2020 PAST PAPER

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

EITHER • Hall’s Reception theory      OR      • Bandura’s Media Effects theory. 

TAKEN FROM THE MARK SCHEME

Hall: 

• Hall’s ‘encoding-decoding’ model argues that media producers encode ‘preferred meanings’ into texts, but these texts may be ‘read’ by their audiences in several different ways. This clearly links to interpretation since most news stories will be presented from a biased perspective linked to the organisation’s historical position with relation to a story and its cultural basis.

 • Knowing what the dominant-hegemonic position is (a ‘preferred reading’) can obviously explain why stories are written in the way that they are; again, the historical and cultural circumstances surrounding the stories will be influential here. 

• Similarly, an awareness that some audiences will take on a negotiated position or an oppositional reading linked to the broader awareness of a story’s cultural background and historical context can explain how and why different audiences might interpret the same story differently, or indeed why a story might have a particular impact. 

• Hall draws attention to the range of different possible audience readings of a newspaper’s messages and values, while acknowledging the role of power in creating dominance within newspaper messages and values – there is a clear connection to both cultural and historical circumstances here (possible that candidates could reference the Windrush stories here). 

• Candidates may identify a flaw in the usefulness of applying Hall’s theory to news stories by acknowledging that it assumes audiences are always active and engage with a text, but the relationship between print news, audience and the concept of ‘truth’ in the news is complicated. 

• Candidates may identify that Hall’s theory 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.

• Candidates may suggest that Hall’s theory is useful to show how different audiences align themselves to different newspapers depending on their own cultural and historical experiences. 

Bandura: 

• Bandura’s argument that the media can influence people directly – human values, judgement and conduct being altered directly by media modelling – could be used to discuss audience interpretation since this may well be shaped by other aspects of cultural influence or historical imperative derived from the media. Bandura’s evidence best supports direct influence rather than the alternative models of media effects: two-step flow, agenda-setting, no effects, or the media reflecting existing attitudes and behaviour. Candidates might argue that this explains the continuing influence of news stories on public attitudes. 

• Bandura’s ideas can be extrapolated to consider that the media may influence directly or by social networks, so people can be influenced by media messages without being exposed to them. Candidates might argue that the current circumstances allow audiences to be influenced by events which they have had no direct experience of (an old example being Jonathan Ross/ Andrew Sachs, which only gained traction once it was featured in The Telegraph). 

• Bandura’s theory might also be explored in the context of messages that are consistent across newspapers, e.g. about the wrongness of terrorism – it could be argued that certain concepts become locked into the public mindset. 

• Bandura draws attention to the need to investigate the direct effects on individuals who consume newspapers, and candidates might consider that there is an argument to apply his ideas to explain why certain themes gain traction with little evidence (e.g. some of the stories about Brexit or Jeremy Corbyn in the right-wing press). 

• Bandura’s ideas could be used to support the arguments of those who think the internet should be regulated to avoid public harm - remove fake news and terrorist propaganda – linked to cultural fears and historical imperatives. 

• Arguments against the effectiveness of Bandura might include that his ideas do not really take into account the interactive nature of modern news; online newspaper messages may often be challenged by audiences in comments, tweets or other posts, which would reduce the effect of the original messages and undermine the theory whilst prioritising the effects of the media on the audience may mean that the effects of the audience on the media are underestimated; it may be that cultural and historical factors are not particularly important. 

• Another significant argument against Bandura is that the theory was originally developed to explain the imitative effects of media that are powerful in positioning audiences, such as television – newspapers representations of aggression or violence may be less likely to produce imitative behaviour. Furthermore, newspaper messages are rarely homogenous and are likely to be contradicted by messages from politically and socially opposing newspapers (e.g. The Guardian and Mail), especially in areas of social or political conflict (e.g. Brexit).