Compare and contrast the following documents Document A Who really runs the country?

The power of the press has escalated but John Lloyd says, in an extract from his controversial new book, it is time for the media to rein in their grip over politics and society Nothingnot religious belief, not political debate and argument, not even conversation with friends and familypossesses the command over mass attention that the media have taken as their own. Their themes dominate public and private lives. Their definitions of right or wrong, true or false, impose themselves on politics and on the public domain. Their narratives construct the world we don't immediately experiencewhich, for nearly all of us, is most of the world. Democratic rule has the sanction of the vote: but media power has the sanction of the audience. The first has been tending to decline, in some cases to alarmingly low levelsdown to around 20% in local and European elections, not much above 50% in general elections. The second is largely growing, as the media add more and more entertaining products, services and choice for consumers who are increasingly placed in the position of indulged children: spoilt for choice. Political power in a democracy cannot sustain itself without engagement and debate, on the part of the public as well as the political classes, and it cannot work without demanding a good deal of citizens, most obviously demanding large amounts of their money in the form of taxes. The media demand little apart from purchaseat relatively low pricesand attention at an intensity of the viewers choosing: anything from excitement to snoozing will do. The media have an unwritten rule not to divulge their power. They are critically important players in public life: account for huge amounts of leisure time; give news round the clock on each day of the year; stage the dramas and spectacles which provide the content for much of the common interests of acquaintances and friends; teach attitudes; introduce trends; show how to display emotion. They have made the world their oyster: or rather, they are the oyster, empearling their audience with their glow of ceaseless interest, ceaseless novelty, ceaseless sensation []. The division between news and comment has tended to erode and the habit of comment has become general. In part this is because the number of columnists has increased and comment is now the habit of our age. The line between fact and comment is gone. The reporter and the presenter are much freer to suggest, or even impose, their own explicit or implicit judgment on the process described than at any time since the broadcast media became dominant. In newspapers, the tendency has resulted in the privileging of reportage which is suffused with moral or other judgmentsas the reporting of some dailies, notably the Independent and the Mirror, of the Iraq war. In broadcasting, no such overtly biased comm-portage is possible. Yet in the hands of the most skilful broadcasters, judgments are made which are not of a right/left political bias; rather, they are descriptions of the lowly, degraded state of public lifeby implication. When, in 2003, the Labour politician Estelle Morris came under strong pressure and finally resigned, the BBCs political editor Andrew Marr said, during a TV news broadcast, that she's dead meat. It was a
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phrase inconceivable to an earlier generation of broadcasters, injecting the image of the slaughterhouse into the political process []. The goal of developing informed citizens need not be served by acts of constant aggression or attitudes of constant suspicion towards politicians and public officials. It could also be servedand better servedby understanding and taking seriously officials and representatives stated aims, indeed, by seeking an understanding of the public world which is richer than that attempted by most media organisations now.

John Lloyd, The Guardian, Monday 21 June 2004 .

Document B

Parody of Fox News channels logo and slogan We Report, You Decide

The Liberal Curmudgeon, www.theliberalcurmudgeon.com, September 7th, 2013

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Document C On the Critical Abilities of Viewers The status of the viewer has been upgraded regularly during the course of communications research. In the early days, both major school of researchthe dominant, so-called, and the criticalsaw the viewer as powerless, and vulnerable to the agencies of commerce and ideology. Gradually, the viewerand indeed, the reader and the listenerwere accorded more power. With the rise of gratifications research, the viewer began to be seen as more selective and more active than was originally supposed, at least in the sense of exercising choice in the search of satisfaction, and less isolated. The new-Marxists for their part, have recently acknowledged that the media can be consumed oppositionally or in a mediated sense and not only hegemonically, thereby adding the notion of conscious decoding to counter the instrumental and even intuitive matching implicit in gratifications. It appears that recent literary theory has followed a similar course, abandoning the idea of readers uniformly fashioned by the text in favor of readers as members of interpretative communities that are active in negotiation with the text, both aesthetically and ideologically. Although it may seem that the reader posited by gratificationists is most powerful of all because s/he is free to bend the text in any way s/he sees fitindeed, virtually to abolish the textthe fact is that her or his seeking is determined by her or his needs, and those needsso the critics saymay well be determined by the media. In short, the reader/listener/viewer of communications theory has been granted critical ability. The legendary mental age of 12 which American broadcasters are said to have attributed to their viewers may, in fact, be wrong. Dumb genres may not necessarily imply dumb viewers, or, in other words, there are creative options within formulaic popular culture which may challenge both producers and readers. Empirical evidence for critical ability is still very sparse: Neuman and Himmelweit have made a start toward classifying viewers reactions to programs and their critical vocabularies. So far, one can say only that there is a growing consensus among these and other scholars that the operational definition of critical coincides with an ability to discuss programs as art or constructions, that is to recognize or define their genres, formulas, conventions, narrative, scheme, etc. We would give equal credit for critical ability to viewers who are able to perceive a theme or message or even an issue in a fictional narrative []. W e would code such a generalization as critical, all the more so if it takes a more complex form []. We would also credit as critical viewers who are aware that they themselves are using analytic criteria such as schemes, scripts, frames, roles, and other notions of viewer processing and involvement in their own responses to the program. Two of these categories relate to the viewers awareness of the text as a construction either in its semantic aspectthemes, messages, etc.or in its syntactic aspectgenre, formulas, etc. The third category relates to the viewers awareness of the processing of the program by her or his cognitive, affective and social self. This third form of criticism, we shall call pragmatic.

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Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz. In Elen Seiter (Ed.), Remote Control: Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power. London: Routledge. 1989. p.204-205
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