on age, social class, ethnicity, location etc. Hall may not give us insight into the deeper sociological issues that emerge from cultural and historical circumstances, but he does provide us an excellent place to begin.