Hannah

I found this chapter very comprehensive. In introduced many new concepts and viewpoints particularly in the For/Against section.

I liked the use of statistics in the 'Historical Developments' section whereby it was said to have been estimated that we spend 7 years of our lives watching TV!

It was interesting to learn about the role of politics and profit in media and how the ownership of different television stations and newspapers drastically affects the content, especially in the case of companies who are monopolizing TV. It was intriguing to note how despite the growing number of channels there is a smaller number of owners. This showed that despite the apparent variety in TV shows, many were all pushing the same type of message.

I felt that the two examples of how the media can be a positive or negative force were quite badly matched and that the first example of Mandela and the Inuit people was a much better argument than the one about the star wars franchise.

Questions:
 * How much money do companies such as the BBC receive from taxpayers?

A short commentary to you question. I don’t know how much money the different industries receive from their governments. I find it more important where the money comes from and what it is used for. For me, the press should be free so that everyone has the possibility to express their opinion. Therefore I could worry that e.g. the BBC receives money from the government while the smaller companies have to raise money elsewhere. If the BBC payment comes from e.g. taxes, the population of a country is indirect paying for what kind of entertainments and/or news their government believes they should watch. That is not what I call freedom of the press. :) Lærke
 * Commentary to Hannah**

Minh's Response

After reading that many television companies are owned by one single corporation, I was shock by the realisation that this was fact was in front of us the whole time. For example in England, a channel called “FX” is actually owned by the American company “FOX”. .

I think that this media “Imperialism” can be related to other companies outside the media genre. “Coke Cola” owns a massive franchise of drinks including “7 up”, “Pepsi” and “Fanta”. This fact is oblivious to most consumers.

However I must add to your comment that TV shows push their own message; this statement can be true in some cases but I find that the end objective is money and profit. The message is to buy their product, whilst it is government advertisements that usually convey messages.

In response to Laeke’s comment where companies are taxing the population causing the freedom of press to be oppressed, freedom of press has not been taken away. Many people in England write their own articles on the media and the government does not evoke its censorship laws or restriction, even if the text might be controversial. It is only when the text can cause harm that the government might use its power; however this is a rare case in England. I do not think that taxation has to do with anything with the freedom of the press, as the press in England is quite free, even under taxation.

Please take note, that this information might be inaccurate and missing some important information that might give this response a biased viewpoint. It is not intentional of course. I only wish to convey knowledge.

Halfdan:


 * BBC sells the rights to their programs to other TV stations. This also generates revenue.

I also felt that they did not match the Mandela example with the Star Wars example well. They have nothing to do with each other! And I also agree with the media slowly pushing towards the same types of messages - TV shows pretty much all have the same plot, whenever I watch a movie nowadays I am EXPECTING a good and happy ending - I feel like the media ,though it is a business and trying to earn money, just wants to show the people what they want to see. That in turn can be a good thing : I like happy endings and a very bad thing: Exploiting peoples privacy to gain a substantial audience : for example celebrity gossip, or pushing people to do insane things just to get a good 2 minute youtube video that will get some hits. What is the point? Why do people nowadays just want to be famous? Is it because of social websites like Facebook that giving us bigger egos and making us more attention-starved? - MIA

Alan: It is very true that the chapter talked about some very interesting stuff, statistics, totally enjoyable. I think that the media works as long as the owners are not limited to just a group of people. In the case of T.V. you cannot own a channel if you do not have or are going to make a lot of money with it. This is how the Internet contributes better to the media than T.V. or another medium; nowadays even people that lack technical knowledge can set up a website to express themselves to the world. Services like twitter make this process a lot easier. For the media to work for the benefit of the people, getting information from it should be as easy as putting information in it.

Naomi Klein NO LOGO Response

This documentary was about brands globalisation resistance. It spoke about the beginning of a movement in 1995 against Globalisation and multinational cooporations. The purpose of this documentary was to inform us of this movement and its primary target audience was those studying media studies or interested in and/or against the globalisation phenomenon. It was produced to accompany a book by the same name by Naomi Klein and mostly outlined the points that she makes in the book.

To get its message across, the documentary used lots of shock statistics and extreme scenarios to draw our attention to the "horrors" of globalisation. The producers used some jargon to impress us and used many adjectives such as "worrying" and "harmful" to portray a sense of their idea that globalisation was a negative force.

The producers also used many common examples that the audience could relate to, such as describing common brands (eg. Apple, Nike) and the universal shopping mall. Arguably these examples were used so that when the audience saw that they recognized these brands they became more aware of the effect that globalisation has on their lives. By doing this, therefore, the producers once again reinstated their message.

The documentary also spoke a lot on the human rights issues associated with multi national coorporations, something that the audience would be horrified by, especially as it showed the extreme cases of enclosed sweatshops with armed guards and therefore using shock tactics and statistics to make its point known.

The documentary was split up into three sections; no space; no choice, no jobs. The first section spoke about the reasons why people were angry about globalisation. It discussed "lifestyle branding" and how these large companies were no longer marketing a single product but marketing a lifestyle - a type of person. It gave examples such as how Starbucks is based around the idea of community, and how Ikea represented democracy. Nike was one of the first of these companies to become successful by recognising products as lifestyles by marketing their sportswear to create a "Nike type of person". This "lifestyle branding" has given way to a merging of markets, for example companies began sponsoring concerts and sponsoring people to wear their clothes and appear in their adverts. From this merging, "superbrands" were created, brands further pushing this lifestyle idea with more than one product, and the message that we're not just clothes, we're music. It also spoke about how advertising was everywhere in our lives and how it uses mass media as a channel of marketing. It described how shopkeepers and local producers became replaced with stereotypical surrogate mascots and how the relationship of trust between the seller and consumer had become non existant as these mascots used in branding took over. It showed examples of advertisements on bins, buildings, in TV product placement etc. and told of how there was no way to escape from this, thus "No Space" and a "new branded world". It gave another extreme case of Disney as a superbrand, and how the Disney town of Celebration, Florida was a symbol of "brand nirvana", meaning that they had achieved a monopoly and annihilated all other brands.

This brought us to the next section, "No Choice". It spoke of brand bombing, how these multi national coorporations are flattening local shops and businesses and leading to less variety. It again told of how there was "no choice" to turn it off, describing the consistency of advertising in all forms of media all around us. Because competition for advertising space is fierce, advertising now goes beyond billboards and traditional methods of advertising as companies strive to come up with more and more creative ways to engage us. Due to this, we are starting to lose the idea of there being any space outside of advertising, and even how our shopping malls are not what they seem in that they aren't like a high street and they come with rules and regulations that don't exist in the "outside world". For example, it described how protestors and videocameras were not permitted in shopping centres.

In the third and final section, "No Jobs", the documentary focused on Wall Mart as it's primary example. It examined how even the smallest things such as the idea of the powerful family identity of Wall Mart would be enough to make other industries reconsider their products, for example the music industry may not produce something that they don't think will be permitted in Wall Mart because they will not get as much revenue. This leads to an indirect cencorship and the loss of jobs for some musicians.

As well as this example, the producers spoke about the issue of contracted factories and subcontracted factories and how the link between the company the manufacturer and the consumer has become almost impossible to trace since the 1980s. By having a baseline level of quality in their factories means that the companies save money on paying people less. In some cases they make sure people don't start trying to ask for healthcare or rights and instead move to factories in countries where the workface is easily exploited and cheaper. For example, young Vietnamese and Chinese women are easier to control than their Taiwanese and Korean male counterparts.

The documentary refuted the idea that the world is improving due to globalisation and instead argued that it's a "race to the bottom" and that countries are outbidding each other for who can save the most money on their workers. It also reinstated the "No jobs" theory by showing how jobs in america were being outsourced to other cheaper places and that nowadays jobs in the developed world were temporary jobs in the service sector.

The end of the documentary was about brands as targets of anti globalisation picketers, for example how places like mcdonalds have to be guarded during riots. It explained the feeling of these protestors towards these companies, comparing how much they spend on manufacture vs. advertising and about the poor conditions in which these products are produced. The producers of the documentary do not follow the World Bank and the IMFs belief that what's good for big businesses is good for the population, and ended the documentary with the line "The world is not for sale".

I think the producers were very successful in making their ideas known in this documentary and in persuading the audience to agree. Although the documentary is quite clearly biased against globalisation, the points they made and the shock tactics using imagery and language were very persuading arguments.

Response to BBC article and Youtube Clip

I think the debate we had in class the other day was a really interesting one as it showed textual bias in a real context, and our discussion after examining the article showed how different people react to the bias, depending on their own circumstances.

The article was from a normally or at least considered reputable source, the BBC and it was about the killing of Christians in Egypt. The article was very anti-Islamic and neglected to mention that Muslims also joined in the protest against these killings. So although the BBC did not lie, they left out vital information which skewed the story and made it biased.

This may have been because the majority of British people (who would be the majority of the BBC’s target audience) are Christian and when reading the article would have felt a great deal of anger at those who killed their fellow Christians. This is an example perhaps of how the BBC made this particular article “newsworthy”, by relating it to the audience and by acting on the reader’s personal bias and opinion. This personal bias is mostly derived from terrorist attacks in the western world which are always reported in an extremely anti-Islamic and sensualised manner.

However, because of the different viewpoints of the members of our class, we discovered that Muslims also protested against the killing of these Christians and that this had not been reported, which thus made the article a form of discrimination against Muslims.

We then saw other ways in which Muslims are discriminated against when we watched a video entitled “Hate Comes to Orange County” on youtube. This video depicted scenes from a protest rally against muslims in America. Whereas the content of the video was very discriminatory towards Muslims and featured people shouting to the muslims “GO HOME” and accusing them of being terrorists and wife-beaters, the video was presented in a very anti-discriminatory way by highlighting the biased hatred of the protestors and focusing on how the muslims were being maltreated. It also showed republican politicians demoting multi-culturalism. These shocking scenes caused the observer of the video to feel compassion towards the muslims. As well as depicting these images, the video also used slow, fading slides at the beginning of the clip to instigate serenity, another effective way of creating compassion within the viewer.