Media mock 2

Grade: B, 32 marks

WWW: Some excellent points; variety of topics/examples covered.

EBI: Focus on question: democracy! Marxism is a weakness.

LR- Re-write last 2/3 paragraphs on your blog- Marxism.

Marxists believe that the elite nations are in control and will always remain in control. In other terms, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Pareto's 80/20 law states that 80% of media institutions are owned by 20% of the population. The 20% is a minor nation that is in control and in fact is the elite. Marxists also believe that Pluralists are in an 'illusion' and society does not have any power.

Gultang and Ruge created News values which is a list of different topics e.g. frequency, unambiguity, surprise and immediacy. News institutions used these factors to determine the important of a news story and whether it was worth making the headlines. The more factors a news story met, the higher the importance of it was. The problem with this however, is that news institutions do not look at the actual importance of the story but in fact choose the ones which they think will be the most popular with audiences, and therefore gain the most coverage. Alain de Botton recently held a lecture on this topic and stated that news institutions would rather headline Taylor Swift's legs as oppose to a recent disaster that has taken place in a less developed country. He therefore questioned whether it is the news institutions themselves that society should blame for not having sympathy or helping these people, because news institutions do not less us and inform us of how we can help. Instead, they show a few images of the disaster then never bring it up again. This shows that it is in fact the elite news institutions in control as they create a certain image for the content in their news and determine how society feel and what society do about these issues.

Moving on, another way in which Marxists argue their power still remains is through paywalls. Paywalls are used by news institutions online, in which people have to pay or subscribe to access. For example, The Times newspaper have a paywall that users have to pay a subscription fee for in order to access through the internet. This shows that marxists are still in control as they force users to pay money if they want to access their news content and cannot do it any other way. However, pluralists would argue that in fact society has a choice as several other options are available and plenty are free to view e.g. BBC news and Mail online. A factor that can be questioned however is the quality and reliability of free news.