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TELEVISION NEWS AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT 139

alternative case is announced, it does not form the basis of the journalists’
account, nor is its logic developed. Indeed, in being marked out as the exclusive
property of ‘militants’, it is made to appear as though it had no logic. The overall
effect of this disposition of the available cases is to render the Government’s
strategy—adherence to the twelve-month rule, moderation in wage bargaining
and possible cuts in taxation—the only plausible one.
This presentation of the Government’s strategy, the pursuit of a third round of
‘pay restraint’, in the informational stages of journalistic story-telling was by no
means novel nor exclusive to this particular bulletin. By the time of this particular
broadcast it had become a familiar and recurrent theme in the news. It began to
emerge in the accounts provided of Denis Healey’s Budget of 29 March 1977,
which, among other things, had made promises about cuts in taxation if another
round of restraint could be agreed with the unions. It also was one of the
fundamental organizing themes of the news coverage of the various trade union
conferences between April and July. Throughout this coverage the case on which
the Government’s strategy was based, namely that ‘excessive’ wage settlements
were the cause of inflation, was as such only infrequently dealt with.
The ‘transparency-to-reality’ effect is, then, not simply accomplished in and
through the juxtapositioning of the formal modes of television journalism to
which attention has been drawn. It also requires an ideological alignment
between the definitions constituted in the journalistic accounts and those already
constituted as dominant in the discourse of the political-economic sphere. The
‘reality’ of television journalism is not immediately identical with the ‘reality’ of
the political-economic discourse, nor does the former in some simple way reflect
the latter. Rather, the reality of television journalism must be formed in such a
way that it corresponds to the reality that has been formed by the political-
economic discourse.
I want now to examine, in more detail, the specific journalistic practices by
which this correspondence is attained, and to do so with reference to the
television coverage of the trade union conferences held in the months before the
TUC Conference of September 1977. In so doing, I hope to make it clear not
only that between this coverage and the Government’s account there was a
shared ideological problematic, but also that the signifying practices of television
journalism actively constituted the dominant definitions as normal and self-
evident. From earlier sociological studies of television journalism we know that
it is centrally concerned with those actions which have been pre-signified as
‘unexpected’—that is, with actions which break from the meaningful and
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consonant, to use Galtung and Ruge’s terms. It is the latter, the meaningful and
consonant, the expected, which operates as a yardstick for determining the
‘unexpected’. The expected, if it is manifested in the utterances of television
journalism at all, does so as ‘what everyone knows’ and, therefore, does not need
to be spelt out. During the period we are concerned with here the Government’s
proposition that inflation was wages-led was only rarely mentioned, let alone
explicitly articulated. At an earlier moment, during the first months of 1975,