Muslim and the Media Report

             In Australia, where a media culture exists, the consumption of mass media message .
             has increased in the past decade. This suggests an increasing influence of the media on religion and of religion on media.
             .
             FACT OR FICTION.
             While examining a newspaper, the reader is not introduced to "pure information" but a portrayal of contending forces in the world. If one examines the newspaper under this view, it would view reading a newspaper as "attending a mass or a situation in which nothing new is learned but in which a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed." News is a historic reality, a form of culture that was invented by a particular class at a particular point of history. It was created largely by the middle class in the eighteenth century as a "hunger for experience," and to do away with the epic and the heroic. It is an invention in historical times, and like all other human inventions, it will dissolve when the class that sponsors it evaporates. Thus under the ritual view, news is not information, but drama, which helps to constitute a shared social phenomenon, and in the process of describing an event, news defines and shapes that event. .
             Woodward, offers two theoretical approaches to studying news: traditional and interpretive. The traditional view defines the news as dependent upon the society's structure. The social structure produces norms, including attitudes that define aspects of social life, which are of either interest or importance to citizens.
             The news workers, who are socialized to these norms and attitudes, cover and select stories about items as either interesting or important. According to this view, news reflects society or "news presents to a society a mirror of its concerns and interests.