The modern Media: Power on Paper
“The word media comes from the Latin plural of medium: an agency or means of doing something. ▶the material or form used by an artist, composer, or writer.”( Oxford University Press, 2004)
To understand the world of the media we first need to find out what media is. Media is offered information transmitted through a medium that is consumed by the “receiver”. The world of media changed drastically in the past 50 years, with new techniques of transmission and a wider range of information data bases. But one medium still is the most important one when it comes to media as a wider arm of power: the daily newspaper.
“Acknowledgement is made of the powerfully competing agendas in contemporary society that strive to attract and manipulate public attention and in doing so affect the nature of news production.” (2003 Watson.J.: 120/121)
In this research we will take a look at 3 daily newspapers which together had a market share of “37,2%” in 2002 in the U.K. (2003 Media Guide:7/8) and are selling themselves “25million times” (2003 Media Guide:7/8) on a single weekday. These Newspapers belong to maybe the most powerful news corporation in the U.K., the “News international Ltd.” Owned by the Australian-American Rupert Murdoch whose company also launched “the londonpaper” in 2006, a free newspaper which is handed out all over London with roughly 400,000 copies a day. “News International Ltd.” Is not only an U.K. based company, it has stock shares of TV-Stations in Europe (e.g. Italy) and owns the American based TV-News station “FOX” together with one of the six most important film studios in Hollywood “20th Century Fox”.
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