Reception Theory suggests that audiences receive and interpret media messages in three ways: the preferred reading, where the audience understands the message as intended by the producer; the oppositional reading, where the audience rejects the producer's message and develops their own interpretation; and the negotiated reading, where the audience both accepts parts of the producer's message but also develops their own interpretation. The theory sees audiences as both active, in that decoding media requires thinking, and passive, in that audiences will initially accept the encoded, or produced, message. A criticism is that the theory assumes audiences are either lazy and passive or intelligent and active decoders.