Page 290 - Culture Society and the Media

280 HOW THE MEDIA REPORT RACE
public confidence. After the speech, for example, the Wolverhampton Express
and Star received 5000 letters supporting Powell and only 300 opposing him. A
subsequent poll conducted by the newspaper recorded a ‘vote’ of 35,000 for
Powell and only a tiny number against him. As the editor of the paper remarked:

We cannot build up the sort of reader-editor relationship which establishes
the local paper as a local ombudsman on matters like unemptied dustbins,
uncut grass verges, unadopted roads, unlit streets, excessive council house
rents and all that sort of thing, and then snap it off shut on a major social
issue like this. To do this would be to betray that faith which readers would
have in us and the social function of newspaper production. (Jones, 1971,
pp. 16–17)

CONCLUSION

Much has been claimed about the power of the media to determine what are
regarded as major social issues and the sorts of questions most people have in
their minds about them. According to Spiro Agnew, for example, the small group
of men who control the media ‘decide what forty-five million Americans will learn
of the day’s events in the nation and the world…these men can create national
issues overnight’ (quoted in Burns, 1977, p. 59). Particular reference has been
made to the power of the media to influence the state of race relations. For
example, UNESCO declared that the media can have a crucial role in
encouraging or combating racial prejudice; and Harold Evans believes that what
the media publishes about ethnic groups can directly affect ethnic tensions. The
coverage of Powell’s speech, however, indicates that the power of the media
might be much smaller than is often supposed and that it was Powell who
changed the definition of the situation so that the focus of debate became a
concern with the consequences of a large and growing black presence, and that
the media controllers saw no alternative but to pass on this message.
Even if as Evans says, ‘the way race is reported can uniquely affect the reality
of the subject itself’ (1971, p. 42), the effectiveness of the media message
depends on how well it accords with various feelings, dispositions and
circumstances already present in a particular society.
Where prevailing beliefs are hostile to immigrants in general or to black
immigrants in particular, stories which present black people in a favourable light
may be widely seen as evidence that the media are not giving a true picture,
whereas ‘selective perception’ will exaggerate the amount of material
unfavourable to blacks which is perceived to be in the media. If the media
message is uncongenial it is likely to be distorted or rejected in order to fit in
with the recipient’s outlook, because people tend to react to the media according
to their initial attitudes. The editor of one provincial newspaper, for example,
noted that news about black immigrants is read by many whites who live in areas
of high immigrant density, many of whom, in his experience, regard any