ABSTRACT
Audiences’ understandings take many forms; what we ‘know’ is expressed through ‘facts’ and theories, images and words, jokes and stories. Our knowledge consists of unspoken assumptions, ‘common sense’, carefully constructed accounts and hotly defended beliefs. Whether we are acting as members of different audience groups or as journalists on different newspapers we are not passive reproducers of information. We recall some ideas and forget others, we accept some and reject some, we highlight, oppose, censure and reinforce different messages at different times for different audiences of our own (whether these are newspaper readers or our friends, families and colleagues).
