Press Freedom

 Phone Hacking Scandal

• Rupert Murdoch
• missing school girls phone hacked
• parents checked the girls voicemail and saw them to be regularly checked and they and police believed her to be alive
• turns out the news had accessed her voicemail and she was long dead
• Official papers would hack phones or voicemails
• An ex MP's affair was exposed this way
• families of terror attack victims and families of dead Afghanistan soldiers
• All happened under Rupert Murdoch's paper news of the world edited by the prime ministers communications officer
• The newspaper is now shut down
• the Leverson inquiry investigated the practices and ethics of the press

Daily Mail online publish about 2000 articles per day which equates to about 4000 pictures per day - essentially impossible to regulate. Instead, complaints and inaccuracies are raised post article - this means that the news has already reached its audience. Regulators are reactionary.

OFFCOM is the TV news regulators and news on a whole is regulated by certain rules -

Editors' Code of Practice (ipso.co.uk)

IPSO is the chosen regulator for most national papers but is not state backed. Impress however is and gets money through the government - this is a problem as any governmental stories any be covered up or reported less

The Daily Mail is regulated by IPSO and The Guardian is regulated by themselves as they don't believe IPSO is good enough

1- 2 mid market tabloids: daily mail/express

2-The Sun, the Times and sunday times

3-Right wing

4-Mirror Daily express/star

5-no bias as its supported by multiple people

6-daily mail

7-we're backing Britain

8-the heart of Britain

Case Study-

June 16th 2023 - Ethics committee investigating if there were parties during COVID lockdown

Despite being proven to have lied about it, there was still support and opposition for Boris in the press

The Daily Telegraph essentially avoided the entire story

The I condemned him as well as calling him a liar

The Daily Express called the whole situation a stitch up

The Mirror also called him a lair

The Daily Mail called it a vindictive bid against him and hired him to write for them

The Guardian reported it fairly neutrally however named his punishment and what he did

From Snow White to Shang Chi

•  The debts were paid off  until Walt spent it all on new films ,millions of profits in the bank then Walt buys a studio which grows and grows and is now the huge global conglomerate
• reduction in quality to speed up process had to occur but Walt hated this idea
• WW2 saw the Disney studios commandeered
• Walt died in 1966 making the jungle book

Places Snow White is seen outside of her film

• Sophia the First - A tv about a young princess receiving guidance from established princesses
• Shrek - DreamWorks owner used to be a boss of Disney
• Wreck it Ralph
• Disney Land
• Macey's window display
• 9 to 5 - a film
• Games
• Wandavision

Despite the films huge success, on release their was so much buzz about the actual film an dhow innovative it was that nobody stopped to think about the problems of the film such as all its blatant sexist scenes and overall messages conveyed - this could be due to how the film was made in 1937 and based off a fairy tale from the 1800's so it was very old fashioned and is not representative of todays society

Disney has had to change with the times.

Some problems Disney faced include-

• Naming characters after their flaws
• The representation of dwarfism
• Huge consent concerns over the 'true loves kiss'

Ariel (The Little Mermaid)

• Heir to the throne of Atlantica - an underwater kingdom
• 16 years old
• isolated but wants to explore (common theme in Disney)
• Rescued a prince from a shipwreck (somewhat newer theme in Disney of the female saving the prince)
• Antagonist is Ursula who wants Tritons throne however is killed by the prince

Diversity/Lack of in Hollywood-

The film industry was accused of being too white, American, narrow, straight and too male - Lack of representation and diversity.

#OscarsSoWhite - in 2020 almost every Oscar nominee was white or straight - found that 90% where white of the nomination committee - unrepresentative of America

Disney's response to this was Shang-Chi as well as more diverse casts in the remakes

Ownership and Regulation

 

Vast majority of news is consumed physically (print) however this is very dated and could soon change.

The Daily Mail is the most visited news site in the WORLD.

Shows that their is 2 diff audiences for online and print news however 55+ aged audiences are vital as statistically they vote the most.

The fourth estate - The people/organizations that produce the news have an 'unofficial' yet significant political influence

Horizontal integration - buying the competition

vertical - buying the entire process

NEED TO KNOW-

• It is important to have free press in a democratic society - fourth estate holds the powerful to account
• Viscount Rothermere owns Daily Mail group and had 30+% market share - 2nd to news corp - news Baron
• Majority newspapers have a right wing bias
• Most popular news site is the mail online - 4.5 million unique daily users
• The Guardian is considered the most popular news source for hard news
• The Mail have recently come under pressure from campaign groups seeking to influence editorial decisions by pressuring advertisers, They recently lost their editor for being too critical of Boris Johnson
• Guardian viewers are typically left - Labour or Lib Dem
• Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust charity (10% market share)
• The Daily Mail is the biggest UK selling newspaper
• Guardian only recently began to make profit after years of loosing money (almost a million per week) from subscriptions, donations and print advertising. Supportive of participatory culture.
• Considers itself the world's leading campaigning/liberal voice - internationalist aspirations

Snow White and Technology

 Disney were and will always be at the forefront of technology by buying, using and even developing their own tech.

4 Key Uses of Technology in Snow White-

• Rotoscoping - Using videos as the inspiration for movement in animation by tracing. It is a way to film real movement to create better animation - filmed live motion then put in front of a white sheet and car headlights for contrast - got tracing paper and traced the movements relative to their characters - very smooth results

• CELS - Short for celluloid and is a transparent sheet where animations are drawn, Snow White showed 24 Cels(per second and used over 200 000 individual cels)

• Technicolor - Transferring dye into 3 separate film strips and Walt bough the rights to the process and was very expensive however unlike previous techniques, it didn't fade. 

• The Multiplane Camera - splits a scenery into multiple different frames (foreground/background) that can be individually moved forwards and backwards in order to simulate a live scene. Multi means more than one and plane is a flat surface so its is basically called more than one flat surface camera.

Walt Disney Introduces the Multiplane Camera - YouTube

Production- 

1. Grimm brothers initial story
2. Snow White silent film Walt watched in 1934
3. Pitching to his workers
4. Storyboard is made - rough drawings
5. soundtrack/lines recorded - 
6. evolution of the characters and refinement of characters
7. advertising during production to maintain cashflow - made short films
8. created their own ink out of makeup - 150 artists - 1500 colors used
9. Edited and deleted scenes
10. 6 months before completion, they ran out of budget money 500k was the original budget
11. The last few months was the fine tuning stage where Walt would oversee EVERYTHING and make his own adjustments

Disney have recently reported some quarterly falls however have tried to combat it in many ways

• Increased content
• Disney premier access - an extra subscription that costs more to gain the premiers  -can watch it sooner- of new films - this however had many effects on cinema as their whole USP is being able to see films before the TV release

Disney have had many recent cinema conflicts one of which being Scarlett Johannsson contract for black widow being a cut of cinema profits but due to the pandemic, it never premiered so she had to sue.

                                                                             Team A-

• 20.49 billion British pounds - how else can we make that money - would it come out of taxpayers money as opposed to 2.3 billion in streaming
• post pandemic ticket sales were only 67% of pre pandemic so cinema is still on the rise as the hobby slowly reintegrates into peoples lives 117.3 million ticket sales last year

Team B however discussed the portability of streaming services which is a very good point however WE STILL WON