Page 147 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

136 MEDIA STUDIES

certainly do not rule out measures during the autumn.’ For half an hour Mr
Callaghan spoke forcefully to TUC delegates in Blackpool who tomorrow will
vote on the twelve-month rule. He argued that there were dangers in pay
flexibility and free collective bargaining and he regretted that a third year of pay
code was not possible.

Callaghan seen addressing delegates:
As I say I would have liked, eh, a third year, but, ehm, all right, I’m told it’s
not on. Well, other things won’t be on either. And this is, I think, the situation
that the movement as a whole has got to discuss. We believed, I still believe, that
despite all the difficulties, a combination of moderate earnings increases and
reduced taxation is the best way to safeguard the interests of your members. I
dare say some of your members don’t believe it. Well, that’s a situation we all
have to face because this is a democracy. I understand. I would agree that there is
a case, a very important case, for flexibility. It’s the argument, if you like,
against a statutory wage policy, which I am not in favour of. But flexibility
implies that differentials will be allowed to grow. You can’t have an inflexible
flexibility. And if we get into the situation in which, as a result of one excessive
claim and settlement, others use that to make a back and leap-frog over it,
Madam Chairman, there’s nothing the Government can do then to stop you all
being back in the situation you were glad to escape from in ’74, ’75, when wage
claims made at twelve-month intervals eventually became wage claims made at
nine-month intervals and, if it had gone on, some of them were being made at six-
month intervals and if you had continued, it would have been at six-week
intervals and three-week intervals and you would have been in hyperinflation
(shouting up, but remains at the level of general background noise). Well, I don’t
believe, indeed I would say with certainty, that the majority of your members and
their wives do not want a return to that situation. (BBC News, 6 September
1977).
The extracts presented here from these early-evening television news bulletins
do not exhaust the accounts. In both cases the accounts, after the actuality
quotes, are passed over to the Industrial Correspondent, who begins to fill in
more details of the speeches and the response to them. His comments will be
considered in a moment. In both cases the establishment of the topic relies
heavily on the use of actuality forms of television journalism: direct verbal and
verbal-visual quotes. Thus the accounts have the appearance of simple reports
which do little more than give the main points of the Prime Minister’s speeches.
The use of these actuality forms is the practical mode of demonstrating the
objectivity of television journalism. They are ritualized means of affirming that
what has been selected from the available pool of definitions has not been
invented by the broadcasters. They are, then, the key means by which the
‘transparency’ effect of television is realized, an effect which denies the
productivity of television’s specific practices. Undoubtedly, the broadcasters are