Language And Mass Media

To begin with, newspapers can be divided into two different categories: tabloids and broadsheets. There are also middle-market tabloids. Broadsheet newspapers intend to reach an intellectual appeal, in other words, readers interested in social issues (art, politics, history, philosophy). Its audience is called the “high-brow audience”. Instead, tabloids tend to emphasize sensational stories with gossip columns reporting scandals about the personal lives of celebrities and sport stars. Its audience is called the “low-brow audience”. Tabloid stories are generally shorter, while broadsheet stories are more in-depth. Having described these differences, it is relevant to mention The Guardian’s broadsheet style and its slant. The Guardian is socialist, but it does not support extremely the left wing. The Guardian is stereotypically read by artists, students, academics, among others.

As regards the audience of a newspaper, it is in itself the readers. It can be emphasized the different relations between a newspaper and the audience, and there are also differences of audience, the real audience, the readership, and the audience the paper appears to be writing for, that is to say the implied audience. By addressing to the audience, a newspaper creates a shared ideology such as a particular political slant. Every newspaper group does market research for being aware of their readership, in order to know age, gender, political sympathies, social class, among others. For example The Guardian readership is expected to be left-wing, middle-class, Labour supporters while The Sun readers are supposed to be Tory supporters and working-class. What is more, The Guardian had in the surveys done in 1995, a high percentage, over 70 per cent of middle class. Newspapers often tend to create a feeling of identification among its readers, using language that involve them in a created homogeneous group of people with shared beliefs and values whose defining feature is the newspaper they read. For example, in the headline published in The Sun “hula meanie spurns sun readers on loot” (AGREGAR HEADLINE) it is clearly demonstrated that the person who opposes the Sun readers is childish, immature and dishonest by the use of the word “meanie”. Likewise, as in this article (AGREGAR ARTICLE QUEEN), the implied readers are identified as “the Daily Mirror’s loyal army of readers”. To conclude with the audience, the objective of mass media is to create a system of shared values as a covert form of bias. Although the appeal to the implied readership is overt, papers also report stories that establish a set of shared values, (ethnicity, family, sexual orientation) usually in opposition to another group’s values.

Even though the slogan of The Guardian is “the whole picture”, we cannot state that our newspaper belongs to the free press, because every mass media suffers a process of selection and transformation of news. News can be defined as “information about recent events that are of interest to a sufficiently large group, or that may affect the lives of a sufficiently large group”. Overt forms of bias occur when there is a legitimate editorial control of news, that is to say that real events are not newsworthy, but only become “news” when selected for inclusion in news reports, which gives readers a partial view of the world since the beginning. However, these decisions are also considered covert forms of bias, as they may be made to exclude or conceal information from the readership, or to include information that is seen beneficial to groups other than the readership, for instance, the advertisers, the owners of the newspaper, and the political party they are affiliated to.

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