In this week’s article, Mary Macken-Horarik discusses media discourses, focusing in particular on the ways the media re-shapes the structure of a news story and providing us with information implicating powerful ‘truths’. Macken-Horarik explains that through the use of composite texts – those that include interaction between communicative resources e.g. visual, verbal, layout, and typographic – the media is able to fabricate ‘believable’ stories and sell them as ‘news items.’ One of the greatest associations that permit the ‘validity’ of these texts is the “complementary truths of word and image.”
The article states that “multimodal texts like newspapers are a crucial public resource in the production of social attitudes towards particular groups of people”. With western media becoming increasingly “Multimodal”, society’s perception is not just affected by the text, but by the headlines, layout as well as photographs in the article. The media can change our prejudice towards events and people.
The key aims of this article is to inform the responder that the media needs to be analyzed, due to its ability to manipulate visual and verbal forms of communication to further manipulate the way society thinks and feels which can lead to damaging social discourses. This is explained through concepts such as “Genericisation-Specification” and “Categorization”.
The concept of “Genericisation-Specification” can be used to identify how the media can shape meaning. Essentially, this concept analyses whether a character in the media is being depicted generally or specifically. In the case involving the ‘children overboard’ scandal, the ‘boat people’ were just depicted with images and words to appear generally.  These invoked feelings of emotional distance and the government, were being depicted specifically to allow us to feel more emotionally connected to the government’s view.
The view of identity portrayed by the media is addressed as ‘categorization’. This is where representation is concerned with defining their subjects with what they do or alternatively with what they are. The consequences are that discourses are easily manipulated through society this way. From the ‘children overboard’ article, it is shown through visual and verbal forms that the Government and Navy are depicted by their occupations to display authority and the asylum seekers are depicted by what they are, i.e. ‘boat people’. The idea behind depicting the asylum seekers as ‘boat people’ creates a more broad and permanent identity. The permanent identity is then easily combined with negative connotations associated from authority i.e. the government, in order to create desired meanings and discourses in society.