Media texts are vivid, verbal, print, or electric communications with an unrestricted audience. They are produced and showcased by a technology that many people control. They are commonly used to entertain, encourage, or teach the public about a certain affair or event. These media texts are written or created on different issues depending on the pace of the organization, where they can be faced with different pros and cons in publication. The different types of media texts include newsprint texts, graphic texts, dialogues, radio interview records, and television documentaries.
Newspaper texts are commonly used to create awareness of different issues happening around the world. It has got three parts which are the byline, lead, and the body. They are usually printed and circulated every day or weekly by different organizations. Editors and reporters face daily issues such as the drop in newspaper readership and the difficulty of attracting the youth (Tewksbury & Scheufele, 2019). Also, creation expenses and absence of timely apprise rather than reliability or content value, and high illiteracy levels of the audience are cons associated with newspaper texts (Shea, 2015). However, as newspapers persist converging with the internet, other problems are overshadowed.
A radio transcript of an interview is also an example of a media text. They have inscribed records of concluded verbal interviews. It is also a document discussion between two or more individuals (Zhue et al., 2021). The transcript consists of the names of the interviewer and the interviewee and the date and time when the interview took place. They are beneficial since they provide accurate records of the events in an interview (Zhue et al., 2021). The issues that affect the transcript are mostly the parties’ fluency, low selling points of the topic at hand, time management, and language barriers.
The historical roots help in bringing light to how the newspapers evolved. The oldest handwritten news sheets were distributed as early as 1566 (Hangli, 2020). They were mostly full of information on wars and politics in Italy and Europe. The first printed newspaper was published weekly in Germany in 1609 (Hall, 2019). They were used since it was the most effective method of connecting the government with the people and helping citizens become more knowledgeable about their nation. The radio transcript was invented in 1895 by Guglielmo Marconi while experimenting in his parent’s attic (Mchugh, 2019). It was invented since it makes it easier for a user to access content and clear misunderstandings brought by breaks in speech.
Ideology is the context of the rational character of a community or a person. Its purpose is to compromise devotion to established ideals where conformity already occurs through a nominative thought procedure. According to Taiwo, no news statement is ideologically unbiased, clear, or innocent (2007). They are all subjected to linguistic manipulations, including news reports, captions, and commercials. In the present study, ideology is being studied in the setting of newspaper headlines (Taiwo, 2007). Thus it plays a key role in the publication of newspaper texts.
In conclusion, the different media texts strive to adapt to the changing environment. They continue to advance as per the wishes of their audience to be more efficient. They also try to outshine each other to be in a better position to convey messages to the targeted audience. It can be clearly defined that media texts are essential in our daily lives since they make people understand and provide assumptions and justifications on different issues.
References
Hall, S. (2019). The determinations of news photographs (1973). In Crime and media (pp. 123-134). Hänggli, R. (2020). The origin of dialogue in the news media. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Routledge.
McHugh, S. (2019). The affective power of sound: Oral history on radio. The Oral History Review.
Shea, N. A. (2015). Examining the nexus of science communication and science education: A content analysis of genetics news articles. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 52(3), 397-409.
Tewksbury, D., & Scheufele, D. A. (2019). News framing theory and research. In Media effects (pp. 51-68). Routledge.
Zhu, C., Liu, Y., Mei, J., & Zeng, M. (2021). MediaSum: A large-scale media interview dataset for dialogue summarization. arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.06410.
Taiwo, R. (2007). Language, Ideology and Power Relations in Nigerian Newspaper Headlines. Nebula, 4(1).