Page 313 - Culture Society and the Media

MEDIA, ‘REALITY’, SIGNIFICATION 303
these issues, this study convincingly argues that the way in which such stories
were actually handled—the criteria of newsworthiness that were used, the place
that they occupied within the structure of the news bulletin as a whole and so on
—produced a markedly anti-union inflection.
The authors suggest, for example, that, compared with the Department of
Employment statistics relating to industrial stoppages in 1975, the news bulletins
by no means offered a balanced or accurate picture of the history of industrial
stoppages during that year. They focused disproportionately on the key mass-
production industries, particularly the car industry, which occupied a key
position in the drive for exports, and on those industries—notably transport and
communications—where industrial disputes created a maximum of
inconvenience for the general public. The result, it is alleged, was that industrial
disputes were signified within a ‘unions versus the national interest/general
public’ semiology of the public world, suggesting that strikers were holding the
nation to ransom or hindering the decent, orderly, non-striking citizen from going
about his/her daily business. This effect was reinforced by the typical placement
of industrial dispute stories within the structure of the news programme. The
close proximity between economic and industrial items, which is particularly
clear on BBC 1, suggests that items about particular industrial situations are
likely to be juxtaposed with items (usually shorter) on the general state of the
economy, with a resultant strong implication of a causal connection’ (Bad News,
p. 118). Clearly, the implication of such a causal relationship was to favour
certain explanations of the economic difficulties of the period—those that
attributed the chief blame to the unionized working class—over others—those,
for example, that have attributed Britain’s long-term economic difficulties to the
declining international competitiveness of the economy stemming from the
obsolescence of its capital stock and a persistently low rate of investment.
The Glasgow Media Group also argue that the ways in which management and
union representatives were interviewed, and the ways in which such interviews
were inter-cut and articulated in relation to one another within the structure of
the pertinent news items—although formally impartial in the sense that they
recognized that there were two sides to such disputes—tended to favour the
management interpretation of such disputes. Whereas management
representatives tended to be interviewed in their offices, surrounded by all the
trappings of authority, reason and responsibility, union representatives were
more likely to be interviewed by out-door broadcasting units against the setting
of a mass meeting, or pickets at a factory gate—in other words, against a
background of activity and disorder which stripped them of any semblance of
power, authority or reason and, at times, of the elementary requirement of
audibility. (It is worth nothing that current TUC guidelines concerning their use
of the media advise union representatives to refuse to be interviewed in such
circumstances.) A further effect of structuring interviews in this way, the
Glasgow Media Group suggest, was that of constructing an opposition between
‘facts’ and ‘events’ homologous to that between management and unions.