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New media, ownership and control, representations of gender, ethnicity and age, audience effects and moral panics from Cohen to Jenkins, with globalisation debates and 30-mark essay technique for AQA 7192 and OCR H580.
🎯 Learning Objectives
- Explain the growth of new media, Jenkins' convergence and participatory culture, and the digital divide (AQA 4.7.1)
- Set out Marxist and hegemonic accounts of ownership and control (Murdock & Golding, Miliband, Gramsci, Herman & Chomsky) against pluralism
- Analyse representations of gender, ethnicity and age with named concepts (symbolic annihilation, male gaze, tokenism)
- Compare audience-effect models: hypodermic syringe, two-step flow, uses and gratifications, encoding/decoding
- Explain moral panics (Cohen 1972), deviancy amplification and their links to labelling theory
- Assess globalisation debates - cultural imperialism against hybridisation - and deploy reached judgements (AO1/AO2/AO3)
📋 Key Definitions and Core Concepts
New media: Digital, interactive, on-demand media enabled by Web 2.0 - user-generated content, convergence and portability - distinct from traditional one-to-many broadcast media.
Digital divide: Unequal access to and use of digital technology by age, class, income, geography and disability, creating a 'digital underclass' excluded from online services, information and opportunity.
Convergence: Jenkins: the merging of technologies, industries and audiences - one device (the smartphone) delivers print, broadcast and interactive content, blurring producer and consumer roles.
Hegemony: Gramsci: ruling-class domination through consent - media win voluntary acceptance of the dominant worldview - which must be continually renewed and can be contested (counter-hegemony).
Propaganda model: Herman & Chomsky (1988): five filters (ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, anti-communism/ideology) systematically skew news content towards elite interests without overt conspiracy.
Symbolic annihilation: Tuchman (1978): women are either absent, trivialised or condemned in media representation, so their social contribution is symbolically erased.
Male gaze: Mulvey (1975): mainstream film and imagery position women as passive objects of a heterosexual male gaze, constructing femininity for visual consumption.
Hypodermic syringe model: An early effects theory (Frankfurt School heritage): media 'inject' direct, powerful, uniform messages into passive audiences, producing immediate uniform responses.
Moral panic: Cohen (1972): an exaggerated, distorted media-driven overreaction to a group ('folk devils') seen as a threat to societal values; produces deviancy amplification spirals.
Uses and gratifications: Blumler & McQuail (1968); Katz et al (1974): an active-audience theory - audiences use media to gratify needs (surveillance, identity, relationships, diversion) rather than being used by media.
📌 Key Points
New media: Jenkins (convergence, participatory culture, 'fans as producers'); digital divide by age, class, geography ('digital underclass'). Critique: Cornford & Robbins - 'new' media is actually older media repackaged; commercial logics persist.
Ownership FOR control: Murdock & Golding - concentration and the profit motive skew content; Miliband - media transmit ruling-class ideology; Herman & Chomsky's five filters; Gramsci's hegemony. AGAINST: pluralism - competition, regulation (Ofcom), and Web 2.0 plurality disperse control.
Representations: gender - symbolic annihilation (Tuchman 1978), male gaze (Mulvey 1975), feminised beauty norms; ethnicity - negative stereotypes, tokenism, exclusion (Hall's 'inferential racism'; Gilroy on the 'war on terror'); age - children as innocent/victims, the elderly as frail or invisible (Carrigan & Szmigin).
Audience effects: hypodermic syringe (passive audiences) -> two-step flow (Katz & Lazarsfeld 1955, opinion leaders) -> uses and gratifications (active audiences; Blumler & McQuail) -> encoding/decoding (Hall 1973, negotiated and oppositional readings). Evidence: Bandura (1963) supports limited direct effects; Livingston/Gauntlett argue effects research understates audience activity.
Moral panics: Cohen (1972) mods and rockers - exaggeration, prediction, symbolisation; folk devils; deviancy amplification; linked to labelling (Becker 1963); 'amplification of deviance' now extends to social media.
Globalisation: cultural imperialism (US dominance; Sklair's culture-ideology of consumerism) vs hybridisation and the 'global village' (McLuhan); Ritzer's McDonaldisation; new media accelerate global flows and citizen journalism.
New media, convergence and the digital divide
AQA 4.7, OCR H580 (Component 03) and Eduqas AC6.1 expect you to define new media as digital, interactive, on-demand media - user-generated content, convergence, portability, global reach. Jenkins (2006) frames this as convergence: technologies, industries and audiences merge, so the smartphone delivers print, broadcast and interactive content at once, and 'fans become producers' - a participatory culture where audiences co-create what they consume (Wikipedia, fan fiction, YouTube). Digital divide: access and use remain stratified by age (young 'digital natives' against excluded older users), class, income, rurality and disability, producing a digital underclass locked out of online services and opportunity.
AO3: the celebratory account has limits. Cornford & Robbins argue 'new' media is largely old media repackaged - the same conglomerates, advertising and commercial logics in new wrappers; interactive platforms still concentrate ownership (a handful of tech giants) and regulation struggles to keep pace. The strongest answers treat new media as an intensification of existing patterns of control, not a rupture - and note the divide itself shows structural inequality persisting into the digital age.
Deepening new media: its defining features are digitalisation (content reduced to data, so boundaries between media collapse), interactivity (users respond, comment and co-create), decentralisation (no single gatekeeper) and portability. Optimists (Jenkins) stress democratisation - audiences become participants; pessimists note the same platforms concentrate attention and profit. Prensky's 'digital natives' label the generational divide, but Ofcom data show it is classed as well as aged: income, skills and confidence produce the 'digital underclass', and the divide carries life chances (job applications, services, education). AO3: treating the divide as purely generational mistakes a structural inequality for a cohort effect - the strongest answers link it back to class and age stratification.
Ownership and control: Marxism, hegemony and pluralism
Murdock & Golding (1977) give the Marxist baseline: media are owned by a shrinking set of conglomerates whose profit motive and cross-ownership skew content towards elite interests; Miliband (1969) adds that media transmit ruling-class ideology, normalising inequality. Gramsci's hegemony refines this: domination works through consent - media renew the dominant worldview daily until it appears common sense - and can be contested by counter-hegemonic voices. Herman & Chomsky (1988) operationalise the claim with the propaganda model: five filters - ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak and ideology - systematically produce elite-friendly news without any conspiracy; studies of Iraq War coverage (Kovach-style sourcing biases) are the standard application.
The pluralist counter-case
Pluralists argue ownership does not equal control: audiences are sovereign - content must attract them or outlets die; competition, Ofcom regulation, professional values (impartiality norms) and editorial autonomy check owners; and the internet multiplies voices so no one worldview can dominate. Vertical integration may even raise output diversity. AO3: empirical judgement - concentration statistics (a few conglomerates dominate UK national press) and Herman & Chomsky's filters support control; the two-way web and citizen journalism support plurality. The strongest answers argue media give bounded choice: real plurality inside a commercial framework.
AO3: the control thesis also underplays audience agency - even if content is skewed, decoding is active (Hall 1973), so ideology must still be accepted, negotiated or resisted by viewers.
Deepening ownership: in the UK national press a handful of proprietors dominate circulation, and vertical integration (one company owning TV, print, film and platforms) multiplies their reach; Curran & Seaton document how ownership concentration narrowed the diversity of the press over the twentieth century. Regulation is the pluralist counterweight: Ofcom enforces impartiality rules for broadcasters, and press self-regulation (IPSO) - though critics note its weakness, a finding central to the Leveson Inquiry (2011-12). AO3: weigh the two empirically: concentration statistics and Herman & Chomsky's filters support control; competitive diversity, editorial autonomy and the two-way web support plurality. Jenkins' participatory culture cuts both ways - audiences produce content, but on platforms owned by a very few companies, so 'plurality of voices' sits on a 'monopoly of pipes'.
Representations of gender, ethnicity and age
Gender: feminist research shows women are systematically mis-represented. Tuchman (1978) named this symbolic annihilation - women are absent, trivialised (confined to domestic and beauty roles) or condemned (portrayed as 'problem mothers'); Mulvey (1975) added the male gaze: mainstream imagery constructs women as passive objects of heterosexual male looking. Evidence: body-ideal imagery, women's under-representation as news experts and presenters of 'hard' news. Ethnicity: minorities are disproportionately stereotyped as criminal, exotic or dependent, or simply tokenised; Hall et al (1978) showed mugging coverage racialised black youth ('inferential racism' in Hall's later term), and Gilroy extends this to the 'war on terror' framing of Muslim identities. Age: children are represented as innocent and vulnerable (justifying protection and control), while the elderly are framed as frail, dependent or comic - Carrigan & Szmigin document their invisibility in advertising despite growing spending power.
AO3: representations matter because they feed back into identity and power: repeated imagery constructs stereotypes that audiences learn (link to labelling - Becker 1963). But the strongest answers note change over time: women's and minority representation has diversified, and social media let users self-represent, complicating the top-down model; and Gauntlett warns against reading media as straightforwardly reflective of social divisions rather than constructing them.
Deepening gender: Connell's hegemonic masculinity explains the male side: media construct an ideal masculinity (strength, dominance, success) against which men and boys are measured, marginalising other masculinities. Gauntlett (2008) argues representation has diversified - contemporary media offer a wider range of gender identities - which feminist critics read as surface change over persistent structure. Deepening ethnicity: Hall's inferential racism names racism embedded in imagery without explicit statements, and Van Dijk found news discourse systematically frames minorities as 'the problem'. Deepening age: children are constructed as innocent and at risk (justifying regulation and control), youth as a threat (Cohen's folk devils), and the elderly as frail or comic - Biggs notes invisibility grows with age. AO3: representations are constructed, not reflected - Gauntlett's methodological warning - and social media self-representation complicates the top-down model.
Audience effects, moral panics and globalisation
The audience-effect models form a historical sequence. Hypodermic syringe (Frankfurt School heritage): media inject powerful, uniform messages into passive audiences - applied to propaganda and violence, with Bandura's (1963) Bobo doll experiments its classic (laboratory) support. Two-step flow (Katz & Lazarsfeld 1955): media reach 'opinion leaders' first, who interpret messages for others - audiences are social, not isolated. Uses and gratifications (Blumler & McQuail 1968; Katz et al 1974): the active audience uses media for surveillance, identity, relationships and diversion - power sits with the user. Encoding/decoding (Hall 1973): producers encode preferred meanings, but audiences decode them dominantly, in negotiated or oppositional readings - meaning is a struggle, not an injection.
Moral panics (Cohen 1972): studying the mods and rockers clashes, Cohen showed media exaggerate, predict and symbolise, creating 'folk devils' and a deviancy amplification spiral - more police, more arrests, more coverage - which confirmed the original panic. The panic defines folk devils, agents of control (police, courts, politicians) escalate, and the group is further marginalised; the process is a direct application of labelling theory (Becker 1963), and Cohen shows it often panics on behalf of moral entrepreneurs. AO3: McRobbie & Thornton (1995) note modern panics now come with counter-panics and the target group's own media response.
Globalisation: media flows cross borders. Cultural imperialism (US dominance; Sklair's culture-ideology of consumerism) argues global media export one homogenised, consumerist worldview; Tomlinson counters with hybridisation - local cultures appropriate and rework global content - and McLuhan's 'global village' frames shared instant communication. Ritzer's McDonaldisation names the efficiency-and-standardisation logic spreading through global media. AO3: new media accelerate these flows and enable citizen journalism, but conglomerate ownership of the pipes keeps the control debate alive - the A* judgement weighs cultural homogenisation against evidence of hybrid local reception.
Deepening the models: the hypodermic syringe's historical setting matters: inter-war propaganda and Frankfurt School fears of mass society shaped it; its weakness is assuming a uniform, passive audience. Two-step flow (Katz & Lazarsfeld's personal influence study of the 1940s Erie County election) showed personal networks mediate media - but influence still flows one way from leaders. Uses and gratifications reverses the arrow but is criticised as tautological (we use media because we are gratified) and hard to test. Encoding/decoding (Hall's account of TV discourse) shows meaning is a struggle between producer and audience. Deepening globalisation: cultural pessimists see homogenisation - 'coca-colonisation'; optimists see hybrid local reception and a global public sphere. AO3: new media accelerate both flows and fragmentation; the strongest judgement weighs audience activity (uses and gratifications; encoding/decoding) against structural power (ownership; moral-panic amplification through social media).
Exam technique: media questions reward weighing models against evidence, not listing them. AQA 4.7 and OCR H580 give 30-mark 'outline and evaluate' essays (AO weighting roughly 8/8/14) and 10-mark 'outline and analyse two' items; OCR also sets 'assess the view that...' with an Item (e.g. Item: most young people get their news from social media). The A* skeleton: define the key concepts (new media, hegemony, moral panic; hypodermic syringe, two-step flow, uses and gratifications), deploy two or three competing perspectives each with a named study, evaluate each with a counter-theorist or counter-evidence, and finish with a weighed judgement answering the actual question - e.g. 'media power is real but bounded: content is concentrated and amplified, yet audiences decode actively and platforms give counter-voices space'.
💡 Worked Example
Exam-style: 1. Outline and evaluate the view that the mass media play a key role in creating moral panics. [30 marks]
2. Outline and analyse two reasons why ownership of the media matters for the content they produce. [10 marks]
Mark-scheme logic: Q1 (30 marks): AO1 - define moral panic (Cohen 1972); set out the process: exaggeration, prediction, symbolisation; folk devils; deviancy amplification; link to labelling (Becker 1963) and to moral entrepreneurs. AO2 - apply to mods and rockers (Cohen), to subsequent panics (youth subcultures, refugees, single mothers, social-media panics) and to the roles of police, courts and politicians as agents of control. AO3 - evaluate: McRobbie & Thornton (1995) - modern panics come with counter-panics and target-group responses; two-step flow and uses and gratifications show audiences negotiate rather than accept media inflation; pluralists note the media reflect real public fears as often as they create them; but the hypodermic syringe's laboratory evidence (Bandura 1963) and contemporary amplification through social media support media power. Reach a weighed judgement - e.g. media ignite and amplify panics, but audience interpretation and control agents decide whether they burn. Q2 (10 marks): two developed reasons with application, e.g. (1) concentration and the profit motive skew content towards elite interests (Murdock & Golding 1977); (2) hegemony and the five filters - advertising, sourcing and flak systematically produce elite-friendly news without conspiracy (Gramsci; Herman & Chomsky 1988). Developed application only - no extended evaluation required.
❓ Practice Questions & Mark Schemes
Outline and evaluate the pluralist view that media content reflects the choices of audiences. [30 marks]
Answer: AO1: pluralism - audiences are sovereign, competition and regulation (Ofcom) check owners, professional values and editorial autonomy, and the internet multiplies voices. AO2: apply to market-driven content decisions, web 2.0 plurality and citizen journalism. AO3: Marxists counter with concentration and profit motives (Murdock & Golding 1977), ruling-class ideology (Miliband 1969) and the propaganda model's five filters (Herman & Chomsky 1988); hegemony shows consent is manufactured (Gramsci); empirically, conglomerate dominance of national press supports control, while the two-way web supports plurality. Conclusion must weigh audience sovereignty against bounded choice, with a reached judgement.
Outline and analyse two strengths of the uses and gratifications model. [10 marks]
Answer: Mark-scheme logic: two developed points with application. (1) Active audience: Katz et al (1974) - audiences use media to gratify needs (surveillance, identity, relationships, diversion), reversing the passive-audience assumption of the hypodermic syringe; fits modern on-demand viewing where users select content. (2) Explains diversity of response: Blumler & McQuail (1968) - different viewers gratify different needs from the same text, so effects are uneven and socially situated, which two-step flow's opinion leaders cannot capture. Each point developed to 5 marks.
Outline and evaluate the view that representations of gender in the media reinforce patriarchy. [30 marks]
Answer: AO1: symbolic annihilation - women absent, trivialised or condemned (Tuchman 1978); the male gaze (Mulvey 1975); women under-represented as news experts; beauty-ideal imagery. AO2: apply to advertising, news, film and social media. AO3: liberal feminists note measurable diversification of representation; postmodernists argue audiences construct their own meanings (Gauntlett) and self-represent online; uses and gratifications shows women actively consume for identity; but repeated imagery still feeds labelling and stereotypes (Becker 1963). Conclusion must weigh patriarchal reinforcement against audience activity, with a reached judgement.
Outline and analyse two features of a moral panic. [10 marks]
Answer: (1) Exaggeration and prediction: Cohen (1972) - media inflate the scale of the threat and forecast repeats (mods and rockers), creating 'folk devils'. (2) Deviancy amplification: escalation by agents of control - more policing and arrests generate more coverage, confirming the panic and further marginalising the group, a direct application of labelling theory (Becker 1963). Each point developed to 5 marks with application.
Outline and analyse two effects of media globalisation. [10 marks]
Answer: (1) Cultural imperialism: global media export one homogenised, consumerist worldview - US dominance and Sklair's culture-ideology of consumerism - reinforced by Ritzer's McDonaldisation of content. (2) Hybridisation and connectivity: Tomlinson shows local cultures appropriate and rework global media, and McLuhan's 'global village' plus new media enable instant shared communication and citizen journalism. Each point developed with application to 5 marks.