Manipulative/Instrumentalist approach✅

Main Ideas

  • A traditional Marxist approach, adopted by writers like Miliband.

  • Suggests that the owners (the media moguls) directly control media content, and manipulate that content and media audiences to protect their profits, and spread the dominant ideology.

  • Media editors, managers and journalists have little choice other than to run the media within the boundaries set down by the owners as they depend on them for their jobs

  • Journalists will consequently self-censor their work, and produce biased, one-sided reports which attack, ridicule or ignore ideas or groups which threaten o criticise the interests of the dominant class and the status quo (existing arrangements in society).


Curran and Seaton (2010)

  • Found evidence which suggested media ownership raised did interfere and manipulate newspaper content, at the expense of the independence of journalists and editors, to protect their own interests, and supported or withheld criticisms of governments which defended those interests.

  • In February 2003, Murdoch of New Corporation was arguing strongly in interviews for a war with Iraq. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that al his 175 newspapers around the world backed him.

  • The Leveson Inquiry in 2012, into the culture, practice and ethics of the press, uncovered a range of links between media ownership and governments, with media support given to political parties in return for government policies favourable to the interests of media owners.


Media and the audience

  • The manipulative/instrumentalist approach assumes the media audience is passive - a mass of easily manipulated, unthinking and uncritical robots, who unquestioningly swallow the preferred readings of the limited range of opinions and biased reports found in media content.

  • It is fed on a dumbed-down mass diet of undemanding, trivial and uncritical content, which stops them from focusing on serious issues, or encourages them to interpret serious issues in ways favourable to the dominant class.


Criticisms of the manipulative/instrumentalist approach

  1. Pluralists - Argue there is a wide range of opinion in the media, and the media’s owners and managers are primarily concerned with making profits. This means attracting large audiences to gain advertisers and the only means of doing this is to provide what the audiences want, not what the owners want.

  2. The state regulates media ownership so no one person or company has too much influence. By law, TV and radio in the UK have to report news impartially, and can’t therefore simply churn out biased, one-sided reports

  3. Audiences are not as gullible and easily manipulated as the approach suggests. People can accept, reject or re-interpret the preferred readings of media messages, depending on their existing ideas and experiences.

  4. Pluralists and neophiliacs (optimists who rapidly adopt and use new media) - Suggest the rise of the new digital media and the internet, and the growth of citizen journalism, has undermined the traditional influence of media ownership, and has given more power to ordinary people to give their interpretations of events that happened in the world.