January Assessment: Learner Response

1) WWW - Well structured, clearly expressed + clear focus on the question.

EBI- You should have talked about the mainstream news media more (our case study) and linked it to News of the Tweet etc. Write a paragraph doing this.

2) From the mark scheme, I believe that I had used the following:

• Well structured and clearly expressed (Level 3) 
• A clear focus on the question (Level 3) 
• A clear individual case study, with a range of examples (Level 3) 

Despite me thinking that I have met these requirements from Level 3, these are only the basics in my opinion and I believe that there is much more which I can improve on, for example giving more examples on the case studies. I did give a few but I don't believe that it was enough to justify a high level 3 mark.

3) Points I included

• Good answers discussed the different 'value' audiences placed on these sources.
• Good answers discussed the role of audiences in influencing and producing media content and the advantages and disadvantages of this audiences and producers.
• Almost all answers had examples from their case study of competing ideas and opinions. Weaker answers tended to just describe them.

Points I didn't include and could have improved

• Good answers discussed the reasons why there was democracy or not, using media issues, debates and wider contexts.
• Good answers discussed the different ‘value’ audiences placed on these sources. Sophisticated answers discussed how this could change and wasn’t fixed. For example did audiences trust established media organisations or user generated content now? What were the advantages and disadvantages for audiences of the different sources? Did audiences now use a range of sources for different reasons? Could established media organisations lose trust?

4) From reading this exemplar A grade essay, the three things which I didn't include were the following:

• Should've included more theorists, e.g. Briggs and Burke - "the most important medium of the 20th century".
• Comparing my essay to this one, I spoke more towards one side of the story where as in this one, their argument was well balanced.
• Talk about hegemony (society is usually controlled by the elite).

5) LR Paragraph

On the other hand, a pluralist may suggest that the internet isn't always misleading and on some occasion, citizen journalists and bloggers have been extremely useful. A key example of this, where the public and even the government have benefited from, is the Ian Tomlinson case. This is where the police had attacked him as they thought he was a suspect, but he was only a regular civilian walking along the road and then died at the scene. Since the police thought it was filled with many protesters etc, they tried to back themselves up and wrote a false statement saying that he was not innocent and was trouble. However, what they didn't know was that a bypasser on the street was recording the whole thing and uploaded it online showing that the police were wrong since the citizen journalist had the evidence to back themselves up with. So, what the people can learn from this is that even though bloggers and journalists (citizen) are not always professionals, the public can still benefit from them as they may know something which the professional experts may not. Rupert Murdoch said that "The internet has given readers much more power...The world is changing and newspapers have to adapt". This could suggest that the newspaper industry can be hard to top the new/digital media platform as they can give more to the audience such as showing footage to the audience as it is digital where as the newspapers can't have that capability of doing something like that. Therefore, on some occasions they can also be very trustworthy, e.g. to help solve crimes and the online world as a whole can be extremely useful.

Article paragraph

19/12/16 - How TV news failed to keep up in 2016 (30)

Throughout the years, TV news has been extremely popular in terms of the trust, from the audience, and the quality it has gained over the past decade or so. However, TV news is slowly starting to become less popular since the online (new/digital media) is slowly starting to take over the platform of news. Although, the TV news has got a lot of trust from their audience, they believe that what they see on TV can be quicker to access online and therefore, the audience would want to use the online applications etc. However, a Marxist would believe that the internet is can be very unreliable on a lot of things that have been posted. An example of this is fake news. Fake news is highly linked to Keen's theory on how "The internet has become millions of monkey's typing nonsense" and this is true to some extent. With fake news, many things in the public eyes have gone wrong, e.g. Brexit and Trump winning the presidential election. So, the Marxist would suggest that the digital world is ruining our lives as they are constantly feeding us with false information and we don't see it and therefore, we believe everything that we read online. This is why the results such as Brexit has happened, because of the fact a lot of the audience are very 'gullible' as they believe the internet is always right but don't understand anyone can write anything. Therefore, on some occasions the internet is very false and misleading and also very hard to trust at some points.