Page 139 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

11
Television news and the Social Contract*

Ian Connell

The ‘impartiality’ of television news and current affairs is now widely
considered a myth. This standard critique is usually presented in terms of ‘bias’
and ‘distortion’. In this article I argue against the terms and implications of this
position. In a wide variety of studies the pictures and definitions constructed by
journalistic practices are said to provide ‘biased’ or ‘distorted’ accounts of an
independent and objective reality; they are ‘biased’ or ‘distorted’ because they
are informed by a body of ruling and dominant ideas, which are said to ‘belong’,
in a simple way, to ruling political or economic groups. In short, television
journalism is made to appear to be a kind of megaphone by which ruling ideas
are amplified and generalized across all sectors of the social formation.
The material examined here is television’s account of the Labour
Government’s attempts, since October 1974, to win, and maintain the ‘voluntary
obedience’ of trade unions to the policy of wage restraint. This account recruited
and represented the different positions constructed in and through the struggles
between unions, Government and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) leadership.
There was no attempt to mask the controversial reception of the Government’s
economic policy. Particularly during ‘Phase Three’ of this policy, much of the
reporting concentrated on explicit trade union opposition. If television were
‘biased’, as the conspiracy theorists would have it, if it took its orders directly
and unquestioningly from the ruling political-economic forces and if, moreover,
it had no material presence and effectivity of its own, there would have been
little or no representation of this opposition.
It could certainly be argued that while the positions of all those directly
involved in the negotiations and struggles over and around the Social Contract
were aired, not all of them had access to television in the same way. As this
article attempts to demonstrate, some of the already constructed positions on the
Social Contract, particularly the position which argued for a return to free
collective bargaining, were subordinated in the discourse of news and current
affairs. At the same time, the Government’s position was taken over and
constructed as the ‘basis of reality’ on which serious discussion was mounted.
While Labour Ministers and their supporters, including, at crucial moments, the
Economic Committee of the TUC, were asked whether a ‘voluntary policy’
would be effective, while there was speculation about whether the various limits