Page 151 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

140 MEDIA STUDIES

after Healey had announced that ‘it is far better that more people should be in work
even if that means accepting lower wages on average…that is what the Social
Contract is all about’, the proposition was explicitly articulated and speculated
on. It is not possible here to go into details of the form that the articulation assumed
in television news. It can only be pointed out that it was prompted by a reversal
in the position adopted by the Labour Party during the latter part of 1974, when
the whole question of wages was subordinated for the purposes of gaining the
assent of the TUC and winning the October 1974 General Election.
By 1977 the proposition that inflation was wages-led had become a taken-for-
granted in television news—an apparent ‘fact of life’—and the form of the
coverage actively reproduced it as such. Though rarely mentioned in the course
of television’s monitoring of the trade union conferences held between April and
September 1977, it nevertheless functioned as a premise, as the ‘always-already-
there’ of the explicit articulations concerning the conferences. The substance of
many television news items in this period was conference debates about wages.
Only rarely were debates on other topics featured. The following is a typical
example of how the wages debates conducted by the ‘minor’ unions were
represented:

Newsreader talking direct to camera:
The National and Local Government Officers’ Association voted
decisively for another phase of pay restraint today. The resolution before
them was against restraint but they threw that out by 448,000 to 139,000.
So that means that the fourth largest union in the country with 700,000
members and the largest of the white collar unions is behind the
Government. (Independent Television News, 15 June 1975)

The account does not simply provide information about the vote: it gives the vote
a particular significance. The narrator transforms this, and indeed other votes in
other unions, into evidence of support for the Government. It is made to be of
interest only in terms of the relation to ‘another’ phase of pay restraint.
Throughout this period then, the facticity of wage restraint was constantly
reproduced. What television news constructed as the ‘unexpected’, what
bulletins articulated, was the question of whether the unions were going to
deliver. Certain conferences were expected not to deliver—for example, the
Scottish TUC’s Conference in April 1977. Both the BBC’s and the ITN’s
coverage elected to feature prominently the speech of the Scottish Secretary
(Bruce Millan) to that conference. The BBC’s news analysis of the speech ran as
follows:

Industrial Correspondent, in studio, direct to camera:
Mr Millan came to Rothesay to try to impress upon this pretty left-wing
gathering the advantages of continuing pay restraint after July and of