David Morley and Stuart Hall

David Morley was a media researcher who specialised in audience theory, which is an element of thinking that developed within academic literary theory and cultural studies. His research has addressed questions in relation to media consumption and the effect that it has on viewers. He worked for the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies(CCCS) – a research centre in the University of Birmingham, primarily in the 1970s.Morley conducted The Nationwide Project in the late 1970s and early 1980s, alongside Charlotte Brunsdon, which focused on media audiences. He undertook a frequent amount of research with various participants from various educational and occupational backgrounds.
The initial conclusion of the project was that decoding's cannot be traced solely to socioeconomic position, since members of the sample occupying the same class location produced different readings.
However, media critic Sujeong Kim's statistical re- analysis of the projects findings suggests that this may have been an under interpretation. For example, Kim observes that middle class viewers produced negotiated readings of one particular programme, while working class viewers produced dominant or oppositional readings dependent on their gender and race.

Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall looked at the role of audience positioning in the interpretation of mass media texts by different social groups. Hall came up with a model suggesting three ways in which we may read a media text.

- Encoding and decoding
-Dominant reading - reader fully accepts the preferred reading (audience will read the text the way the author intended them to) so that the code seems natural and transparent.
- The negotiated reading – the reader partly believes the code and broadly accepts the preferred reading, but sometimes modifies it in a way which reflects their own position, experiences and interests. 
-The oppositional reading – the readers social position places them in an oppositional relation to the dominant code.