Roles and control

Roles of the media in society

The media has very important roles in society. Firstly, it can act as a ‘gate-keeper’ because it decides what news and issues are shown (let through the gate) and which are not.

The media can also ‘set the agenda’; newspapers and television channels decide when and for how long issues are covered. (For example, the News of the World newspaper chose to raise the problem of naming paedophiles in England by covering related issues on the front page for a long time.) In this way, some people say that the media can create moral panics in society by encouraging people to become alarmed or panicked by an issue that they were not previously aware of.

Who owns and controls the media?

Traditionally in Britain, the media has been owned by wealthy individual families and transnational companies or multinational corporations (companies which operate in more than one country), for example, Rupert Murdoch and News International, and the late Robert Maxwell and the Mirror Group. Ownership of the British press is highly concentrated (ie a few companies own many different types of media agencies). Examples of such concentrated companies are the Virgin Group and Emap.