Page 312 - Culture Society and the Media

302 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
Although canons of impartiality are embedded in the news format of the daily
press as well as in the news bulletins of the broadcasting media, the ideological
role played by the latter is probably of the greater importance—both because of
the sheer scale of their impact and because their claims to neutrality are more
clearly articulated, and more widely credited, than are those of newspapers. The
audience for the major news bulletins of all three channels is significantly larger
than the readership of any national newspaper—ITN’s ‘News at Ten’ had an
estimated nightly audience of between 12 and 15 millions in 1977—and, as the
Annan Report confirms (para. 17.2), the amount of time devoted to news
programmes has increased dramatically in recent years. The BBC’s news
coverage, for example, more than doubled between 1962 and 1977. Perhaps
more important, as the Annan Committee again reported, an increasing
percentage of the public has come to rely on television as its primary source of
news and, according to surveys conducted by Professor Himmelweit, both the
BBC and ITN news bulletins are widely regarded as being more trustworthy and
impartial than newspapers. Finally, of course, impartiality is an official
requirement placed on the broadcasting companies by the charters which govern
them. Television news may therefore be taken as an extreme and limiting case: if
it is possible to demonstrate the operation of ideological categories here—the
acknowledged pinnacle of impartiality in the media world—similar claims made
by journalists working in other media will thereby be called into question.
This is not to suggest that the broadcasting media have ever claimed to be
impartial in any truly philosophical sense. As Reith said of the BBC’s operations
in the midst of the General Strike: ‘since the BBC was a national institution, and
since the government in this crisis was acting for the people, apart from any
emergency powers or clauses in our licence, the BBC was for the government in
the crisis too…’ (cited in Hood, 1972, p. 415). Both the BBC and the ITV
companies have the right—which was fully endorsed by the Annan Committee—
to waive the constraint of impartiality in their coverage of those events and
issues which are considered (by whom?) to challenge the constitution, the
national interest or public order. Northern Ireland is a case in point where the
media have been, so to speak, officially biased—albeit not altogether openly so
in the respect that such official bias has, by now, been naturalized through
systematic exclusion of any alternative perspective.
However, whilst it is possible to itemize cases of overt bias and explicit
censorship, it is arguable that the ideological effectivity of the news is greatest in
those areas where the operation of the particular signifying conventions which
constitute the news and seem to secure its impartiality—the use of actuality
footage or of live interviews, framed by the apparently impersonal and neutral
narrative of the presenter, for example—conceal the operation of another,
ideologically loaded set of signifying conventions. Bad News, the Glasgow
University Media Group’s study of the television news coverage of industrial
disputes in 1975 affords a good illustration of this. For although not partial in the
sense of favouring a Conservative versus a Labour Party position in relation to