1) To what extent do you agree with Alain de Botton's views on the News?
2) How can you link Marxism and Hegemony to de Botton's criticisms of the News?
3) How could you use Pluralism and new technology to challenge de Botton's views on the News?
4) Choose two news stories from the last six months - one that supports de Botton's views and one that challenges his belief that the News is used for social control.
1) I agree with Alain De Botton's views on the news, that we are fed important material but left to our own devices to decide what we do with that information and how we ingest it. As De Botton mentions 'the news seeps up on us as we are growing up' but nobody ever takes us aside to explain why it's there? or how it is created. So we are often left puzzled and sometimes desensitized when we come across particular headlines such as "I slept with 1,000 men, but I used to be a man myself" wondering what to do with the information that is presented to us. In the modern society, celebrity based news often increases readership exponentially while serious disaster news decreases readership greatly.
2) Hegemony can be linked to what De Botton says in this clip as he mentions how the hierarchical structure that the news used to have with important news at the front and unimportant/fun news at the back is no longer existing within the news industry. We as an audience struggle to distinguish between news that is important and news that isn't because no structure is present. We struggle to tell the difference because we are sometimes presented with 'below the line - insane' news. Marxism can also be linked because in the modern society we are persuaded that we are being fed fresh new stories we means that we keep paying for news subscriptions with the big conglomerates etc, so they can continue making money and reinforcing the status quo; the media is dumbing down the audience.
3) De Botton's views could be challenged using the pluralism view because he says that we have difficulty telling the difference between soft and hard news. Though, through new technology we have greater access to the news both consuming and producing it so therefore surely we are deciding what to consume and what not to consume. As well as how important that news story is.
4) For De Botton's views
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-3959578/Harry-honeymoon-Meghan-Markle-Antigua-countrys-PM-says.html
Against De Botton's views
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