Lesson video

Hello again, it's Mr. Joy here.

Today in our Citizenship lesson, we're going to continue looking at how the media affects us.

And today we're going to be focusing on what the role of the media is within a democracy.

For today's lesson, all you need is a pen and some paper, and obviously as always, it would be really helpful if you're able to find somewhere quiet to do your work and make sure that you've put away any distractions you might have around as well.

Just give you a couple of seconds to be able to sort that out and then we can continue.

In today's lesson, we're going to start off by reading kind of narrowing down on what a democracy is.

And then we're going to start looking in more detail about what it means for the media to set the agenda, and then we're going to look at how the media informs and educates the public as well.

But before we get into what the media does within a democracy, we really need to make sure that we fully understand what the word democracy means.

The word democracy comes from two Greek words, one of those is demos, which means people and the other one is kratos, which means power.

So when you put those two words together, you get democracy, which literally means the power of the people, and so that's what people are talking about when they are referring to a democracy.

Now in a democracy, there are certain characteristics that you would expect to be able to see.

So the first one you would be able to expect to see regular elections.

Because the point of a democracy is that the people get to elect the people who are going to be running the country.

The people get to have a say in that.

People should therefore be free to be a candidate in those elections.

If they decide that they want to be elected to help in running the country, they therefore should be allowed to do so.

As part of this whole process, you'd expect then to see a free and secret ballot.

And that means that you can choose whomever you want to vote for and that no one is going to force you to vote in a particular way.

And because it's a secret ballot, no one can find out who you voted for, and then you won't be punished for voting a particular way.

So it's completely up to you, it's your choice.

We also have political parties, and political parties helped to organise representatives based on the ideas that they have in common.

And then that way, it's also easier to form a stable government.

Because we didn't have political parties, we just have a whole load of people who might have similar ideas, but who kind of argue about things a little bit more than they do now.

If everyone was their own little bubble, they'd have lots of ideas and we wouldn't get anything done at all.

We then also got freedom of assembly.

So freedom of assembly means that people can gather and they can meet and possibly even protest if they feel really really strongly about a certain issue.

Also in a democracy, you'd expect to see rights for minority groups.

So this would stop people being targeted and treated poorly based on their characteristics, like their race or their religious belief, to making sure that people still get their human rights.

And linked to that, in a democracy we'd also expect to see equal rights for women.

So that might include things like women being allowed to vote and to work as well.

And the last characteristic that we would see which is the one we're really going to focus on today's lesson is that you would have a free media.

Now having a free media means that the media is able to freely write about things which might include criticising the government or the government's policies.

They're not being censored, so they're not being told what they can or they can't write.

And it's this area of democracy that we're going to really be focusing on because this is part of our topic, looking at how the media impacts us.

For your first task, I would like you to have a think about how else other countries might be run.

So make a list about any alternatives to democracy that you might know about.

So any other ways that countries might be run that are not a democracy, and if it helps you could rewind just a little bit and see the list of the features that I just went through about a democracy, and then think about what might be different in other parts of the world, and then try and think about the key words that might be used to describe how those countries are run.

So you can pause here for a little bit while you complete the task, and then when you're ready, you can continue and we will keep moving on.

I just briefly want to go through some of the examples of the other ways that countries are run that you might have also listed in your work.

So a dictatorship is the first one I've got for you.

And a dictatorship is a country where the ruler or the party that is running the country has complete control.

And because they have all the power, the public or the people who live in the country, don't get to exercise their human rights.

So they wouldn't have a free press because the media wouldn't be allowed to speak out about those in charge.

They wouldn't be able to criticise them or have that freedom of speech.

A monarchy is when one person oversees the decisions of a nation, and often but not always, monarchies involve the power being passed down to a family member of the next generation.

So from parent to child.

The UK is therefore an example of a monarchy because we've the Queen who will pass down at some point to Prince Charles.

An oligarchy is where a small group of people is given control over the government.

And this could be a small group of people who are a family or they might have some other sort of common link like they're quite wealthy, or they come from a similar social status or that there are the same religion.

And that one then leads nicely into the last example that I've got for you which is a theocracy.

Now a theocracy is a country which is run by leaders who are considered to have been chosen by God or a deity.

And the Vatican City that is pictured there in that image is an example of a theocracy.

It's led by the Pope, who is also the leader of the Roman Catholic church.

And Roman Catholics would say that the Pope was appointed because God chose him to do that, and so therefore he has the support of God.

So if we go back to the main question for this lesson, what does the media do in a democracy? We now know what the democracy is, and so we can then continue on to look at what a media or what the media does.

So the media has three major roles in a democracy.

They set the agenda, they inform and educate, and then they hold people to account.

We're only going to focus on the first two of these three ideas for today's lesson, because I'm going to hold off on the third one, and I'm going to make that an entire lesson of its own.

So lesson four in this topic is going to be all about how the media holds people to account.

The first role is about setting the agenda, so let's find out what that means.

The media decides which issues are reported on.

So we don't get told everything that happens in the world, there's not enough time for them to be able to cover every story all across the world.

So the media has to filter all of that information down.

Now, if you remember back to the very first lesson that we did in this topic, the decisions about what are reported are usually based on news values.

And so those are the things like impact, timeliness and conflict.

So those are really important factors that will affect the decisions that the editor or the editorial team are going to make about the content.

And because of that, sometimes a certain issue might only be covered very briefly, so just for a day, and then other stories might get a lot more attention over a greater amount of time.

And if we think of recent examples, obviously COVID-19 received huge amounts of media attention, predominantly because of the impact it was having on the entire world.

So that was obviously and rightly so a massive story that needed be explored in depth and in detail throughout the media over many months.

And another factor that can also affect what is reported is that some news outlets, and by news outlets, it might be the newspapers, it might be the television stations.

Sometimes they might openly support a political party.

And that then in turn influences what it is that they publish, so what they print or what they air or broadcast.

And these things are sometimes called affiliations.

And these newspaper front pages really kind of illustrate those ideas of political affiliations.

So both of these front pages come from the day after a ruling that was made by the Supreme Court in 2019.

So you may or may not remember, but in 2019 Prime Minister Boris Johnson shut down parliament, he prorogued parliament.

And that was unofficially so that he could have a new state opening and he could kind of start a new parliamentary term.

And unofficially people were saying that he was trying to deliver on Brexit, and that was his way of trying to make sure that Brexit happened.

So some people took him to court and ultimately the Supreme Court decided that Boris Johnson's actions were unlawful.

So on the left, you've got the Daily Mirror, which has a headline "There's a special place to history waiting for you, Prime Minister" and a subhead calling Boris shamed.

And this shows that the Daily Mirror disagreed with the action that the Prime Minister took and that in turn reflects their historic affiliation with the Labour parties.

They tend broadly to agree with the policies of Labour party and therefore support Labour.

The Daily Express on the other hand asks, "Unlawful? What's lawful about denying for 17.

4 million Brexit!" And the figure there is referring to the number of people who voted to leave the EU in the referendum.

And that then also refers to the idea that the Prime Minister was trying to prorogue parliament so that he could help to deliver Brexit.

So the Daily Express is really clearly demonstrating their support here for the Prime Minister, which in turn reflects their loose affiliation to the Conservative party.

So, we're going to do a couple of questions just to check what you've taken in so far.

The first question is a true or false.

The question is, affiliation means having a close link or connection.

You got about five seconds to make up your mind, feel free to shout out at me, if it's going to help.

And your answer is true.

Affiliation does refer to a close link or connection.

So when we're talking about the media, it might be that there is that link between what the media is publishing and their belief in the ideas that the political party are sharing.

Over here in the UK it's not as obvious with our media, in the US it's a lot more prevalent.

You might have Fox News in the US that supports the Republicans, which includes president Trump.

And then on the other hand, you would have someone like CNN, which is another Cable News Network, which is much more supportive of the Democrats.

So those ideas of affiliation are often represented around the world.

Second question is a multiple choice.

Which of these would the media not be allowed to do in a dictatorship? So would they not be able to publish information given to them from the government? Would they not be able to write an article sharing the journalist's opinion? Would they not be able to write an article criticising the country's leader? Or would they not be able to show support for new policy proposed by the government? You got about five more seconds.

And the answer here is option three.

So options one and options four would be incorrect, because the media would be forced to publish information that's given to them by the government, if we were talking about dictatorship.

And they would therefore be expected or forced to demonstrate support for the government's ideas.

So we're not going to have one and four as actions that would be banned.

Option two is a bit of a possibility here.

So if the journalist's opinion is that they like the government and what the government is doing, then that sort of published article is going to be fine.

So it's not going to be an issue.

If on the other hand, it was negatively reflecting upon either the country or the leader, then that wouldn't be allowed.

And so that could potentially be a correct answer, but because there are times where they might be able to share their opinion, it's not the best answer that is here.

Option three is definitely not going to be allowed in a dictatorship.

So one of the issues that I mentioned about a dictatorship is that people don't get to exercise their rights, and so they wouldn't have free speech.

And therefore wouldn't be able to openly and freely criticise the country's leader.

For your next task, I want to develop your understanding of media outlets and whether or not they should be allowed to have a political affiliation.

So just to remind you when I'm talking about media outlets, we're talking about individual newspapers or radio stations or TV stations.

So I've got an essay question here, should media outlets be allowed to have a political affiliation? Don't worry, you're not going to have to write an essay, I'm going to go step by step with you here.

So I've come up with some arguments to agree with this statement.

So the first one is that it might mean that a different point of view can be given.

So it might well be that this is the only newspaper that supports a particular political party, and so their views aren't widely shared at the moment, but by publishing something that is different from what's shared everywhere else on television or newspapers.

It means that there's something different, there's a different take on the events.

Also, it would provide a platform for political parties to share their ideas.

So they're going to get support from this news outlet.

They can have their members of their party either go on to the television stations or to be interviewed for the newspapers, so that the ideas that the political party believes in can be shared widely as well.

And the third one is about individual journalists.

So they have opinions of their own.

And because we're in a democracy, they should be allowed to share their thoughts and their opinions so that they can make other people aware of what they think.

Whether those other people agree or not is a completely different story.

So this is where your task then comes in, because I've not listed a set of arguments against for you.

I want you to come up with some arguments that disagree with this statement.

So your task is to list at least two arguments that you could make against the statement.

So in other words, why should media outlets not be allowed to have a political affiliation? What good reasons can you come up with for that task? You can pause the video here so that you can complete the task, and then when you finish that and you're ready to go through some ideas and see some other suggestions, you can continue to play.

So just going to go through some examples that you might have come up with.

And if you didn't, if you've come up with something different, that's fine as long as it's a valid point, that's the important thing.

If you've kind of found it difficult to come up with some ideas, then this might help you to try and understand what you could've come up with and what I'm after.

So the first one is that the larger news outlets would become more influential.

If you've got a high percentage of people who are buying a certain newspaper or watching a certain television network, then you're then going to get a lot more of a power or a benefit for those networks and those newspapers.

So they're going to expose their message to a huge number of people, which then gives them a lot more control.

And their influence, the decision that they are making to support one political party over another could be very very influential, it could be a big deal.

The second one is that the political parties might become too friendly with the media.

And by that, what I mean is that you could say this idea of politicians becoming good mates with journalists to try and encourage the journalist to make the political party or that individual look a little bit better when they are reported upon.

So the whole point of the media as we'll go into in more detail in the next lesson is about holding people in positions of power to account and making sure that they're doing the right thing.

And so if there is this kind of blurring of the lines with being allowed to openly support a political party, then maybe the media isn't going to be doing their job properly.

And that's because the media works best when it is independent.

When it is clearly able to work on its own, not being intruded upon, not being told what they should publish.

Sometimes, you get an issue where a news outlet reports one thing and another news outlet reports another one.

And so we saw with the front pages that I showed you just a few slides ago, that the exact same events were reported on in completely different ways.

And so you might end up getting different news outlets reporting opposing facts.

One says one thing, another one says another.

And for most people, they would probably find that incredibly confusing because they wouldn't know which source to trust.

And also the public finds that difficult to tell the difference statistically, between fact and opinion.

So obviously there are people who can read a newspaper and who can pick out the key information to identify that this is someone's opinion or that possibly there is a bit of bias with a news article, so trying to persuade you to vote a certain way or speaking about politicians in a certain way.

But a lot of people actually don't see the difference.

And so when they read these news articles or watch the news clips on the television, even though it is actually an opinion, they take it as gospel, they take it as being fact.

So those are some examples that you may have come up with.

You may have come up with others, as I said before, but that gives you an idea about the type of points that you could have included.

So we're going to move on to the second role of the media in a democracy.

So let's find out how the media informs and educates, and this really is the biggest role for the media.

And it's about them providing the public with information and making sure it's explained clearly enough for people to understand.

So if we look at the example of the front page that I'm showing you here from The Times, it's from when the Prime Minister announced the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And it was really important that people were given information which is accurate so that they can act upon that.

And that idea of accuracy links back to the work we did in the second lesson about the responsibility of the media to correctly report information as well.

And by educating the public, what it means is that hopefully the public can then make responsible, informed decisions about what they wanted to do.

And as an example, it's particularly important in the lead up to a general election.

So when we are going to have an election, the media helps to explain to the public what each party wants to do if they win power.

And so hopefully people can then use that knowledge, that information, to then inform the decision they make about who to vote for.

Another part of informing and educating includes providing opportunities for different views to be discussed and debated.

So the picture there is of a show on BBC1 called Question Time, and this specific episode shown in the picture was actually filmed in Westminster Hall in the houses of parliament.

And Question Time gives the public the opportunity to ask questions to politicians who can then give their views on the important issues that are going on in society at that time.

And so it's also then really interesting, not only to hear an individual politician or someone from industry or another well known person not just about them giving their own view, but also the dialogue that then happens between the different people who were sitting on the panel at that particular point in time.

Because that's really value, valuable sorry about seeing the differences in the points of view and getting to hear the reasons for those opinions and not just someone saying, "I think this is right or wrong." So linking back to the idea of general elections that I mentioned just before, we now have these special debates where the political leaders of each of the major parties get to have a face to face debate, and it often happens on a variety of different TV networks in different formats.

It might be that sometimes it's a question and answer session, and other times all the leaders are there at once and they can talk to each other and point out the problems of each of the other's parties as well.

The first picture that I've got there on the left, the front page of The Guardian, shows the very first televised leaders debate, which was in 2010.

And it had been many many attempts previously to get the different political party leaders, especially the major parties to have a debate, and it never went ahead for whatever reason involved.

And in 2010 for the first time, you had Gordon Brown from Labour David Cameron from the Conservatives and Nick Clegg from the Liberal Democrats who all took the stage at the same time.

And it was such a success that on the right hand side there for 2015, you've got the headline from the Daily Telegraph and it is showing the seven biggest political parties in the nation and the leaders of each of those parties.

And the numbers along the top is showing the figures from a report, showing who supposedly had done the best when it came to polling after the performances in the debate as well.

And because it's been such success, the leaders debates are now really really important.

Lots of people watching those to really get an idea about who they want to vote for in the general election.

So media outlets like TV networks and newspapers may also run campaigns to draw attention to important causes.

So if you watch ITV, you might have seen that they've created a campaign over the last year or so about mental health and encouraging people to talk to their friends and families about how they're feeling.

In 2012, The Sun started a campaign in a response to a decision by the government to try and raise taxes.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, so George Osborne at the time.

And the Chancellor of the Exchequer is the person who's in charge of taxes and spending money for the government.

He wanted to raise a tax on certain types of food and the media at the time referred to it as the pasty tax, because it mentioned this situation where someone would have to then pay more in taxes for buying a food that was served hot, as they would if they bought the same food product that was served cold.

And The Sun campaigned for about two months for this to change, and a lot of other people were involved as well, but The Sun really pushed this issue.

And eventually the Chancellor announced he wasn't going to make these changes as planned.

And obviously The Sun then claimed that as a victory for themselves.

What I would like you to do for Task three is to have a look at the sources that I've put in the worksheet file.

And I want you to read about the campaign that the Daily Mail started in 2008.

What I would then want you to do is to answer these four questions about the campaign.

So what was the aim of the Daily Mail's campaign? What was it about? How did the Daily Mail try to achieve a change in society? So what was it that they were trying to do? How successful was the campaign? So looks specifically at the last source and have a think about what difference was made between the start of the campaign and the end of the campaign.

And then finally, why you think the campaign was successful? So you're trying to evaluate what helped to lead to making a difference? What was the one thing, if you could only pick out one thing that you think really made an impact here? So you can pause the video here to complete the task, and then when you're done and you're ready, we can move on to the very end of the lesson.

So, as I mentioned, this is the very last part of our lesson.

I just want to go through some examples of what you may have written for your task just to check that you're on the right track here.

So the first question was about the aim of the campaign.

And here my response is, the 2008 Daily Mail campaign was about trying to lower the number of plastic bags used at shops to reduce the impact on the environment.

And obviously I've shortened this down slightly so that I can fit all of this on the slide for you.

You may have written a longer sentence and that's perfectly fine as well.

And in relation to how the Mail tried to achieve a change, Daily Mail asked readers to send letters to the Prime Minister, and highlighted how nearby countries have successfully adopt the idea.

So by pointing out that other countries had done it, that really kind of gives this idea of people are, "Oh, okay, so it can be done.

It's obviously not that difficult.

If we leave in a country that is quite similar to them and geographically quite close, then maybe it's something that is achievable for us to try out." My third comment is the government introduced a 5P levy on single-use plastic bags in 2015.

And then as a result of that, the use of the bags reduced by 86% by 2018.

So that's a huge difference in only three years to drop down that much.

I think it is fair to say that this campaign was really successful.

Which then ties into the last bit, the final comment, the personal one about why the campaign was successful.

I think it was successful because it made people care.

The sources at the beginning, really kind of wanted people to feel something.

It made them feel like they could make a difference in a way that wasn't going to take a lot of time or effort.

It was something that, it was a small step for them to take that would potentially and ultimately did have a big consequence.

As I said before, you may well have written something different, especially for that personal evaluation.

But hopefully that gives you an idea about what I was expecting in those answers.

We're just going to recap over the lesson.

So we started off by looking at the features of a democracy.

We then had a look at how the media sets the agenda by deciding what to publish.

And we considered about how the different political affiliations might impact upon what and how they report stories.

And the last part of the lesson, which we've just finished, was looking at how and why the media informs and educates the public.

So again, like I've said in the previous lessons as well, I'd really love to see some more of your work.

It's fantastic to be able to have a look at those.

If you would like to share what you've done today, please ask your parent or carer to share your work on Twitter, and make sure they tag @OakNational and use the #LearnwithOak.

We are now halfway through our exploration about how the media affects us.

And as I said before, in our next lesson we're going to look in more detail about how the media holds people in positions of power to account.

So I really hope to see you then and come back soon.