First 544 words of the document:
To what extent are people influenced by printed media?
In this essay I will talk about the extents that people are influenced by printed media. I will talk about
political agendas and allegiances, bias and about different types of printed media. I will also talk
about how people can be influenced by printed media and about how printed media influences our
Printed media consists mainly of newspapers and magazines. There are two types of national
newspapers: popular or tabloid newspapers and quality or broadsheet newspapers. Broadsheet
newspapers are normally bought by `more intelligent' people or people who want to learn. They also
tend to be bigger in length and width. Broadsheet newspapers also have more intellectual articles in
them. Tabloid newspapers are normally bought by people who want to read newspapers but not
broadsheets. They normally have general interest stories in them. People can be influenced by
newspapers easily as newspapers print what they want to. They also can be biased on a political
basis and this also influences us.
Magazines are also a type of printed media. They tend to be targeted at an audience that don't
want to learn. A lot of the time the target audience is teenagers but for specialised magazines the
target audience are fans of the specialised area the magazine deals with. In some educational articles
they might have in the magazine, they will influence the reader to buy or do the certain thing that
they want the reader to do, e.g. in a teen fashion magazine they could influence a teenage girl to buy
a certain bag etc. Magazines rely heavily on advertising. If a person sees an advert showing how
good the magazine is a few times then the person will be influenced to buy it. The more people
seeing and buying the magazine, the bigger the profit they make. These tend not to bias on a
political basis and so do not influence us in that way.
Newspapers and magazines, but especially newspapers tend to side with a different political party.
They can also have a political alignment e.g. the Daily Mail's political alignment is traditionalist
conservatism. This means that they can be biased to different political parties and perhaps not write
the complete truth about political stories. Newspapers could also be right-wing (right-wing meaning
the conservative section of a political party or system) or left-wing (left-wing meaning the radical
section of a political party or system). Some newspapers are neither and try to keep themselves as
neutral as possible. This means that they can give coverage of politics without being biased. If a
newspaper is biased, they will write articles biased against that political party. This means that they
will influence all the people who will read that article.
In conclusion I think that people can be influenced to a big extent by printed media. They influence
not only our political views, but also what we buy and what we think. This shows the extent to which
people can be influenced.