The most studied thing concerning media audiences is the effect media texts have on them and how it happens. Moral panics have sometimes been focused on different media texts. A reason for some of this occurring is because young children are the vulnerable people and could be ‘corrupted’. An argument about the effects could be that did not have an effect on people, they would not advertise because money would be lost. Also, it is possible that media audiences use media rather than be used by the media.
Audiences use entertainment to help them escape from reality. Capitalism also creates the need for entertainment that gives options to capitalism but would be given out by capitalism. Also, entertainment is not limited to fictional text. So, since entertainment defines what utopia is, there is no room for a classless society or for equality between races and sexes. The media can create a panic where none should be.
Most media texts have specific meanings encoded within them but the audience receiving the text determined how they were read. Different generations can also have very different experiences of the same texts. Ethnography is the study that the researcher should become part of the audience he or she is studying. It looks beyond a text to understand what readings audiences make. It is currently being polarized between the theories of mass audience and the detailed accounts of the readings of particular programs.