This document outlines the benefits and limitations of three approaches to studying media: media production studies, media text studies, and media audience studies. For media production studies, benefits include understanding news media organization and influences like censorship, while limitations involve overlooking audience effects and exaggerating media manipulation power. Media text studies allow awareness of hidden ideologies but are limited by ambiguity of meanings and intensifying a distorted societal view. Media audience studies help understand how audiences make sense of texts, but have limitations such as isolating media influences and measuring effects.

2. Media production study

 Benefits
- See organizational structure of news services in regards
to, at least, politics, economics, and mass culture.
- Thus, be aware of
- other influences (self-censorship, propaganda,
filters, commercials)
- other key figures: not only artists or journalists
- other possible objectives of production.
- boundaries in journalistic professionalism
- alternative media seeking (independent mind)
- See the change in value of “art”. (purest/commercial)

3. Media production study

 Limitations
- Overlook of actual effects on audiences. (passive?)
“…the PM’s argument is that media texts are often encoded in
specific ways, …” (Klaehn, 2002)
- Exaggeration of media power?
“Adorno's exaggeration of the media's power to manipulate is
partly a result of this theory being too closely modeled after the
Nazis' use of the media in mobilizing the masses.” (Andrae,
1979)
- Just prejudice against new culture?
- How to measure professionalism? Media producers or
journalists do have their own prejudice. How to really say
that relationships between journalistic and powerful
people distort reality: socialization is necessary.

4. Media text study

 Benefits
- Be aware of the ideologies hidden and the effort to
spread them.
- Get an insight into complex human thought and
language use and learn how they make sense of the
world out of it.
- Learn how a text can be interpreted in a number of
ways.
“The media is chewing gum for the brain.”(Marcuse)

5. Media text study

 Limitations
- Ambiguity of meaning: there are as many meanings
as there are people.
- Too Interpretative (liberal): lack of theoretical base.
“Some semioticians seem to choose examples which
illustrate the points they wish to make rather than
applying semiotic analysis to an extensive random
sample.” (Leiss et al. 1990)
- Intensification of distorted society image and
conflicts.

6. Media text study

 Limitations (cont.)
- Different codes in different text formats.
“…we need to learn to 'read' the formal codes of
photographic and audio-visual media, …the resemblance
of their images to observable reality is not merely a matter
of cultural convention…the formal conventions in still or
motion pictures should make a good deal of sense even to a
first-time viewer.” (Messaris 1994,)
- Disregard of motives/background where the text
has been produced.
- Limited availability of text to be analyzed.

7. Media audience study

 Benefits
- Understand how audience make sense of texts.
- Thus, change texts to be read by audience in
meanings the producers want.
- Reconsider about the power of media: not as
manipulative as it was thought to be.
- Realize that it is audience who controls the output
of the media, and thus the content of popular
culture.

8. Media audience study

 Limitations
- Impossibility to isolate media from other influences.
- Inaccurate answers from audiences.
- Lack of generalizability.
- Unmeasurable effects of media.
(e.g. correlation vs. causation)
- Sole focus on why audiences consume the media,
disregarding meanings constructed by audience.
(O’Sullivan, Dutton & Rayner 1994, 131)
- Emergence of new media: change in viewing behavior .