Week 5: Censorship & the Effects the Media has on Audiences

The media influences people in many different ways, through the different media platforms these are some of the ways the audience is influenced:

·         Awareness of Issues

·         Behaviour- imitating things you have seen

·         Lifestyle- has appealing aspects

·         Guilt- from charities (adverts seen on TV)

·         Gain knowledge- from news programmes

These are the different aspects of how the media influences their audiences. The media platforms these relate to include: Magazines, Newspapers, TV, Film and Internet

There are three main media debates about how the media affects audiences, these include:

1)    The effects of exposure to explicit violent or sexual content

·         It is argued that explicit content has negative effects on people. Especially children, people believe that children should not be exposed to this content.

·         Influences their behaviour: the way in which it could influence their behaviour, for example, they could see a violent scene in a film and this could influence them to repeat this.

·         Warp reality: the viewer may not be able to distinguish the different between reality and the ‘media world’.

2)    The effects of advertising on media audiences

·         Advertising appears in many forms this includes: TV, Magazines, Newspapers, Internet, Radio and Outdoor signs (billboards).

·         The advertisements influence the audience to buy the product, the better the advert the more products they will sell.

·         Celebrity Endorsement: this is used within many advertisements on most of the media platforms. TV advertisement is the most common for celebrity endorsement, for example, Cheryl Cole is used for the Loreal adverts. This will influence people to buy the product because they like the particular celebrity.

3)    The effects of Censorship on media audiences

·         The main point of Censorship is to protect audience’s from explicit content they shouldn’t be viewing.

·         Censorship has a huge impact on the audience. This is because it influences them into what they can and can’t view. This is a positive and negative, as it is protecting the audience from viewing something they shouldn’t see. Although, it is also stopping them making their own decision of what they think they should view.

·         Another negative of censorship is the fact that if people do not have access to the content, they will try to find it anyway. It will make the audience more interested within the content because they have heard about it.

There are possible alternatives to censoring media content, these include:

·         Stricter Classification- in relation to films and TV programmes

·         Make length of content shorter

I have started my research into these above aspects for worksheet 3. I am focusing on how the media effects audience in terms of films which were censored in the UK. I will be discussing the audience response theories, effects debates and audience responses.