Redraft News question 4

 Q4. Evaluate the effectiveness of one of Hall’s reception theory in understanding how cultural and historical circumstances can affect audience interpretations of news stories [10]

Hall argues that there is an encoding/decoding model explaining the relationship between the producer, media product and the audience in creating meaning. Media producers encode products with a preferred meaning. Each audience member can decode meaning by the dominant reading, negotiated reading or the oppositional reading, but this is down to cultural and historical backgrounds. For example, people will have a different reading on Brexit, a controversial topic, based on age, gender, sociodemographic and location.

It could be argued that dominant messages (preferred) are becoming more binary due to the oligopolistic nature of the newspaper market, thus three newspapers own 80% of the market. This shows that the space for negotiation is narrowing because of the lack of diversity from different historical and cultural perspectives.

This theory could be argued as not useful because it is only a general theory of representation, and nothing specific towards newspapers. This showing that this theory cannot be applied effectively for understanding how cultural and historical circumstances can affect audience interpretations.

Therefore, this theory could be useful in some ways to an extent for covering news stories which offer different opinions and are quite controversial, and so people will react and use different readings due to cultural and historical factors such as sociodemographics, but this isn't totally true/effective because it is only a general theory, and may not relate to newspapers at all.