主讲课文 What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream数字时代的商务英语写作.pdf

Unit 1: Fact or Fable 1 Text I What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream Noam Chomsky [1] Part of the reason why I write about the media is because I am interested in the whole intellectual culture, and the part of it that is easiest to study is the media. It comes out every day. You can do a systematic investigation. You can compare yesterday’s version to today’s version. There is a lot of evidence about what’s played up and what isn’t and the way things are structured. [2] My impression is the media aren’t very different from scholarship or from, say, journals of intellectual opinion—there are some extra constraints—but it’s not radically different. They interact, which is why people go up and back quite easily among them. You want to study the media the way, say, a scientist would study some complex molecule or something. You take a look at its internal institutional structure and then make some hypothesis based on the structure as to what the media product is likely to look like. Then you investigate the media product and see how well it conforms to the hypotheses. Virtually all work in media analysis is this last part—trying to study carefully just what the media product is and whether it conforms to obvious assumptions about the nature and structure of the media. [3] Well, what do you find? First of all, you find that there are different media which do different things, like the entertainment/Hollywood, soap operas, and so on, or even most of the newspapers in the country (the overwhelming majority of them). They are directing the mass audience. [4] There is another