NDM News: Marxism & Pluralism - Alain de Botton on the news

Answer the following questions on your blog:

1) To what extent do you agree with Alain de Botton's views on the News?
- I agree to an extent that news has broken down in the sense that the hierarchy of the importance of the type of news has shifted dramatically. The fact that news is being shaped so that it appeals more to the audience instead of what may be important for the audience to know, since it more targeted about what the audience what to read. Through gatekeeping we see that news industries restrain information and select what news they publish, which highlight the hegemonic idea that the elite are controlling what we see and what we are getting access to.

 2) How can you link Marxism and Hegemony to de Botton's criticisms of the News?
- He states that we as an audience are passive consumers of the news which is exactly what Marxism and hegemony believes in. The idea that news is there to create mass audiences and that news is dumbed down in order to do that. An example of this he shows in his presentation is the New York Post's headline 'Osama Bin Wankin'. Which is an example of dumbing down news in order to generate mass audiences. Marxism argues that we are manipulated by the elite, he mentions that there two ways that news does this and this is by either stopping all news just like in North Korea or flooding us with news that makes us confused and also unable to keep up in a way that we forget what information that we have received.




3) How could you use Pluralism and new technology to challenge de Botton's views on the News?
- It can be argued from a pluralistic perspective that media has become more audience orientated in the sense that we have the ability to express our opinions and that we have some contribution to what news organisations publish. The fact that through things like citizen journalism we bring light to issues that, we, the audience think is important. It gives us some power to influence what major organisations show during news reports. Especially for things like the Grenfell tower incident where people took to social media to express their distaste for how the news was portrayed the death of the victims and to this day the hashtag #GrenfellTower is still being used regularly. This shows the increase of audience involvement. However, the fact that the news are concealing the possible real number of death of the people in the tower could be seen as another way that the news is selecting what to present to the audience which would support the Marxist/hegemonic view.

 4) Choose two news stories from the last six months - one that supports de Botton's views and one that challenges his belief that the News is used for social control. 
Against - http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/42080247/why-celebs-like-rihanna-and-kim-kardashian-are-sharing-the-story-of-cyntoia-brown
For - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/22/grenfell-tower-death-toll-of-71-unlikely-to-rise-as-last-inquests-open