Theories Concepts and Debates in Mass Communications

Extenuating circumstances

If you are experiencing unforeseen personal circumstances that are affecting your ability tosubmit within the stipulated deadlines, you are required to communicate these issues to the Unicaf Extenuating Circumstances team in the first instance, via extenuating for further information on how to make a personal circumstances application for consideration.

Personal circumstances requests may usually only be made within 5 working days of the original deadline unless valid justification, along with appropriate evidence, exists to show that you could not have reasonably communicated the issues any earlier. It is important to keep in mind that if the claim is not upheld and you have not submitted by thedeadline, the module shall be failed as a result of no submission of the summative assessment.

Academic Misconduct Including Plagiarism

Ensure that you are familiar with the relevant regulations regarding academic misconduct. By submitting the assignment, you declare that it is your own work and that the material and sources of information used, including internet sources, have been fully identified and properly acknowledged. In addition, you confirm that the presented work has not been submitted for any other assessment. You also acknowledge that the faculty reserves the right to investigate allegations of plagiarism and other forms of academic misconduct which, if proven and dependent on the severity level of the offence, may result in a penalty that could affect your progress.

By submitting your work, you acknowledge that you have read and agree with the above statements.

General Guidance
Your assignment should be word processed (handwritten assignments are not accepted), using Times New Roman, Font Size 12, 1,5 line spacing, with numbered pages and your student number printed as a footer on every page.

The word limits stated for this assignment excludes the reference list at the end of the assignment but includes all text in the main body of the assignment (including direct quotations, in-text citations, footnotes, tables, diagrams and graphs).
Please be aware that exceeding the word count limit will affect the academic judgement of the piece of work and may result in the award of a lower mark.

Appendices are not considered a supplement, and thus, will not be assessed as part of the content of the assignment. Please note that appendices are not included in the word count.

The majority of references should come from primary sources (e.g., journal articles, books conference papers, reports, etc.) although you can also utilise area specific textbooks. You must ensure that you use the Harvard style of referencing.
Please indicate the word count length at the end of your assignment.
The file types that are accepted are: Doc Microsoft Word (DOC) and PDF Portable Document Format (.PDF).

Marking and Assessment

This summative assessment consists of one (1) assignment 1,500 words. While it will be graded out of 100, the weighting for the overall for this assessment will be 40%.

Assessment 1will be assessed according to the following criteria:

1. Ability to assess existing theoretical and methodological approaches in Mass Communication scholarship.
2. Ability to evaluate the main arguments in the assigned journal article.
3. Ability to construct a coherent essay.
4. Ability to present work in an appropriate academic style.

Assignment 1 Essay (40% of final module mark) (1, 500 Words)

For this assignment you are required to write a 1,500 words (+/- 10%) evaluative essay on the following journal article:

Hyun, D.K., and Moon, J.S. (2016). Agenda Setting in the Partisan TV News Context: Attribute Agenda Setting and Polarised Evaluation of Presidential Candidates Among Viewers of NBC, CNN, and Fox News. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 93 (3), pp.509-529.
DOI:10.1177/1077699016628820

OR

Williams, D., Martins, N., Consalvo, M. and Ivory, J. D. (2009) The virtual census: representations of gender, race and age in video games. New Media & Society, 11 (5), pp. 815- 834.

When writing your evaluation, pay critical attention to the authors’ main arguments, use of theory and use of research methods.