Page 314 - Culture Society and the Media

304 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
Whereas management representatives were usually looked to to provide the
‘facts’ against which to view the dispute, the labour side was looked to for
‘events’—for filmable happenings—with the result that, in visual terms, the
source of discord was most typically seen to be the workers—in pickets, mass
meetings, rallies—a discord which was projected against an orderly backcloth of
‘facts’ as established by management. Finally, the structure and content of
interviews with union leaders was said to be almost a priori prejudicial to the
union interpretation of disputes in the respect that such union spokesmen were
usually asked to provide an explanation or justification for their union’s action.
In being thus provided with an opportunity to exculpate themselves, the
inevitable implication was that—in striking—unions were axiomatically engaged
in a culpable act.
Bad News and its successor, More Bad News (1980) are both useful and
important studies, particularly in the degree of close attention they pay to the
routine practices of television news. Yet there are limitations to both, particularly
so far as the alternatives they envisage are concerned. The concern of Bad News,
it is stated in the introduction to More Bad News, was to show how Viewers were
given a misleading portrayal of industrial disputes in the UK when measured
against the independent reality of events’ (p. xiii). This is to imply that the
standards against which news coverage is being assessed and found wanting are
those of a truthful representation of reality ‘as it really is’, reflecting a politics of
the sign based on the notion of truth versus falsehood. Indeed, as Ian Connell has
argued, it often seems that the demands of this alternative would be met if the
statutory requirements of balance, impartiality and neutrality were scrupulously
met (Connell, 1980). Connell’s objection to this is not merely that this is
impossible, resurrecting, as it does, the dream of forms of representation that are
neutral and through which reality might be revealed as if without mediation. He
also argues that to castigate the broadcasting media for their failure to be
impartial in some absolute, philosophical sense misses the more essential point
that they achieve their ideological effectivity precisely through their observation
of the statutory requirements of balance and impartiality. (The statutory
requirement, it should be noted, is merely that the media should exhibit ‘due
impartiality’, taking account of ‘not just the whole range of views on an issue, but
also of the weights of opinion which holds these views’—a formula which
clearly justifies the media according a privileged weight to the views of those
political parties which can claim popular support as evidenced by the returns of
the ballot-box.)
The basis for this argument is to be found in work earlier undertaken by Ian
Connell, together with Stuart Hall and Lidia Curti, on the subject of current
affairs television. Hall, Connell and Curti argue that it is television’s very
commitment to impartiality and the fact that, within a limited sphere—notably,
the political terrain constituted by the parties which define the arena of
legitimate, parliamentary politics—it genuinely is impartial that secures its most
significant, and least noticed, ideological effectivity. For the effect of the