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138 MEDIA STUDIES

Alan Fisher; Well, I wouldn’t have put it warmly. I would have thought
it was respectfully by the Congress, and I think that’s usual with the TUC
and the Labour Prime Minister. I wouldn’t think it was warmth. (Tonight, 6
September 1977)

What Allen Fisher’s redefinition of the standing ovation indicates is that
journalists had given not just an interpretation of the reception, but one which
was favourable to the Prime Minister’s position. That this account was
positioned within the Prime Minister’s terms of reference was also indicated by
its calling the Prime Minister’s interpretation of the causes of and remedies for
inflation ‘hard facts about the economy’. There is little questioning in this example
of the Government’s proposition that excessive claims and settlements over
wages brought about inflation and that ‘the best way forward’, therefore, lay in
‘moderate increases and reduced taxation’. What there was concerned how
effective the Prime Minister’s presentation of his case would be ‘at shop floor
level in the months ahead’.
This direction was developed in the ‘news analysis’ section of the account
which followed the run-down of the Prime Minister’s speech and the details of
its immediate reception. News analysis, typically provided by the specialist
correspondents, represents a kind of half-way house between ‘straight reporting’,
the informational stage of informed speculation, and ‘comment and analysis’,
contained in the second speculative stage of the process. The object of news
analysis is to provide a preliminary contextualization of the themes contained in
the report section of the account. As in this example, this typically means
providing an assessment of the responses made by important people involved in
the situation. On this occasion the BBC’s Industrial Correspondent began by
noting that ‘there was nothing new in what the Prime Minister had said…though
the style of delivery of the economic analysis seemed rather more determined…
and he told delegates squarely that so-called free collective bargaining had not
produced social justice’. From here he moved to the main concern of this part of
the account, ‘union leaders’ reactions’, which were said to vary ‘according to the
stance taken on the twelve-month rule and on moderation in pay settlements’.
(Notice here that the yardstick by which union leaders are positioned is provided
by the Government’s case and not their own.) This was presented by means of
extracts from video-recorded interviews with two union leaders, Clive Jenkins,
who was presented as ‘a militant exponent of free collective bargaining’, and
Tom Jackson, who was presented, in an unqualified way, as ‘a supporter of
incomes policy’. The questions asked of them set up a situation in which their
replies were confined to an assessment of the effectivity of the speech and also
prevented any detailing of the alternative case.
The labels applied by the Industrial Correspondent to the alternative economic
strategy that had been adopted by the TUC on the previous day in the form of ‘an
orderly return to free collective bargaining’ and to its proponents further
reproduced a sense of the Government’s case as ‘hard fact’. Although an