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The Mirror: Theory - Coggle Diagram
The Mirror: Theory
Power and Media Industries: Curran and Seaton
Reach plc has maintained their position in the UK market despite falling sales of the Mirror and other mainstream titles by diversifying into regional news
This diverse pattern of ownership has allowed them to create the conditions for more varied and adventurous media products
Regulation: Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt
Reach plc is facing increasing pressure alongside the rest of the UK press industry to adhere to strict rules and regulations on industry practice
This has arisen after the phone hacking scandal and subsequent Leveson enquiry into the industry
There is an underlying issue of protecting citizens from harmful material while ensuring choice and press freedom
Cultural Industries: David Hesmondhalgh
Reach plc has become a horizontally integrated company with a wide range of titles in order to maximise audiences and minimise risks
Rather than seeing digital media as a threat, the company has embraced its digital expansion and now offers digital marketing as well as digital classifieds to generate additional income
Cultivation Theory: Gerbener
Audience exposure to repeated patterns of representation (of May, of Brexit, or of modern politics) by newspapers may shape and influence their views and opinions
Gerbner went on to say that this is not like ‘hypodermic model’ but rather depends on what the audience already believes
The messages (e.g. politicians are ineffectual) need to resonate with an established belief (e.g. Brexit is a chaotic mess) in the audience (e.g. working class, left-wing men and women)
Reception Theory: Stuart Hall
There is an ambiguous representation of women on the front page
Some may decode the stories as portraying women as defeated and vulnerable, others may negotiate a meaning as these women being defiant in the face of adversity
End of Audience: Clay Shirky
The concept of audience members as passive consumers is no longer tenable in the age of the internet with the rise of the prosumer who can create their own content such as submitting stories and being part of forums
Newspapers like The Guardian have embraced this, taking popular ‘below-the-line’ (i.e. non-professional) commentators and offering them ‘above-the-line’ columns
The Mirror does offer some opportunities for ‘citizen journalism’ (e.g. the “What’s Your Story?” section of their website) the majority of content is still written by journalists
Structuralism: Levi Strauss
There is a binary opposition between the MPs and “the Nation” which feeds into the ‘us vs them’ ideology of ‘populism’
There is also an opposition between the two political pundits on the double page piece
The language in the headlines (plus the odds from ‘Honest Jason’) also explains some quite complex political debates in using the allegory of a horse race - this dramatises the details (and also links to the paper’s main advertisers!)
By reducing Theresa May to the smallest image on the page, the Mirror is sending a clear message about the way she is seen by her fellow MPs and by the newspaper’s target audience
The headline focuses on her defeat and implies the whole situation is her fault - there is very little description of the MPs who have challenged her
This personalises a complex story by making it about the experiences of one individual rather than a complicated political progress involving hundreds of people. This is a technique used by news media to help audiences build emotional engagement about ‘dry’ political or economic stories
The small amount of space given to the whole story - along with the “...Loses Key Vote Again’ headline - suggests that, these political conflicts have become almost commonplace, and this is all part of the ongoing Brexit ‘chaos’
Both this and the Eastenders story could suggest women are weak and vulnerable: May ‘surrenders’, ‘Hayley’ has been physically assaulted
Yet the images - May in midargument, ‘Hayley’ looking defiant - give the impression of inner strength despite the attacks they have experienced
The Mirror has an even gender split in their audience, which may explain this more complex portrayal of women
The portrayal of May as embattled continues with a blow by blow account of the debate
The detail of her losing her voice again represents her as both weak, but also relentless in her aims
The image of her dominates the page, whilst the male politicians are in far smaller photo-boxes
There is a sense that even though she is failing, she is going down fighting
Though this seems at odds with the Mirror’s political bias, it does fit with the large female market who may admire May’s tenacity even if they don’t like her politics
Feminist Theory: Van Zoonen
Van Zoonen suggested that women are often portrayed as sexualised, weak or vulnerable in the media
Though the two women featured on the Mirror’s cover are from stories that seem to portray them as vulnerable, the images used connote strength and defiance in the face of adversity; also neither are sexualised (almost a genre convention in many other UK tabloids!)