Plunkett, John. Queen Victoria. First Media Monarch. Oxford, 2003.
In Queen Victoria: The First Media Monarch, author John Plunkett examines the
correlation with the rise of mass media and the perception of Queen Victoria. Public opinion
and visual interpretations go hand in hand in the multifarious image of the Queen. He explores
the “publicness” that was associated with Queen Victoria and later Prince Albert, thus ordaining
her the “first media monarch”.
He uses a chronological approach to display the changing role and perception of the
monarch by the media, using milestone events such as the assentation, coronation, and marriage
to Prince Albert. Plunkett focuses on the first portion of Victoria’s reign because it shows a
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This is a paradoxical statement in that media was a modern
avenue to convey ideas, individual ideas and opinions at that. As mentioned above, Plunkett’s
thesis is “growth of a mass print and visual culture in the 19th century was a vital influence upon
the development of the British monarchy. (1)”
One of Plunkett’s most successful analogies is his comparison of Queen Victoria to
Russian Nesting Dolls. This visual is effective in the understanding of his argument. With the
advent of mass media, various perceptions and interpretations of Queen Victoria abounded. Her
iconic image was built up out of countless different smaller versions (2).
In his introduction, Plunkett asserts that he will use the term “media making” as a theme
throughout the monograph as it relates to each of the chapters listed. Media making was born out
of the amount of publicness that this nineteenth century monarch enjoyed (7). The features of
media making incorporate both the individual and collective experience provided by different
forms of media (7).
Through Plunkett’s discussion of civic publicness, he clearly lays out the
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That being said,
Plunkett argues that professional journalism and the monarchy were interdependent on each
other (199). Plunkett furthermore makes the keen observation that journalism in this time was
anything but homogenous. He notes that various news establishments had a variety of motives as
well as a spectrum of funding sources and the lack thereof.
Plunkett’s success lies in the originality of his arguments and the themes addressed
throughout the book. He asserts in the introduction that scarce attention has been paid towards
the interplay between 19th century monarchy and its tangible representations, especially in
Britain. Though his five chapters are thematic, the contents are not unclear and the prose it easy
to follow. Plunkett’s variety of sources are both necessary and successful in his attempt to merge
ideas about the monarchy and its representations through the media.
He analyzes newspapers, periodicals that look at key events in her early reign including
her assentation, coronation, marriage and subsequent births. The over forty illustrations included
throughout the monograph are helpful in providing context to the discussion of these
Canada holds the same beliefs about pubic broadcasting as Lowe & Jauert (2005). As a nation that is not only democratic but multicultural and diverse, media influence plays a major role in bringing together and shaping the Canadian society. Howev...
TUNSTALL , Jeremy. “The Media Are American: Anglo-American Media in the World.” London: Constable, 1977.
Vipond, M. (2000). The Mass Media in Canada. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Publishers.
From her youth, Queen Victoria was in a position of power to change the world. As a young child she grew up with her widowed mother. When Victoria was one year old her father died of pneumonia(“Edward, Duke of Kent”). At age 18 she inherited the throne because of the lack of heirs.
The Prime Minister of Spain once told an American, “The newspapers in your country seem to be more powerful than the government.” This statement was never more true than in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. The rulers of the New York newspaper empire, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, battled against one another in the ultimate test of journalism. With a real war on the horizon, these men fought to produce the most sensational stories Americans had ever read; and, as a result, they brought forth a new age in the American newspaper business, an age of fighting for the little guy, and beating back tyranny one paper at a time.
The title of The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England is misleading. The descriptions of the “warrior queens” and the language used to describe them is overwhelmingly negative, when queens are talked about at all. Through the 245 years of Plantagenet rule, to the author, Dan Jones, only three queens warranted more description than their place of origin, children, and death. Even as he did mention the three, Empress Matilda, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Queen Isabella of France, they were given mere paragraphs in the greater chapters of kings. These powerful woman faced a patriarchal society that trapped them and now they are trapped by the musings of an author who ignored them.
Schwartz, Donna. “Objective Representation: Photographs as Facts.” Picturing the Past: Media History & Photography. Ed. Bonnie Brennen, Hanno Hardt. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. 158-181.
The meaning of Lord Northcliffe’s (1865-1922) quote: “News is what people do not want you to print. All the rest is advertising,” varies depending on the individual’s interpretation of the word ‘advertising’. However, all discrepancies aside, this quote simply implies that all published items that should be considered news retain some form of ethical issue in the context. After critical investigation, however, this quote may be deemed false, as it does not account for all aspects of a story which are currently considered news worthy. The newsworthiness of particular stories varies throughout time as the interests of the consumer alter, however the chief news values have remained constant for generations (Harcup 2009).
It is a culture in which private persons (the public) do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers. We are in a moment of time in which an explosion of new media technology has made it very easy for everyday people to take media in their own hands to create, to share, to express themselves, through every possible media channel. Participatory culture could be defined as new ways of life that lead people to create and circulate new self-made content including video, audio, text, and images. The movement is taking shape and being popularized by consumer social networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr, and Wikipedia that encourage mass participation and collaboration. Participatory culture is changing the way people and the media communicate and actively engage. The characteristic that define modern participatory culture is that consumption is no longer the only way we used media like in the past. We have started to expand our focus to include producing and sharing media too which can be found in any form or content. Example would be fan communities, groups of gamers, the blogging population, and various sub cultures online. What these groups have in common is their supportive environments in which to create and share. There is an assumption that anyone who is currently a reader could become a writer, anyone who is a consumer can become a producer. Participatory culture fostered by new media is like a communication triathlon involving consumption, production, and sharing leads to more knowledge. Many of these tools allow us to remix, recirculate, content from media as a mode of creative expression. There is an informal training process for experienced participants help newbies acquire the skills they need to be...
Hartley, John (2002), Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts, London, Routledge, pp. 19-21.
Campbell, Richard. Media & Culture: an introduction to mass communication. Bedford/St. Martin?s: Boston, N.Y. 2005.
Thompson, B. John (1995) “Self and Experience in a Mediated World”, The Media and Modernity : A Social Theory of the Media, Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp.209-219.
The first is the crisis of viability. The chance of success in the journalism in the mainstream is approaching a decline due to the transformations in technologies and new access to multiple sources of information. The second is a crisis in civic adequacy. The contributions of journalism to citizenship and democracy have begun to shift and this shift has caused a question of the relevancy of journalism to democratic processes. In a democratic society journalism plays the role of the government watchdog. The effectiveness of society’s watchdog is now being challenged and in turn alternating the structure of the current democratic society. Many critical theorists of the press during the beginning of the 20th century were concerned with finding appropriate forms of public regulation of the press and journalism to ensure that journalists are writing “news and information about public affairs which sustains and nurtures citizen information, understanding and engagement and thereby a democratic polity” (Cushion and Franklin, 2015: 75) (Dahlgren, Splichal 2016). Journalism is a political entity that influences and informs the public. It is meant to work as a source of public information that helps and does not hinder the general public specifically in political processes. The article
...ely available and accessible from everywhere. New media has introduced innovative platforms and ways to consume media products, they have been embedded into our social context that we are unaware of the different ways we are constantly relying on technology. This leads us to call for more contemporary studies towards new media audiences for a more in-depth analysis and how they have merged the different contexts of media consumption.
McLoed and Hawley (as cited in Wilson, 1995) elucidated appropriately, "a recurrent journalistic controversy has involved the question whether journalism is a true profession or merely a craft." Sparked primarily by Lippmann and Dewey, extending into the age of the penny press (mid 1980s) and later, the attempt to commercialise the news (late 1980s) to our present era, there has existed a contentious debate on journalism being distinguished as a profession (Wilson, 1995). Encapsulated in a democratic homeland since the advent of time, media systems are habitually acclaimed as the “fourth power,” with its journalists often hailed as the “watch-dogs” of such a society. Lending itself to act as ‘gatekeeper’ for the wider society and performing the traditional role of journalism, the media (overall) exist as powerful “instruments of knowledge” that perform the function of providing information to the masses in a public sphere, where issues may be discussed, justified and contested (Scannell, 1995, p. 17). Evidently, media workers play a pivotal role in our society; however, their status in the realm of professions is not definite.