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130 MEDIA STUDIES

dramatized through the employment of various ‘actuality forms’ and then framed
and focused by an authoritative, informational address that offers its abstracted
sense to the audience. It is here, in particular, that it is necessary to highlight how
television journalism attempts the generalization of its explanations. So the main
proposition which this article will elaborate is that in and through the signifying
practices specific to television journalism political-economic antagonisms are
contained and their development as antagonisms is neutralized. This is not
accomplished by abandoning the basic editorial imperatives but, on the contrary,
by fulfilling them.
The following sections consider the relation between television journalism, the
Government and trade unions, not by recording and examining what broadcasters
have to say about their views of this relation, but rather by examining how these
views are constructed and articulated in and through the routine operations of
journalistic story-telling. We will therefore be focusing upon the perspectives,
themes and propositions which have been advanced by journalistic accounts.
This will be done by isolating and examining key elements employed in the
construction of these themes and in their organization into apparently ‘adequate’
and ‘coherent’ explanations. These same elements will also be examined to
clarify the attempts made to align the explanations with the ‘lived experience’ of
audiences.
Something of this approach has been adopted by other recent studies of
television’s account of political issues, studies which have worked with a notion
that television is now the key ‘agenda-setting’ device in the sphere of public
opinion. It has been argued, for instance, that beside the long-standing
commitments to inform, educate and entertain enshrined in the constitutional
documents of both television networks, television now plays the role, albeit
unwittingly, of drawing public attention to, and shaping the understanding of, the
political situations it chooses to cover. The major points of this approach can be
summed up as follows. It has been argued that broadcasters possess the power
to: (1) define which issues will enter the sphere of public awareness and
discussion; (2) define the terms in which these issues will be discussed; (3)
define who will speak on the topics that have been selected; (4) manage and
control the ensuing debates and discussions. At the heart of this approach to
television journalism is the notion that the professional ideologies of broadcasters
—that body of ‘routinized and habituated professional “know-how”’ —uniquely
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and absolutely determines all decisions concerning subject matter, speakers and
treatment. This approach transfers or displaces the power to define issues from
dominant political and economic forces as attributed by the ‘conspiracy’
theorists to the broadcasters.
As a consequence, programmes are not studied in order to specify what they
reveal about the actual relations between broadcasting and other sectors.
Television is regarded as an absolutely independent prime mover in the social
formation; the main emphasis of studies which adhere to this position lies in
determining how programmes set about effecting what Trevor Pateman has