Importance Of Media Content Analysis In Mass Media

Media content analysis was introduced as a systematic method to study mass media by Harold Lasswell (1927), initially to study propaganda. Media content analysis became increasingly popular as a research methodology during the 1920s and 1930s for investigating the rapidly expanding communication content of movies. In the 1950s, media content analysis proliferated as a research methodology in mass communication studies and social sciences with the arrival of television. Media content analysis has been a primary research method for studying portrayals of violence, racism and women in television programming as well as in films
Shoemaker and Reese (1996) note that media content is characterized by a wide range of phenomena including the medium, …show more content…
a report in a specialist scientific or medical journal which will have greater credibility than a report on the same subject in popular press); Context (e.g. a health article published or broadcast during a disease outbreak will be read differently than at other times); Audience characteristics such as age, sex, race, ethnicity, education levels and socioeconomic position which will all affect ‘readings’ of media content.
Qualitative content analysis examines the relationship between the text and its likely audience meaning, recognizing that media texts are polysemic – i.e. open to multiple different meanings to different readers – and tries to determine the likely meaning of texts to audiences. It pays attention to audience, media and contextual factors – not simply the text.
Accordingly, qualitative content analysis relies heavily on researcher ‘readings’ and interpretation of media texts. This intensive and time-consuming focus is one of the reasons that much qualitative content analysis has involved small samples of media content and been criticized by some researchers as unscientific and