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- WJEC GCSE Media Studies Newspapers and Radio News Overview Planner
- WJEC GCSE Media Studies Newspapers and Radio News Teaching Guide
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- WJEC GCSE Media Studies Newspapers and Radio News Student Workbook
- WJEC GCSE Media Studies Newspapers and Radio News Glossary
Associated Resources
- Overview Planner.pdf
Introduction for Teachers
News is a staple of media output. Most of us require a daily fix – be it teenagers wanting details of the latest escapades of the Kardashians, fans looking for match reports or details of a budget speech. We look to news not only for facts but opinions – a filter between us and the complexities of the modern world. Increasingly, we want it 24/7, glossily packaged, and for free.
Media institutions are aware of this and over the decades have been sure-footed in positioning and re-packaging news output to meet the changing demands of each shift in public demand and expectations. News, in the view of commentators like Stephens, has been commodified since the earliest telegraph systems expanded the reach and speed of communication. Now we are faced with what he calls the hyper-commercialization of news, whose main outcome appears to be the dumbing down of the product.
Whatever its guises, news is a key element of the media and worthy of a great deal of our attention. For our students, film and tv shows may be the glossy attraction of studying this subject discipline but the work in this unit hopes to convince them that news is possibly even more influential in shaping our ideas about the modern world, providing a base for representations, ideologies and social narratives that fictional media breeds upon. The issue is that news is seen as truth, more importantly the truth.
The aim of this support module is to provide a range of lessons over a typical half-term module designed to be a lead up to the examination. In most...
