Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Year 13 Press Regulation - Privacy Vs. Public Interest
This is an interview with a judge from the European Court of Human Rights outlining how judgements are reached when deciding on cases where someone feels the press has invaded their privacy. It's even laid out in an accessible questions and answers format - ideal for you poor stressed out things!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
hi its maiya, i was going through the OCR website you gave us and in the freedom of the press part, where it says what you should know it says: "Media representations: power/elites/hegemony, representation of gender and social groups, dominant ideologies blah blah blah, i really dont understand this, what part of the work we have done does it fit into??
tthanx
God, where to start?! These are all big words for some pretty basic concepts. What they're essentially getting at is the general issue of how representations of groups or individuals are influenced by the ways in which the British Press is regulated. For example, given the relative freedom enjoyed by the press regarding the coverage of private lives, we have a much wider range of representations of celebrities than in previous times. With the growth of magazines like Heat and Closer and their rather intrusive shots, celebrities are represented as repulsive and flawed as well as glamorous and perfect. The issue of power is linked to this - who controls these representations? Do the laws concerning privacy place newspaper editors in rather powerful positions when it comes to the careers of celebrities? Newspaper editors also hold an important power when it comes to influencing public opinion. Many would argue, this is effectively a political power equal to that of any government minister. Think about the Sun headline in '92 that many feel turned the election away from a Labour victory when such an eventuality was represented as a disaster for Britain - "will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights".
Elites - newspapers are ultimately owned by a few elite people - Murdoch, O'Reilly etc.. Thus, it could be said that they reflect the views of these elites. This would be an argument against the idea that a free press in Britain guarantees a plurality of views because ownership creates more censorship than any form of regulation could ever do. James Curran is a good person to read on this.
The idea of elites is also linked to hegemony and dominant ideology. Hegemony refers to the way in which the ideas and values of the elite groups in society become commonly accepted and eventually the dominant ideology -the values held by the largest part of society. For example, there used to be two competing ideologies in the world - capilatism (or a belief in the free market) and communism (state control of the economy). One was the dominant ideology in the West but contested by a vocal minority (e.g. people on the left of the Labour party) while the other was the dominant ideology in the Russia and Eastern European countries. Now, capitalism is pretty much the dominant ideology across the world, it frames the way we discuss every issue. We cannot have a discussion about the environment and global warming without questioning the impact of cutting carbon emmissions etc. on the growth of the economy. This assumes that the growth of the economy is a good thing. We think of economic growth as almost naturally good because we accept the dominant ideology of capitalism (which sees economic growth as fundamental), we do not even question its rightness, we aren't even really conscious that we are operating within the framework of the dominant ideology. There are of course a number of other dominant ideologies - a particular Britishness that values tolerance and multiculturalism above integration - all of which become difficult to contest because of the process of hegemony. You see this in the press, where papers claim to be expressing or representing the views of the common man when in fact they could be seen as representing the views of their elitist owners. The views of those who may contest the dominant ideology are supressed or represented as ridiculous. This isn't necessarily a conscious act on the part of newspaper editors but occurs because they themselves are influenced by the dominant ideology - you can think of the whole process as self-reinforcing (some would argue this is a flawed way of thinking as it doesn't account for how change occurs in society). You could look at the general obsession with celebrity culture as being rather hegemonic. Through this obsession - fed by the press coverage of their private lives - we become more and more accepting of the idea of aspiration and the worth of consumerism (central to the capitalist ideology).
I don't know if this helps but it's late and I may have jsut confused you even more. Main thing is, don't worry about using the big words. If you can, great but don't use them unless you are really sure about how to use them. just make sure you know the main details of the cases you are going to discuss and how they inform our understanding of the regulatory framework.
sir i think you got a little carried away with your response to maiya's question. u may as well have wrote a book about it!
Post a Comment