Page 292 - Culture Society and the Media

282 HOW THE MEDIA REPORT RACE
comparatively high wages in Britain, little or nothing of this economic aspect has
been presented in the media.
Against this it has been argued that it is a misconception to treat ‘the problem’
of the mass media as primarily a cognitive one: that news is not a surrogate form
of social enquiry; and that media critics are wrong in treating media men

as if they have signed up to be professional sociologists and have fallen
down on the job…where the measure of distortion is precisely the extent of
discrepancy between their account and that given by the favoured
sociological theories of the media scholars’. (Anderson and Sharrock,
1979, pp. 369 and 383)

The irony is that the sociological definition of race relations which has been the
product of lengthy ‘scientific enquiry’ is itself open to grave criticism. In
particular, the sociological definition has been unduly influenced by the
American experience and the wealth of research which is available about that
experience. The consequence has been that race per se has generally been
unquestioningly accepted as the key to understanding the position of black
people in Britain; it is regarded as sufficient to refer to a ‘society where racism is
entrenched’ or in which the connotations of blackness are wholly negative. On
the other hand, the parallels which may be drawn between the position of black
immigrants in Britain, and that of the more than eleven million migrant workers
who work in the North-European industrial triangle to perform the jobs which
indigenous workers no longer wish to perform, have received—until the
appearance of certain publications in the early 1970s (Castles and Kosack, 1973,
Bohning, 1972)—insufficient attention. Thus it can be said that both the media
definition and the sociological definition have ‘fallen down on the job’, though
editors may reasonably point out that it is not their task to provide an adequate
sociological definition of race.
The standards by which the press should be judged, according to the Royal
Commission on the Press, included the need to provide ‘a clear and truthful
account of events, of their background and their causes; a forum for discussion
and informed criticism’ (Royal Commission, 1949, Para. 362). Measured against
these standards, the performance of the press may leave something to be desired.
Perhaps this is because such standards have little to do with newsgathering and
rather more to do with scientific enquiry. News, by contrast, has more to do with
what is happening now than what has evolved over many years; as Walter
Lippmann put it: ‘the news does not tell you how the seed is germinating in the
ground but it may tell when the first sprout breaks through the surface’ (quoted
in Daniel, 1968, p. 8).
As far as reporting race relations is concerned, once the contradiction between
‘keeping the temperature down’ and following ‘news values’ was resolved in
favour of the latter, it became inevitable that the bulk of media coverage (with
the exception of the quality press to which media critics pay insufficient