Essay On Media Ethnography

In a society surrounded by media the producers have to prioritize there audience, who is consuming there product such as TV, radio and newspapers. This can be done by calculating how many individuals are consuming and what type of gender, age and class they are or by more in-depth research such as ethnography and interviews.
Classifying media audiences according to class can be seen as useful particularly within the media industry in regards to the sale of advertising. For instance, newspapers are aimed at different class’s, the Daily Mail being aimed at the higher classes containing political information, business based, discussing economic problems and using a different type of terminology which would not apply to the interests of the working class. The Sun on the other hand, is aimed at the lower classes as it contains gossip type information, is light hearted and is not materialistic based. This therefore, is useful for media companies as they know what to …show more content…
These methods show meanings, interpretations, and you’re able to view the audience first hand whether you’re watching those consuming media or asking them questions on how they consume the media. One example of TV ethnography is by David Morley. Within this study Morley taped the discussions of group viewings of TV programmes in order to analyse if individual’s class position affected their interpretation of the media text (Morley, 1992). A criticism of this ethnography is the researcher bias it holds. Morley chose his own groups of people to study comparing this to official statistics a more generalizable group of people would be researched. However, ethnography offers an immediate response due to the taped discussions providing more valid date compared to official statistics which relies on retrospective data collected from questionnaires taken after the TV programme has been