#2 Reflective Media Theory

A few of the topics that we have covered so far are; YouGov profiles, gender signifiers, Leveson inquiry, representation of men in TV, representation of women in film and debating whether anyone can be a journalist or not.

Firstly we looked at the YouGov profiles. This is a website where you can type in anything you want and it generates a majority audience to that specific text. For example there are a few magazines and newspapers that I searched and these are the profiles that it generated.

Next we discussed gender signifiers and how different products/objects are represented in a certain way, either for men or women. For example a lot of beer/alcohol products are targeted towards the male audiences because on their advertisements there tends to be an attractive women in revealing clothes to attract the male consumer. Whereas beauty products are aimed towards women and oddly yoghurt also seems to be aimed towards women.

I also looked into the phone hacking scandal and the Leveson inquiry. I found out that employees of the News of the World and other British newspapers were accused of phone hacking and the most notable arrest was former News of the World managing editor Andy Coulson.

In our debate, my team had to argue that not everyone can be journalists. Some of the point we came up with were;

• You have to be professional.
• Has to be trained/taught how to be a journalist.
• Members of the publish trust what is being written so has to be truthful and factual.
• Needs to be able to use suitable grammar for the situation and have the necessary writing skills which you would also need to be trained for.
• Why is it that journalism is a paid job and would need to have certain qualifications to succeed career wise.
• Companies would not just hire 'anyone' would have to have experience and be trained.
• There are different type of journalism including citizen, community and civic.

The Bechdel test.