Leaders or followers

Reading two

Answer the following questions.

Agree or disagree with the following statements and give your reasons.

Speech activities

Language focus

1. Explain the meaning of the following figurative expressions used in the text. Translate them into Russian/Belarusian.

– TV has become the drug of choice;

– TV has stripped away much of our gregarious nature;

– cocooned in their world;

– TV has dammed the natural flow of human contact;

– our stock of social capital has been badly depleted;

– the social fabric is becoming visibly thinner;

– the profound undermining of civic culture;

– the message of the age has become: plug in, switch on, drop out.

2. Match the adjectives with the nouns they collocate with. Translate them into Russian/Belarusian.

gregarious	interest
ominous	movies
superficial	undermining
moronic	picture
profound	coverage
tangential	nature

3. Insert the right particle or preposition where necessary. Translate the sentences into Russian/Belarusian.

1. The survey carried … by Harvard University shows that TV has become the drug of choicve.

2. The movie aims to strip … the lies surrounding Kennedy’s life and death.

3. Her eyes were glued … the screen.

4. She was absolutely enslaved … television and couldn’t imagine her life without it.

5. The programme-makers are concerned … the drop … advertising revenue.

6. Her mother was a passionate amateur of meetings … public affairs.

7. The revenue of this company has fallen … 18 million in 2000.

8. News producers must take care not to linger … bloody consequences of terrorist attacks.

· television has profoundly undermined society’s traditional values and standards;

· people have become suspicious and reclusive;

· the more you read newspapers, the more trusting you are, the more you watch television, the less trusting you are;

· the message of the age has become: plug in, switch on, drop out.

1. What ideas is the author of the article concerned with?

2. What are the main principles of the postulates of Dr. Putnam? How far do you agree with them?

3. Do you share the opinion that today’s society is ignorant and lacks knowledge? If so, then how can it be improved? Can television have a positive impact on society?

3. Imagine that some of your group-mates are staunch supporters of Dr. Putnam’s ideas. Discuss these ideas with them and try to prove your point of view. Back up you arguments with the information from the articles you’ve read, from your personal experience and from the supplementary texts.

A question as old as newspapers themselves is whether they influence public opinion or merely pander to it. Are a newspaper’s editorial articles, where it puts forward its own opinion on politics and the other issues of the day, really “leaders” as they are called? Do they lead public opinion, or is it truer to say that they follow it, replaying to the reader of each particular paper his or her own prejudices, to make sure that they will feel “comfortable” with that newspaper and buy it again tomorrow?

The question is an important one for editors and proprietors, and for those who study their motives and the effectiveness of their newspapers. The motives are not always clear; nor is society’s reaction to them.

In 1947 a Royal Commission examined the conduct and control of the British Press. It asked Lord Beaverbrook, a Canadian who owns the mass circulation of the Daily Express and Sunday Express, what his motives were for owning newspapers. Almost surprised at the question’s naivety, he answered that they were to make propaganda. There could be no other motive for buying or launching newspapers, he said. Liberal commentators held up their hands in horror that society allowed a rich man to use his wealth and his newspapers to influence the political opinions of their readers.

Fifteen years later a second Royal Commission on the Press heard evidence from a second Canadian Press baron, Mr. Roy Thomson (soon to be Lord Thomson), who owned the Scotsman, the Sunday Times, and a chain of other daily, Sunday and weekly newspapers throughout Britain, and would eventually own The Times. Did he buy them to influence public opinion, the commission asked. No, of course not, was his answer: he owned them to make profits. Each editor was free to take whatever editorial line suited his paper and its readers. The proprietor’s interest was that his newspapers should be successful and make money. Liberal commentators were horrified again. This time, they said that a rich newspaper owner did not even care what massage his papers peddled to the public but only what profits they made!

Perhaps the truth is that there is a mixture of motives, and the mix varies with the paper. Serious national newspapers, The Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, and now the Independent, certainly set out in their leaders to influence their readers’ views, and succeed. Even they, however, will be wary of moving too far ahead of their readers by putting forward views, which are unpopular, and may lead the reader to change his paper.

Popular daily and Sunday newspapers are so short, light and trivial that they are unlikely to influence any reader very much, and are unlikely either to do much good or to cause much harm.

Except at the time of, say, a general election, popular newspapers nowadays seem much more concerned with keeping their readers and making money than with influencing them. One indication of this is the ease with which even regular readers mistake the politics of their chosen paper because it caters for a working-class public when in fact it is Conservative. Many readers of the Sun, owned by Mr. Rupert Murdoch and a staunch supporter of Mrs. Thatcher, apparently believe it is a Labor paper.

In large measure popular national newspapers, and especially Sunday newspapers, now concentrate far more on entertaining their readers than on either informing or influencing them. What they may do, more by their selection of news and topics than by the argument of their leading articles, is to influence not what people will think, but what people will think about.

Whether or not they realize how they do so, they help to set the national agenda.

BBC News. 2002.

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