Modern newspapers: leaders or followers

A question as old as newspapers themselves is whether they influence public opinion or merely pander to it. The question is an important one for editors and proprietors, and for those who study their motives and the effectiveness of their newspapers. The motives are not always clear.

In 1947 a Royal Commission examined the conduct and control of the British Press. It asked the man who owns the mass circulation of the Daily Express and Sunday Express, what his motives were for owning newspapers. He answered that they were to make propaganda. There could be no other motive for buying or launching newspapers, he said.

Fifteen years later a second Royal Commission on the Press heard evidence from a second Canadian Press baron (owned The Sunday Times, the Times). He owned them to male profits. A rich newspaper owner didn`t even care what message his papers peddled to the public but only what profits they made!

Serious national newspapers, the Times, the Guardian, The Daily Telegraph certainly set out in their leaders to influence their readers` views, and succeed.

Popular daily and Sunday newspapers are so short, light and trivial that they are unlikely to influence any reader very much, and are unlikely either to do much good or to cause much harm. Popular newspapers nowadays seem much more concerned with keeping their readers and making money than influencing them. Sunday newspapers, now concentrate far more on entertaining their readers. What they may do, more by their selection of news and topics than by the argument of their leading articles, is to influence not what people will think, but what people will think about.

Whether or not they realize how they do so, they help to set the national agenda.

7. THE PROBLEMS OF GENDER EQUALITY.

Gender is the term used to describe socially constructed categories based on sex (sex refers to a biological distinction). Gender is a social construct. It is through the concept of gender that society transforms female and male human beings into social women and men, assigning them roles and giving them cultural value. Gender stereotypes are structured beliefs about the socio-psychological characters of women and men. People believe that men and women are substantially different on number characteristics.

I prefer to think that all people are the same no matter what you are – a man or a woman. We all eat and drink and sleep and cough and laugh at the same things. But in some ways each person is different and individuals’ differing wants and preferences may conflict with each other. Many conflicts between men and women had happened in the world to prove who is better and supreme. If there is a cake for dessert there is a chance – one person can get a larger piece that another and even greater chance that one will think the other’s piece is larger whether it is or not. In the situation a man would be humbled as his rights were infringed. A woman would give a larger piece to the man – she got used to refusing herself for somebody’s sake. It is her nature.

Psychologists maintain that gender turns out to be the of the most important determinants of human behaviour, and try to make sense of seemingly senseless misunderstandings that haunt men and women relationships. Psychologists’ data show: women tend to focus o intimacy and men on independence. Intimacy is key in a world of connection where individuals negotiate complex networks of friendship, minimize differences, try to reach consensus and avoid the appearance of superiority, which would highlight differences. That will be the world ruled by a woman.

In the world of statuses independence is key because a primary means of establishing statuses is to tell others what to do and taking orders is a maker of low status. That is present-day world – it is ruled by a man.

Though all humans need both intimacy and independence, women tend to focus on the first and men on the second. That is the main difference leading to numerous conflicts and problems between genders.

Gender differences are a topic of perennial interest. It is through the concept of gender that society transforms female and male human beings into social women and men, assigning them roles and giving them cultural value. Social norms construct and reinforce attitudes about women’s and men’s proper work roles, their participation in family and community life, modes of dress and demeanour and their appropriate styles of verbal behaviour. That is a stereotype that a woman is a housewife and a man is a money-earner. People believe that men and women are substantially different on a number of characteristics. Men are considered to be higher in self-interest, women are considered to be higher in a concern of others.

Men are considered to be higher in a concern for others. Men are forceful, adventurous, aggressive, self-confident, rude, independent, ambitious, active and dominant. Women are affectionate, emotional, gentle, weak, sensitive, nagging and sentimental.

To my mind, people downgrade women’s achievements (sometimes they are great), people have negative opinions about women’s work capacities (though it is not always true); women have been represented negatively in many areas (though they work in most areas shoulder-to-shoulder with men); and women’s stereotypical characteristics are not as highly regarded as men’s are (though women are usually more tactful, punctual, responsible and hard-working than men).

These are the reasons why there cannot be equality of genders. Women would be constantly inferior to men in this respect: she lets a child play and rules wisely and imperceptibly – by means of men.

8) CHILDREN AND TV.

Watching television over a long span seriously damages children's ability to think clearly and the exposure to TV sensationalism robs youngsters of childhood.

It's turning out to be a disastrous influence, at least as far as we can determine at present. Television appears to be shortening the attention span of the young as well as eroding, to a considerable extent, their linguistic powers and their ability to handle mathematical symbolism. Even more serious, in my view, is that television is opening up all of society's secrets and taboos, thus erasing the dividing line between childhood and adulthood.

I call television the "first curriculum" because of the amount of attention our children give to it. By now, the basic facts are known by almost everyone: between the ages of 6 and 18, the average child spends roughly 15,000 to 16,000 hours in front of a television set, whereas school probably consumes no more than 13,000 hours. Moreover, it is becoming obvious that there really is no such thing as "children's" programming. Between midnight and 2 in the morning there are something like 750,000 children throughout America watching television every day. There's a fantasy people have that after 10 p.m. children aren't watching television; that's nonsense.

Many parents, as well as educators, also have the mistaken belief that television is an "entertainment medium" in which little of enduring value is either taught by or learned from it. Television has a transforming power at least equal to that of the printing press and possibly as great as that of the alphabet itself.

Television is essentially a visual medium. It shows pictures moving very rapidly and in a very dynamic order. Although human speech is heard on television, it is the picture that always contains the most important meanings.

Television can never teach what a medium I like a book can teach, and yet educators are always trying, to pretend that they can use television to promote the cognitive habits and i the intellectual discipline that print promotes. In this respect they will always be doomed to failure. Television is not a suitable medium for conveying ideas, because an idea is essentially language - words and sentences.

The code through which television communicates - the visual image - is accessible to everyone. Understanding printed words must be learned; watching pictures does not require any learning. As a result, TV is a medium that becomes intelligible to children beginning at about the age of 36 months. From this very early age on, television continuously exerts influence.

For the reason, I think it's fair to say that TV, as a curriculum, moulds the intelligence and character of youth far more than formal schooling. Beyond that, evidence is accumulating that TV watching, hurts academic performance. A recent California Department of Education survey indicated that the more children sit in front of the television, the worse they do on achievement-test scores.

What emerges most clearly from the mass of figures of numerous surveys is that parents exercise little control over their children’s viewing, even when it worries them. They throw the onus on the programme makers, which is both cowardly and irresponsible. The people who make and schedule programmes should not be the ones who have to worry about little children being upset.

Much I am personally for some sort of indication given to parents as to the suitability of programmes. While children cannot be prohibited from viewing at home by anyone except their parents, as they can be an X certificate in the cinema, there is a precedent for guidance in another way. Adopting an R for Restriction recommended to be clearly attached to tricky titles in programmed journals and in on-air trailers, would be immense assistance to responsible parents, and would encourage those who are less keen to take their job of guiding the young seriously.

I'm not criticizing television for that. I'm saying that's what television does; that is the nature of the medium. Television, after all, does have a valuable capacity to involve people emotionally in its pictures.