Page 155 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

144 MEDIA STUDIES

Margaret Thatcher at the helm as sure as little apples. Recent election
results have shown this. Wages a major cause of inflation? They never
have been. The last two years have proved that. Another period of marking
time? We’ve had enough. Mr Healey, you’re not on. (BBC News, 6 July
1977)

It would have been possible, as on other occasions, when acuality quotes had
been included from the speeches of Cabinet Ministers, to provide background
information on the speech. But this did not happen. Instead, the journalists opted
to emphasize that the ‘militants…dominated the whole debate’, and that the debate
had been ‘noisy, emotional’. From here on the account concentrated on the
defeated executive’s line and then included an interview with Jack Jones, ‘the
architect of the Social Contract’—a constructive image which contrasts sharply
with the destructive images constructed for the opponents.
The interview once again returns to constituting the destructive effects of the
motion that had been carried. Jack Jones was asked, first of all, ‘whether the
threat of a wages explosion now threatened the Labour Party’s own ability to
govern’, and then, following an affirmative reply, (‘I think that is a danger…’), he
was asked if he thought that ‘now, after this decision this afternoon, the political
stability of the country is not threatened as a result of what has happened, that the
Government may indeed not be in a position to govern any longer?’, which again
received an affirmative response when Jack Jones said: ‘Well, the political
stability could be threatened if the Liberals decided to withdraw support….’ The
transformation of the act of opposition into an act of destruction is consummated
by the interview. It is not only authenticated; it is also rendered authoritative by
the affirmations of the architect of the Social Contract.
The television news bulletins which we have been examining here are not the
‘windows on to reality’ that they are made to seem by professional ideologies of
broadcasting and by the extensive use of actuality forms (of which more shall be
said in a moment). The point to be stressed is that we do not see ‘through’ the
bulletins to an objective and independent ‘reality’ beyond. We see only that
reality which has been jointly produced by the journalistic practices of
signification and by the other practices of signification employed by journalism’s
accredited witnesses in the political-economic sphere. In this respect, the simple
‘bias’ thesis is inadequate, based as it is on an untenable assumption of a
separation between images and ideas on the one hand, and objective, material
reality on the other. Within the terms of the ‘bias’ thesis we have no option but to
regard television journalism as a mere (and inadequate) reflection of material
reality rather than an active material process, itself intimately bound up in the
construction and articulation of reality. This thesis takes at face value the
journalistic practices of signification. The construction and articulation of
‘reality’ as seemingly independent, as natural, is inscribed in the most basic
practices of television journalism. The organization of the visual discourse, for
instance, which shows little variation between networks or across the period from