THE MASS MEDIA

Clearly if we are to participate in the society in which we live we must communicate with other people. Nowadays communication is no longer merely concerned with the imparting of information. The modern communication industry influences the way people live in society by allowing access to information, education, entertainment.

Some people argue that the history of the media begins with the printed book, a form which played a part in the transformation of the medieval world. It was as much as two hundred years after the invention of printing before we could recognize a newspaper marked by a regular appearance and circulation openly on public sale and providing information, advertising and gossip. Film began at the end of the nineteenth century, radio and television, in their relatively recent history, have taken positions of power among other media, because of their ability to observe directly and give accounts of events as they take place. Thus the mass communication may take the form of the press, television, radio, films. The newspapers and magazines are often referred to as ‘the printed media’ while radio and television are called ‘ the electronic media ’.

All the mass media are concerned with news. It may be news of the moment, or what has just happened, or is in the process of happening. This is the kind of news usually treated by daily papers. Or it may be news of lasting interest for a general or particular audience, as is in the case with the weekly, fortnightly, monthly or annual printed media.

The idea of what is news has changed and developed enormously with the mass readership of newspapers. How the idea of what is news varies from one paper to another can be made clear by placing the tabloid (popular) paper against the quality paper. In the tabloid there are a lot of stories that never appear in the quality paper: such as accounts of family squabbles, gossip about famous personalities. Conversely, the quality daily press carries a lot of stories generally ignored by the tabloid: such as detailed analysis of the stock market, etc.

How news varies from one locality to another is evident from a comparison of the stories in a local (regional) paper with national dailies. In the rural area a small house fire is news. In the metropolitan area a dozen similar fires are ignored.

Despite these insurmountable obstacles to establish an all-inclusive definition, journalists are in fairly common agreement that the following five qualities characterize news stories.

1. News is any story which will interest the readers or the audience.

2. News is always completely true; or it is at least a set of facts that have been presented by the reporter as true.

3. News has a quality of recency about it. The old statement ‘as out of date as yesterday’s newspaper’ is still a reliable indication of the emphasis placed on recency.

4. News has an element of proximity about it. People, generally speaking, are most interested in news that are near them in space, time and general background.

5. News must have some element of unusual about it. The unusual aspect brightens the newspaper or TV news. Its importance is to be seen in the old proverb: ‘If a dog bites a man, it is not news; but if a man bites a dog, it is news’.

All news reports in the popular newspapers have to convey a good deal of information in the most readable and readily interesting way. One of the virtues of the news report is the clear and attractive layout usually adopted, with careful arrangement into narrow columns, and the use of different sizes of type for the main headlines, the lead, the subheadings and sometimes even the body of the article itself. The function of the headlines is to ‘hit’ the reader’s eye, and that of the lead is to give the summary of the article in the shortest descriptive way. All this helps to arrest the casual reader’s attention and guide it rapidly through the matter on the page. The matter itself tends to be split up, especially at the beginning of an article, into a large number of crisp, short paragraphs, frequently consisting of only a single sentence. And the connection between the paragraphs and sentences is made as smooth as possible, so that the reader, when attracted, is led quickly and easily into the rest of the report.

A great deal of reporting has in addition to be written very hastily and packed into a limited amount of space. As a result of the haste, reporters frequently have little opportunity to indulge in their own stylistic preferences and come to rely upon a well-tried range of set phrases and grammatical constructions; and the tendency is to abbreviate language as far as the meaning will allow and sometimes even farther.

The newspaper feature article differs from news report. Journalists define feature story by comparing it with the straight news story. In the news story the whole atmosphere is impersonal. Cold facts are related in an objective manner. There is no conjecture, no opinion. In the feature story, however, the tone becomes personal. Parts of the story that have emotional, dramatic or inner-thought elements are given distinctly subjective treatment. The writer adopts this subjective approach to impart the human-interest quality to the story and treats it subjectively.

(Лебедева М.С., Фролова Г.М. Язык средств массовой информации Великобритании и США, 2002)