HookA scuffle at the seaside became a national panic
On Easter weekend 1964, a few hundred bored teenagers milled about the cold seafront at Clacton. There were some scuffles, some broken deckchairs, a handful of arrests. The next morning the national press announced a 'Day of Terror', a 'riot' and an invasion of 'Mods and Rockers' laying waste to English resorts. The sociologist Stanley Cohen went to look at what had actually happened and found the reporting wildly out of proportion to a damp bank-holiday scuffle. Yet the coverage had real effects: it told teenagers which 'gang' they belonged to, drew crowds to later weekends looking for trouble, and pushed police and courts to crack down — a self-fulfilling moral panic that the media had largely manufactured.
That gap — between the event and the story — is the whole of the Media topic. The news is not a window on the world; it is a construction, shaped by who owns the outlet, which journalists select the story, which 'news values' make an event printable, and how audiences read it. And the picture the media build is patterned: some groups appear as threats, some are barely shown at all, and a handful of corporations decide what billions of people see. Every question here asks the same thing: who decides what we see, and what does it do to us?
ModelThe new media — democratic miracle or new divide?
'New media' means digital, interactive, convergent technologies — smartphones, streaming, social platforms — that blur the old line between producer and audience. The debate splits into optimists and pessimists. Neophiliacs (cultural optimists) argue that new media revitalise democracy: anyone can publish, citizen journalists filmed the Arab Spring, wikis pool knowledge, and audiences talk back instead of passively receiving. Cultural pessimists reply that the change is shallower than it looks. Access is unequal — the digital divide means the old, the poor and the rural are least connected, so new media may widen inequality rather than close it. Much online content is dominated by the same corporations that ran the old media, and 'participation' is often trivial.
Marxists add that the new media are commodified — our clicks and data are sold — while the range of genuinely radical voices stays small. Postmodernists take the optimist side further, arguing that new media dissolve old identities and let people assemble a 'pick-and-mix' self. For the exam, the useful move is to notice that both sides are partly right: participation has genuinely widened, but on infrastructure owned and monetised by a shrinking number of firms — which sets up the ownership debate that follows.
ModelWho controls the media — Marxists, pluralists and Murdoch
Ownership of the media is highly concentrated: a handful of conglomerates, and owners such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, control newspapers, television and film across continents through horizontal and vertical integration. What that concentration means is the argument. Manipulative (instrumentalist) Marxists such as Ralph Miliband see owners directly imposing ruling-class ideology — hiring and firing editors, backing parties, filtering out anything that threatens capitalism. Hegemonic Marxists, including the Glasgow University Media Group, say the bias is subtler and unintentional: journalists are overwhelmingly white, male and middle-class, so they unconsciously frame the news within a dominant 'consensus' that treats strikes as trouble and capitalism as natural — Gramsci's hegemony rather than a conspiracy.
Pluralists reject both. They argue that owners chase profit, not propaganda, so they give audiences what they want; competition, professional journalistic standards, regulation and now the internet stop any one voice from dominating. The evaluation examiners reward is to weigh these: the sheer scale of Murdoch's political influence embarrasses simple pluralism, but the failure of newspaper endorsements to guarantee election results, and the explosion of online voices, embarrasses simple manipulation. The truth sits between owner power and audience choice.
A strong 20-mark paragraph on whether owners control media content runs like this: 'Manipulative Marxists such as Miliband would argue that owners exert direct control: Rupert Murdoch openly set his papers' editorial line, and reportedly all of his roughly 175 newspapers backed the Iraq war, which suggests content reflects the owner's interests rather than the public's. However, pluralists counter that owners are constrained by the market — a paper that ignored its readers would lose sales — and by professional and legal standards such as broadcasting impartiality rules. A hegemonic Marxist position arguably resolves this: bias is real, but it flows less from owners' orders than from the middle-class background of journalists, who unconsciously reproduce a dominant ideology. This suggests the manipulative model overstates deliberate control, while pluralism understates the ideological narrowing of the news.' The examiner rewards three things here: precise evidence (the Murdoch titles), a genuine counter-argument rather than a second description, and a synthesising judgement that a third position explains the case better than either extreme. That point–counter–synthesis shape — not a flat list of 'Marxists say / pluralists say' — is what pushes AO3 into the top band.
MechanismGlobal media and popular culture — imperialism or hyperreality
Media globalisation means content, ownership and audiences now cross borders instantly. The critical view is cultural imperialism (Herbert Schiller): Western, largely American, media exports — Hollywood, Netflix, global news brands — swamp local cultures and spread consumerist values, a soft-power dominance to match the economic kind. The debate over popular culture sits underneath this. The Frankfurt School and Marxist critics dismissed mass-produced popular culture as a shallow 'culture industry' that pacifies audiences, contrasting it with 'authentic' high culture.
Postmodernists reject that snobbery and the imperialism thesis alike. They argue that the high/popular boundary has dissolved, that audiences actively remix global media into local forms (hybridity again), and — following Jean Baudrillard — that we now live in hyperreality, where media images (the 'simulacra') become more real to us than the reality they supposedly represent, as when a televised war is experienced as a media spectacle. Dominic Strinati argues that media saturation makes popular culture the main source from which people build identity. For evaluation, cultural imperialism can look patronising about audiences' ability to resist, while postmodernism can lose sight of the fact that a few Western corporations still own most of the pipes.
MechanismHow the news is manufactured — news values and moral panics
News feels like a neutral record of the day's important events; sociologists show that it is socially constructed. Only a fraction of events can be reported, so they are filtered. Gatekeepers — editors and owners — decide what passes; agenda-setting means the media cannot tell us what to think but powerfully shape what we think about. Which events get through depends on news values: Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge's classic list includes immediacy, negativity, unexpectedness, reference to elite people and nations, personalisation and 'meaningfulness'. A story with those qualities (a celebrity scandal, a disaster) beats a slow, complex but important one such as chronic poverty.
When selection and exaggeration combine around a group, you get a moral panic. Cohen's Mods and Rockers showed the sequence: the media identify a folk devil, exaggerate and distort its threat, and a deviancy amplification spiral follows as public concern, policing and further offending feed one another. Later panics — over mugging (Stuart Hall), ravers, immigrants and knife crime — follow the same template. Marxists read moral panics as ideological distractions from deeper problems such as inequality; pluralists reply that the media simply reflect genuine public anxieties. Either way, the lesson is that 'the news' is a selective, value-laden manufacture, not a mirror.
CaseWho the media show — and who they leave out
Media representations are patterned, and the spec lists six axes. Gender: Laura Mulvey's 'male gaze' describes how the camera frames women as objects for a male viewer, while Gaye Tuchman's 'symbolic annihilation' captures how women are under-represented, trivialised or condemned; Naomi Wolf's 'beauty myth' links media images to unattainable standards. Class: the working class are frequently shown as feckless 'scroungers' or figures of ridicule — Owen Jones's Chavs traces the demonising of the white working class — while the monarchy and the wealthy attract deference. Ethnicity: Teun van Dijk found minority-ethnic groups recurrently framed as a problem or threat (crime, immigration) rather than as ordinary citizens.
Age: the young appear as folk devils or idealised consumers, the elderly as forgetful or a burden. Sexuality: LGBT people were long symbolically annihilated or reduced to stereotypes, though representation has widened. Disability: Colin Barnes identified recurring stereotypes — the pitiable victim, the sinister villain, and the 'super-cripple' who inspires by overcoming. The evaluation point across all six axes is change over time: representations have diversified under commercial and political pressure, and active-audience theory warns that showing a stereotype is not the same as the audience swallowing it — which leads to the final debate.
ModelWhat the media do to us — from hypodermic needle to active audience
The oldest model is the hypodermic syringe: media 'inject' messages into a passive audience who act on them directly — the fear behind every panic about screen violence, supported loosely by imitation studies and ideas of desensitisation and 'copycat' effects. But most sociologists see audiences as far more active. The two-step flow (Katz and Lazarsfeld) argues that messages pass through 'opinion leaders' who mediate them. Uses and gratifications (Blumler and McQuail) flips the question: audiences use media for their own ends — diversion, personal relationships, identity and surveillance — rather than being used by them.
Stuart Hall's reception theory is the key model for the exam: audiences decode the same text in different ways — a dominant/hegemonic reading accepts the intended meaning, a negotiated reading partly accepts it, and an oppositional reading rejects it — so meaning depends on the viewer's class, age and experience. George Gerbner's cultivation theory offers a middle path: heavy television viewing gradually 'cultivates' a worldview, such as the 'mean world syndrome'. The trend across a century of research is away from a helpless audience and towards an interpreting one — which is why blaming a stabbing on a video game is treated with suspicion in the mark scheme.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
The Media is a Paper 2 topic, marked on AO1 (knowledge of theories, concepts and evidence), AO2 (application to the question and the Item) and AO3 (analysis and evaluation). The three questions are a 10-mark 'Outline and explain two...', a 10-mark 'Applying material from the Item, analyse two...', and a 20-mark 'evaluate' essay. On the 10-mark analyse question, hook each of your two points to the Item — quote a phrase and develop it; an answer that ignores the Item is capped low no matter how much theory you write.
On the 20-marker the reliable spine is a debate: manipulative versus hegemonic versus pluralist for ownership, and passive versus active audience for effects. Every paragraph should do the point–counter–judgement move, not list perspectives. Name your evidence (Galtung and Ruge on news values, Cohen on moral panics, van Dijk and Barnes on representations, Hall's reception theory) because precise studies signal AO1 depth. Because Paper 2 is synoptic, gain credit by questioning methods — how did the GUMG measure bias, and can content analysis prove an effect on audiences? Finish with a judgement that discriminates between the models rather than a summary that lists them.