Mass media Unit 1: the press

TASK 1. Read the quotations given below and express your opinion about them.

1. Were it left to me to decide whether we should have government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.” (Thomas Jefferson, an American Founding Father, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the third President of the United States)

2. The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking. (Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451)

3. Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one. (Abbott Joseph Liebling, an  American  journalist)

4. It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome. (Thomas Stearns Eliot, Anglo-American poet and critic)

5. What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. (Wystan Hugh Auden, an Anglo-American poet)

6. It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media. (Christopher Lasch, Americanhistorian,moralist, andsocial critic)

All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgerize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level. (William Bernbach, an American advertising creative director)

Task 2. Match the media vocabulary with their definitions.

Kinds of Press

1	a broadsheet	a	a set of large folded sheets of printed paper containing news, articles, pictures, advertisements etc which is sold daily or weekly
2	an issue	b	a large thin book with a paper cover that contains news stories, articles, photographs etc, and is sold weekly or monthly
3	the quality press = a quality newspaper	c	a serious magazine produced for professional people or those with a particular interest
4	circulation = readership	d	a magazine for children that tells a story using comic strips
5	the gutter press / the yellow press	e	a newspaper that is printed and sold every day, or every day except Sunday/ a magazine that appears once a week/ once a month
6	a copy	f	the popular press - a newspaper that has small pages, a lot of photographs, and stories mainly about sex, famous people etc rather than serious news
7	a newspaper	g	a newspaper printed on large sheets of paper, especially a serious newspaper
8	a journal	h	newspapers and other press intended for educated readers
9	a periodical	i	the average number of copies of a newspaper or magazine that are sold each day, week, month etc, e.g. 40,000 is a small circulation for a national newspaper
10	a tabloid	j	one of many books, magazines, records etc that are all exactly the same
11	a magazine	k	a magazine or newspaper printed for a particular day, week, or month
12	a daily/a weekly/a monthly	l	the newspapers that print shocking stories about people's personal lives; used to show disapproval
13	a comic	m	a magazine, especially one about a serious or technical subject

TASK 3. Fill in the gaps in the text below with words and expressions from the box and read about newspapers in Britain and USA.

scoops	content and approach	striking headlines	down-market
tabloids	issue	avid	mass-circulation dailies
copy	periodicals	pin-ups	national
competitive	‘quality’	circulation figures	code of ethics
local	intellectual	freedom of the press	‘gutter press’
nation-wide

Britain is a nation of ________ (1) newspaper readers. More than 16 million people buy a ________ (2) of a morning paper, and countless Britons spend part of every Sunday with the latest ________ (3) of their favourite Sunday paper. As there is keen competition between the ________ (4) and weeklies, reporters are constantly in search of ________ (5) to raise their ________ (6).

Britain's newspaper market is highly differentiated. In addition to the ________ (7) Sunday papers (The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The News of the World, etc.) there are five national ________ (8) dailies and seven national "popular" dailies; the latter are also called ________ (9). The quality newspapers, which are serious in_______(10) and large in size, appeal chiefly to the educated classes, whereas the smaller tabloids with their many photos and ________ (11) cater mainly for the less ________ (12) "man or woman in the street". Besides all these national papers, there are many ________ (13) dailies as well as weekly and monthly magazines and journals.

Some of the ________ (14) tabloids are The Sun, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express etc., all of which have millions of readers.

To remain ________ (15), tabloids often entice readers with shocking and sensational stories, lurid details of scandals and crimes, ________ (16) etc, which explains why they are sometimes called the ________ (17) or ‘yellow press’. Serious papers try to maintain a balance between the ________ (18) and the public's "right to know" on the one hand, and the journalistic ________ (19) and the individual's right to privacy on the other.

In the USA there is no newspaper that, strictly speaking, can be defined as a national paper. Only The New York Times, The Washington Post, the USA Today and The Wall Street Journal are of ________ (20) importance. However, there are numerous local and regional papers as well as a wide variety of ________ (21) and news magazines (Time, Newsweek etc).

TASK 4. Match the media vocabulary with their definitions.