All media texts are written with a certain type of audience in mind. The reason  this is done is because every producer needs an audience in mind when producing a show or a movie. It is equally important for a distributor to know who their audience is so they know how to advertise it. The way it is going to be distributed is then shown to the broadcasting institute, for example the BBC or ITV. The criteria which the audience is surveyed under could be there age, their interests during their leisure time and what shows they already watch.

Moral panic is a term used to describe media presentation of something that has happened that the public will react to in a panicky manner. An example of this would be if a horror, or highly violent film was released. The moral panic of this would be that people would see what happened in the film and reenact it in real life. This begs the question, should events such as rape, and murder be allowed on screen, if people who are easily influenced are exposed to it? Examples of these texts which have been accused of promoting rape and murder are, 'Child's Play 3', 'Manhunt' and 'A Clockwork Orange'. 

Bandura, Ross and Ross (1961) tested 36 boys and 36 girls from the Stanford University Nursery School aged between 3 to 6 years old. The researchers pre-tested the children for how aggressive they were by observing the children in the nursery and judged their aggressive behavior on four 5-point rating scales. It was then possible to match the children in each group so that they had similar levels of aggression in their everyday behavior. The experiment is therefore an example of a matched pairs design.

Theodore Adorno argued that a capitalist government fed people with the products of a culture orientated industry.  Adorno believed that we were all passive consumers and that we were being fed through the 'hypodermic syringe'. This is the belief that we are told what to believe to distract us from the lack of freedom and free will that we actually have. He believes that the capitalist government feeds us this and we cannot do anything about it as we are to oblivious to even notice. Adorno also pushed the idea of false needs, we are distracted by things we don't need, such as a new phone, rather than our human rights. 

Katz and Lazarsfiled assumed that audiences are more active than Adorno suggests. They believed that media moves in two ways. The first way is when opinion leaders receive information from the press and then pass it on with their own interpretation. The information does not go straight to the audiences but instead to leaders who then pass it on to a more passive audience. The people are then influenced by the opinion of the opinion leaders thus being influenced by a two step flow model not a direct process. This took power away from the media and researchers now believe social factors play a role in how information is received.