Re-Presentation: Selection, Construction and Mediation
What Does “Re-Presentation” Really Mean?
When you open a newspaper or watch the evening news, you might feel you are looking through a window at the world as it actually is. But media products do not simply capture reality — they re-present it. The hyphen matters: every image, headline and broadcast is the result of choices made by producers, editors and platforms before it ever reaches you.
This is one of the most important ideas in the whole of media studies. Once you understand that every media product is a constructed version of reality, you start asking different questions: who made these choices? What did they leave out? Whose point of view does this reflect?
Every media product is the result of three interlinked processes: selection (choosing what to include), construction (shaping the material into a product) and mediation (filtering the world through the values and perspectives of the producer).
Selection: What Gets In and What Gets Left Out
Selection operates at every stage of production. A photograph of a protest might show a peaceful crowd or a burning barricade — both may have happened, but only one image can appear on the front page. A news editor chooses which stories run, in what order, and how much space each receives. An advertiser chooses which product features to highlight and which to ignore. Every act of selection involves an act of exclusion: what is not shown matters just as much as what is.
Think about a typical front page of a quality daily newspaper. The editors receive hundreds of potential stories each day. Perhaps four or five make the front page. The rest are not shown to readers at all. The selection of those four or five stories, and the prominence given to each, already communicates a set of values about what is important in the world.
Construction: Turning Raw Material into a Product
Construction refers to how the raw material is assembled. A television news report about a local flooding event might begin with aerial drone footage showing submerged streets, cut to a close-up of a tearful resident, then include a statement from a local councillor, and end with a graphic showing predicted rainfall. None of those elements were inevitable — the reporter and editor constructed that sequence to tell a particular kind of story. Choices about framing, camera angle, music, editing pace and the order of speakers all shape the meaning audiences take away.
Mediation is the broadest of the three processes. Even when a producer tries to be objective, their choices are shaped by personal background, cultural context, employer expectations and commercial pressures. The journalist who grew up in a particular community, the broadcaster funded by advertisers, the social media algorithm designed to maximise engagement — all of these forces mediate what audiences see.
Mediation explains why two outlets can cover the same event in ways that feel almost unrecognisable to each other. The event itself has not changed; the filter through which it has passed is different. This is why developing media literacy — the habit of asking how a product was made and why — is so valuable.
Two Competing Views of Media and Reality
When scholars and media professionals debate how truthfully the media represent the world, two broad positions emerge. The first, sometimes called the “window on the world” view, holds that media products — especially factual ones like news — can and should aim for an accurate, transparent picture of events. On this view, bias and distortion are departures from a norm of objectivity that is possible in principle.
The second view, associated with the phrase “the medium is the message” (popularised by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan), argues that the form of a medium shapes meaning at least as much as its content. A photograph, a radio broadcast and a social media post covering the same event will produce fundamentally different meanings because each medium has its own logic, its own codes, its own relationship to time and audience. There is no neutral, transparent window — only different kinds of glass.
Marshall McLuhan argued that the properties of a medium — not just its content — shape the meaning audiences receive. A photograph communicates differently from radio or text even when covering the same story, because each medium involves different codes, different timing and a different relationship with its audience.
Re-presentation is not a neutral act — it positions the audience to read the product in a particular way. Audience positioning works through all the codes discussed in Media Language: camera angle, word choice, music, layout and the sequence in which information appears. A low-angle shot of a politician makes them seem powerful; a high-angle shot of the same person makes them seem small and vulnerable. Neither angle is ‘neutral’ — both are choices.
Producers typically try to build a preferred or dominant reading into their product — the interpretation they want audiences to take away. This preferred reading is never guaranteed, because audiences can and do resist or challenge it, but it is built into the structure of the product through selection, construction and mediation. Understanding this is what allows a media-literate viewer to read against the grain of a product and notice the ideology it carries.
Verisimilitude and the Appearance of Reality
Even clearly fictional products — a soap opera, a crime drama, an advertising lifestyle shoot — depend on appearing believable. Verisimilitude is the technical term for this appearance of reality. Producers use realistic settings, naturalistic dialogue, location filming and real-world problems to make audiences feel the product reflects something true about life. The more verisimilitude a product achieves, the more powerfully it can position audiences and communicate an ideology, because audiences are less likely to question what feels real.