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TELEVISION NEWS AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT 129

set by the Government would hold and whether some ‘statutory measures’
would have to be introduced, television journalism did not question the basic
premise that inflation was ‘wages-led’: on the contrary, this premise constituted
the baseline of television’s accounts. This form of constructing television’s
account does not contravene the editorial imperative to demonstrate ‘due
impartiality’. According to the Annan Committee’s Report, ‘broadcasters must
take account, not just of the whole range of views on an issue, but also of the
weight of opinion which holds these views’. To put it another way, the practices
of television journalism reproduce accurately the way in which ‘public opinion’
has already been formed in the primary domains of political and economic
struggle, how it has been structured in dominance there.
Television journalism does not accomplish this work of reproduction by being
‘biased’, as this has been defined by the conspiracy thesis. It is not accomplished
despite the basic editorial criteria, but rather precisely in and through their
practical implementation. It is because this policy is put into practice that a
complex unity is forged between the accounts produced by television and these
primary accounts which are constituted in the social formation as the dominant,
sometimes hegemonic, definitions of political-economic antagonisms. While the
basic editorial criteria are, as a matter of course, scrupulously implemented, it
does not follow, as many a professional broadcaster has imagined, that television
journalism is ideologically inert. Television is an ideological instance precisely
because of the effectivity of these editorial criteria. This can be seen, for
example, in the shaping of ‘topics’ by the practices of television journalism. The
explanations proffered by news and current affairs programmes are made to seem
the ‘best sense’ of a given situation. They are, in the unfolding of television’s
account, categorized as ‘common sense’, ‘moderate public opinion’, ‘rational
understanding’ or ‘the consensus’. The basis of these explanations are the
already constructed definitions in dominance. Television actively and
independently contributes to their dominance by working them into the fabric of
its explanations and by granting to them the status of what ‘many’ or ‘most’
people think.
A precondition of this ideological labour is the separation and fragmentation
of television’s coverage from the actual events covered. Through a series of
visual and verbal operations discussed below, television’s account is made to
seem apart from, above and beyond, the struggles over the Social Contract. It is
made to seem a ‘neutral’ space for the serious discussion of controversies.
Simultaneously, these same operations construct an ‘audience position’ which,
like the account itself, is separated out: the audience is constantly hailed as
witness of, but not participant in, the struggle and argument over issues. This is
the result of the construction of a televisual space in which the struggles are

*This revised chapter from Ian Connell’s Ph.D thesis was first published in Screen, vol.
20, no. 1, and is reprinted here with kind permission.