Press and Television in British Politics: Media, Money and Mediated Democracy

Press and Television in British Politics Media, Money and Mediated Democracy

Neil T. Gavin

Press and Television in British Politics

Also by Neil T. Gavin ECONOMY, MEDIA AND PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE (editor) BRITAIN VOTES, 1997 (co-editor with P. Norris)

Press and Television in British Politics Media, Money and Mediated Democracy Neil T. Gavin Senior Lecturer, Department of Politics, School of Politics and Communication Studies, University of Liverpool, UK

© Neil T. Gavin 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–0623–6 ISBN-10: 1–4039–0623–8

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gavin, Neil T. Press and television in British politics: media, money, and mediated democracy/Neil T. Gavin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–0623–8 (alk. paper) 1. Press and politics—Great Britain. 2. Television and politics— Great Britain. I. Title. PN5124.P6G38 2007 302.230941—dc22 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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For Esther

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Contents List of Figures

viii

List of Tables

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

PART I

1

The Media Context: Theory and Evidence

1

Connecting the Media and Politics

2

Going Down Market? The Evidence on Tabloidisation

PART II

The Politics of Economic News

3 25 45

3

Bias and Imbalance in Economic News

47

4

Economic News and the Public

74

5 Anti-Globalisation Politics: The Trafalgar Square and Seattle Demonstrations

PART III

The Politics of European News

95 119

6

Europe and the Euro in the News

121

7

The British Public and European News

142

PART IV 8

Conclusions and Implications

Democracy in Danger?

163 165

Notes

179

Bibliography

186

Index

202

vii

List of Figures 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 3.1 4.1 4.2 7.1 7.2 7.3

Number of domestic economic news stories: BBC (August 1997–September 2001).

31

Number of domestic economic news stories: ITN (August 1997–September 2001).

32

Number of euro news stories: BBC (August 1997–September 2001).

34

Number of euro news stories: ITN (August 1997–September 2001).

34

Number of EU economy news stories: BBC (August 1997–September 2001).

37

Number of EU economy news stories: ITN (August 1997–September 2001).

37

Number of BBC and ITN employment stories ( January 1998–December 1999).

52

The salience of ‘unemployment’ ( January 1997–December 2004).

85

Number of BBC and ITN employment stories ( January 1998–September 2001).

86

The balance of opinion on EMU entry (1991–September 2002).

143

Balance of opinion for and against the euro ( January 1999–March 2004).

144

The salience of NHS and European issues (March 1996–December 2004).

145

viii

List of Tables 1.1

Newspaper titles, their owners and their sales in 2004

6

1.2

How much do the public trust various actors and organisations to tell the truth? (February–March 2003)

16

2.1

BBC, ITN and CH4 coverage of the euro at notes and coins introduction (15 December 2001–15 January 2002) 35

3.1

Balance of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ news on BBC and ITN ( January 1998–December 1999)

54

Levels of (un)employment in Britain ( January 1998– December 1999)

55

Sources interviewed on BBC and ITN (un)employment coverage ( January 1998–December 1999)

57

Causes of (un)employment cited in BBC and ITN news ( January 1998–December 1999)

60

4.1

The public’s main sources of news

78

4.2

Attention to news topics in the press and on television

79

OLS regression of the salience of unemployment and inflation (August 1997–April 2001)

83

OLS regression of the salience of ‘the economy’ (August 1997–May 2001)

83

Number of press stories on the Trafalgar Square demonstration

99

Breakdown of the ‘protest paradigm’ elements in coverage of the Trafalgar Square demonstration: Guardian, Telegraph, Times and Independent; The Express and Mail; and the Mirror and Sun

101

The presence or absence of ‘protest paradigm’ elements in BBC and ITN flagship news coverage of the Trafalgar Square demonstration

103

3.2 3.3 3.4

4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2

5.3

ix

x

List of Tables

5.4 6.1

6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 7.1 7.2

Quoted sources in broadsheet, tabloid and television coverage of the Trafalgar Square demonstration

104

Sources in BBC and ITN coverage of the euro at notes and coins introduction (15 December 2001– 15 January 2002)

130

Frequency of pro-euro ‘arguments’ on BBC and ITN (December 1998–January 2000)

133

Frequency of anti-euro ‘arguments’ on BBC and ITN (December 1998–January 2000)

134

Frequency of pro-euro ‘arguments’ on BBC, ITN and CH4 (15 December 2001–15 January 2002)

135

Frequency of anti-euro ‘arguments’ on BBC, ITN and CH4 (15 December 2001–15 January 2002)

135

Responses to a MORI survey on the euro: June 2000

143

OLS regression of the salience of Europe against the number of stories or their word length

148

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Philip Schlesinger, Lee Miles, Dennis Kavanagh, Kees Brants, Ian Rasmussen, Alex Balch, David Hojman and Adrian Quinn for their help and their comments on specific chapters while I was in the process of completing this book. I am especially indebted to John Corner for his support and feedback on various chapters, and to David Sanders for his general encouragement and for his assistance in setting up the formal models of public opinion elaborated in Chapters 4 and 7. Many thanks go to Moira Papworth for her aid. I would also like to offer special thanks to Esther Papworth for her unfailing support when it was needed most. Yvonne Janvier, Gill Rafferty, Eleanor Gordon and Michaela Rimmer were an invaluable assistance in preventing the pressures of academic life from pushing the preparation of the book off track. The data chapters in the book were heavily dependent on a project financed by the ESRC (‘Press, Television And Political And Economic Opinion In Britain’ ref. R000221336), and I gratefully acknowledge their generous support.

xi

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Part I The Media Context: Theory and Evidence

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1 Connecting the Media and Politics

The state we are in The core purpose of journalism is and should be about producing and distributing serious information and debate on central social, political, and cultural matters. Journalists regulate much of what the public gets to know about the world they inhabit, and this activity is vital to a functioning democracy. (Gripsrud, 2000, p. 294) The core rationale for public service broadcasting lies in its commitment to providing the cultural resources required for full citizenship. (Murdock, 2004, p. 2) Few observers nowadays would fail to acknowledge that the mass media are central to the way modern democracies are constituted. However, there is less of a consensus about whether the media are living up to our expectations or, indeed, what role they ought to play in modern politics. There is also a distinct sense that broadcasting and print media are subject to a range of pressures, constraints and imperatives which are now threatening to undermine their positive contribution to informed and participatory democracy. For the broadcasters, these include the challenges of marketisation, declining revenue and fierce competition, and the impact of organisational change or ‘managerialism’ (Born, 2005). And in terms of the newspapers, the insidious and highly partial influence of interventionist proprietors, along with occasional collusion between press magnates and politicians, is seen as a problem. For all journalists the activities of the spin doctors and PR hacks that inhabit 3

4 Press and Television in British Politics

the political landscape are a further cause for anxiety, as is persistent and intrusive political interference by consecutive governments in the production of news and current affairs coverage (Jones, 2004). And finally, there is still a sense amongst critical observers that the mass media never have served society, the public or democracy in any meaningful sense and that their structure and ownership ensure that they advantage a narrow set of sectional interests, especially those of the rich, the powerful or the social elite (Glasgow University Media Group, 1976, 1980, 1982; Hall, 1978; Davis, 2003). The cumulative logic of these critiques anticipates a form of news production that increasingly fails to inform the public in any meaningful sense – when stories are spun or sensationalised, and when coverage is dumbed down, politically inflected or implicitly partial. Much, therefore, is said to be wrong with the way the modern media are constituted and thought to operate, and, as McNair (2000) quite rightly observes, a ‘pervasive pessimism’ about the media is currently much in evidence. This view, in turn, reflects rather negatively upon evaluations of the health of contemporary democracy as a whole – democracy, from this perspective, may very well be in serious danger. This book will argue that many of these criticisms are over-drawn or ill-founded evidentially, and at their worst can be quite misleading. A case will be made that an understanding of the role and performance of contemporary journalism cannot be based exclusively or even predominately on the analysis of political pressure and spin, the exploration of organisational structure or economic conditions, nor for that matter can it be gleaned from an assessment of how these factors impinge on the daily practice of working journalists. All these factors are obviously important to a rounded understanding of contemporary media realities, and much work has been done in describing how they impinge on the political and journalistic process. But a central contention of this book will be that their significance can only be fully understood in the context of the broad and systematic analysis of news coverage, alongside the assessment of the subsequent impact of that coverage upon the attitudes and behaviour of the public. With an empirical focus on economic and economics-related issues, one of the principal contentions will be that television, in particular, is in fact fully capable of handling important developments in a manner that ought to confound the critics and the pessimists. The book will argue that the broadcasters are more than just holding the line against the corrosive forces that assail the modern media. Instead, their contribution to educated, informed and deliberative democracy is still significant. In short, their coverage is not uniformly,

Connecting the Media and Politics 5

irrevocably, inevitably or obviously degraded, and some of the finest traditions of public service broadcasting are, in fact, still being upheld. Nevertheless, our survey also exposes some important gaps and weaknesses in coverage. There can be serious problems with the way the media address some of the key issues, and there are some notable instances where both the print media and the broadcasters fail to live up to expectations. Importantly, some consistent patterns emerged which suggest that there is a subtle but detectable erosion of the quantity and quality of coverage in the commercial broadcasting sector, and this is a cause for concern. The overall conclusion is that in countering a ‘pervasive pessimism’ we should not be tempted to embrace an equally inappropriate and sanguine optimism. Instead, if we are to tell a convincing story of the role of media in contemporary politics, we need a sense of the processes that unite the contextual, coverage and audience-related dimensions of contemporary political communication. Only then will we be in a position to judge contemporary democracy in the round or get a clear sense of how it might develop in the future.

Media context in contemporary Britain But who are the principal players in this story, and what is the overall structure of the domain they inhabit? Currently there is a good deal of concern that the Internet has come to represent the most significant development in the way that information reaches the public. However, in terms of the delivery of political news, information and commentary, its significance can be much exaggerated. For example, not everyone has access to the Web, still less to broadband. Furthermore, only a small fraction of those that do have access to the Web, use it as a source of political information – somewhere in the region of 10 per cent (Towler, 2001; Lusoli, 2005). But the Web is the main source of news for a vanishingly small proportion of the population – 2 per cent or less depending on the study chosen (Sancho, 2001; Worcester and Mortimore, 2001; Hargreaves and Thomas, 2002), and this does not seem to change markedly at elections.1 Here the main issue is perhaps one of trust. When asked, only 20 per cent of British people express any confidence in the Internet to tell the truth (Hargreaves and Thomas, 2002), with a meagre 1 per cent agreeing that it offers accurate and impartial information (Worcester and Mortimore, 2001).2 The Web may be evolving as a place where political mobilisation by pressure groups, NGOs and individuals is encouraged and where information exchange is facilitated (Ward, Gibson and Lusoli, 2003; Bennett, 2003; Gibson, Lusoli and

6 Press and Television in British Politics

Ward, 2005). But important though these activities are, they are relevant to only a small cohort of politically active individuals. If, however, we are concerned with the delivery of news and information which has mass significance, we are – by and large – still dealing with the press and with the electronic media. The press in Britain is dominated by 10 daily papers, some with companion Sunday titles. And many of these titles are run by the sort of people who have become household names – for example Conrad Black and, latterly, the Barclay brothers at the Telegraph, Paul Dacre at the Mail, Richard Desmond at the Express and the Star, and perhaps most famous (or infamous) of all, Rupert Murdoch whose holdings include The Times and the Sun. But these newspapers should not be lumped together into one broad category. Instead, they can be usefully divided into three broad groupings – the ‘broadsheets’, the mid-market ‘black tops’ and the ‘red tops’ tabloids. They each have rather different levels of circulation, as we can see from Table 1.1. The ‘red tops’ outstrip all the other papers combined, and the two ‘black tops’ almost outsell the ‘broadsheets’. The respective sets of titles also appeal to different sections of the public. The broadsheets are sold to readers who are predominately (though not exclusively) from the upper end of the socio-economic spectrum – occupational classes ‘A’, ‘B’ and C1 – while the red tops are a mirror image, selling largely to the ‘C2’, ‘D’ and ‘E’ groups (See Gavin and Sanders, 2003b). The black top readers, in contrast, straddle all social classes. Table 1.1 Newspaper titles, their owners and their sales in 2004 Newspaper titles (listed categorically) Broadsheets: Telegraph Times Financial Times Guardian Independent

Sales in the year 2004 (in 1000s) 912 685 427 367 262

Owner

Barclay Bothers News International Pearsons Scott Trust O’Reilly

Black Tops: Mail Express

2380 926

United Desmond

Red Tops: Sun Mirror Star

3258 2185 851

News International Trinity/Mirror Desmond

Source: Bartle (2005).

Connecting the Media and Politics 7

The significance of these figures is less in their spread than in their combined daily circulation (somewhere in the region of 12 million copies sold per day). This gives their owners considerable reach and, it is suggested, commensurate influence. The one thing that unites these people is that they are, first and foremost, businesspeople – they run large-scale corporations that are, in some instances, part of international conglomerates. The environment in which they operate has changed markedly in the last few decades, with – it is argued – significant consequences for the quality of political coverage. There has been a long-term and slow decline in readership of newspapers generally, stimulating increased competition for the attention of the remaining patrons. This has stiffened in the last few decades as advertising revenue has fluctuated and then declined. The decline has been caused by a variety of factors. Consumers have a finite amount of free time, and there are some intriguing new distractions which can draw consumers away from their traditional daily paper. These include a range of ‘new media’, such as the digital broadcasting channels and, of course, the Web. The new media carry their own advertising and, as a consequence, the associated revenue pool is spread ever more thinly. On top of this, changes in print technology have made it cheaper and easier to produce serviceable ‘free-sheet’ publications that carry little by way of hard news, but are floated on the basis of the advertising they carry. This unfortunate combination of factors has led to intense, if not savage, competition within and between the various newspaper subgroupings. These pressures have led to promotional battles and price wars as newspapers strive to corral a diminishing pool of readers and maintain an adequate revenue stream. Newspapers have produced new and innovative subsections featuring life styles, consumer products and sport, and have experimented with design and layout in an attempt to attract customer attention. The intense competition is seen as having some unfortunate consequences for the quality of newspaper journalism. There has been downsizing, outsourcing and a general squeeze on budgets for news production. It is also claimed that there has been a general gallop downmarket, ushering in a distinctive ‘tabloidisation’ of news copy. This is a criticism that has a long history with regard to Rupert Murdoch’s News International holdings (Evans, 1983), but is a common claim about the contemporary newspaper industry in general. The world of broadcasting is not immune from comparable competitive pressures, and the news coverage that television produces has, likewise, been criticised for what is seen as a progressive dumbing down. For instance, the established broadcasters of BBC and ITV1 have seen the

8 Press and Television in British Politics

number of their terrestrial competitor channels increase, while in the past decade and a half, the advent (and runaway success) of cable, satellite and, latterly, Freeview, has witnessed the number of digital outlets growing almost exponentially. Like their print and Web-based counterparts, these broadcasters are competing for the attention of a public which has limited free time. They have done marginally better than the press in this respect, with the broadcasters as a whole maintaining and even increasing their appeal for the public – an individual averaged 25.5 hours of viewing per week in 1993 and just over 26 hours in 2003 (Ofcom, 2004). But this picture is not as rosy at it seems. Terrestrial BBC and ITV have seen their share of the television audience decline steeply between 1991 and 2004. ITV is particularly badly affected and has lost half of its viewers over the same period (Sedgwick, 2006), largely to the digital services. The problem for ITV is that while the viewing figures for individual programmes on the newer digital channels may be small, their cumulative share of the audience has risen from 10 per cent in 1996 to 26 per cent in 2004. So audiences are now more thinly dispersed across the terrestrial and digital channels. This ‘fragmentation’ of audiences is crucially important for the commercial broadcasting sector as a whole, reliant as it is on revenue generated either through the advertising sold on the basis of audience size, or through direct subscription to a service like Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB. Revenue is increasingly under pressure and, as one insider puts it, These days, austerity is the name of the game in many areas of the industry. As the number of TV channels goes up, the financial cake is being sliced more thinly. For all but the most populist of programmes, that means broadcasters are asking more and more for less and less. (Stark, 2006, p. 57) The BBC, with its licence fee revenue, is not in direct competition with the commercial broadcasters, but it is in a form of indirect competition with them, and needs to sustain its audience size in order to justify the maintenance of the licence fee. This helps explain why the peak-time schedules on both ITV and BBC are dominated by highaudience drama, soaps and sport coverage (Sedgwick, 2006). And the BBC too has seen its revenue squeezed, as it contends with revenue implications of 24-hour broadcasting and the commitment to extend Web-based provision. So while the revenue generated by the licence has grown steadily in the last few decades (Sedgwick, 2006), resources at the

Connecting the Media and Politics 9

BBC have, nevertheless been stretched. Much energy has, therefore, been expended by consecutive Director Generals of the BBC like John Birt and Greg Dyke in an effort to streamline and control the finances of the organisation, impose financial discipline, reduce overheads and reign in expenditure, as their respective autobiographies fully attest (Birt, 2002; Dyke, 2005). The avowed aim here has been to plough any associated savings back into programme provision: Because of Producer Choice, our spend on programmes grew in the 1990s even though our licence income was pegged. By the end of the decade Producer Choice meant that on average the cost of each BBC programme had halved in real terms. (Birt, 2002, p. 329, emphasis original) But questions have begun to be asked about whether the BBC or, for that matter, broadcasters in general have fulfilled or still can fulfil their public service obligations in such a difficult climate, especially when populist programming is such an important priority.

Public service broadcasting The principles of public service broadcasting were not spelled out explicitly until the Communication Act of 2003. But they do acknowledge the need to serve and reach the widest possible audience, and entertain them in the process. So public service broadcasting should be both popular and accessible (Born, 2003; Petley, 2006), and public service provision should entertain and engage (See the Communication Act of 2003, 264, 6a). This means reaching out and appealing to the whole population, and reflecting Britain, as a nation, back to itself, rather than just serving niche audiences. But ‘public service’ also needs to elevate and enlighten, and in a way that some feel broadcasting has failed to do in the past (Birt and Jay, 1975a, 1975b and 1975c). So traditionally public service provision has been understood to encompass the duty to provide programming which educates, informs and improves (O’Hagan and Jennings, 2003; Curran and Seaton, 2003). This embodies the Reithian idea of enabling the spread of knowledge and reasoned argument, and of allowing people to take an interest in ‘… events which were formerly beyond their ken …’ (quoted in Eldridge et al., 2005, p. 46). In doing so, the broadcasters have embraced ‘… a set of core public values built around a shared idea of an informed citizenship underpinned by notions of education, culture and community’ (Willis, 2006, p. 55).

10

Press and Television in British Politics

The programming they produce should also ‘… reflect the lives and concerns of different communities and cultural interests and traditions within the United Kingdom, and locally in different parts of the United Kingdom’ (See the Communication Act of 2003, 264, 6i). This is reflected in regionally based production, and underpins an emphasis on programming for many different kinds of minority. Therefore, as broad a spectrum of experience as possible is and should be reflected in programming output. In addition, and at the level of news and current affairs provision, the function of public service broadcasting is to provide programming output that is challenging, but at the same time trustworthy, fair and accurate. This is at the root of the quest for ‘due impartiality’ in coverage, and as Born (2005) quite rightly points out, ‘The BBC’s journalism was founded on the twin professional ethics of impartiality and objectivity’ (p. 381). And while remaining accessible and intelligible, the news has to be comprehensive and authoritative too (See the Communication Act of 2003, 264, 6c; Petley, 2006). The BBC in particular is much exercised by this sort of concern, and has recently reviewed its provision of news on the controversial topics of Europe and the Middle East. That this should be of concern to broadcasting practitioners and observers alike is understandable, since political accountability at almost every level of society is only really meaningful in the context of informed and informative coverage. But one of the more serious issues facing broadcasters nowadays is how they reconcile these various – yet important and possibly conflicting – public service commitments, within an increasingly competitive environment. Can programming ‘reflect the lives and concerns of different communities’ without losing sight of what the nation as a whole is experiencing? And can analytically challenging news commentary also be popular? This sort of tension has been recognised by insiders, concerned observers and academic analysts alike – although very different conclusions are arrived at. For instance, in a series of penetrating studies of the way the broadcasters handle coverage at general elections, Jay Blumler and his colleagues highlight some of the problems involved, i.e. providing the audience with ‘pacey’ and engaging commentary on the campaign which appeals to a broad audience and does not switch off the viewer, while at the same time providing a weighty, analytical, balanced – and potentially off-putting – commentary on the policies and programmes of the political parties (Blumler et al., 1989; Blumler and Gurevitch, 1998 and 2002). Their general conclusion is that the broadcasters negotiate this delicate balance with some success,

Connecting the Media and Politics 11

although the tensions persist. Other observers, looking more broadly at broadcasting output, suggest that the organisation can maintain a populist vein in its programming without losing an analytical edge or a commitment to balanced and impartial coverage. Andrew Marr (2004), a senior journalist at the BBC, notes the magnetic pull of populist programming content: … the vast majority of programme editors are very well aware of the temptations, and yield to them only in moderation. Most will genuinely try to tell the serious stories, preferably through people and film rather than abstractly, … and will go home feeling bad if they think an important story was squeezed out by glamour or pseudo-relevance. (p. 294) On the other hand, there are those who are less convinced, and who feel that while there is much to commend coverage of politics at the BBC in particular, ‘The pressures to be both sensational and entertaining are making themselves felt in the part of broadcasting that’s supposed to be dedicated to telling us what the real world is actually like: news and current affairs’ (Humphrys, 2000, p. 165). John Lloyd (2004) goes further and suggests that there has been a more profound erosion of standards. The media make the claim ‘… that they inform people about what they need to know to be active citizens, even if this claim is daily subservient to other goals such as entertaining, making a profit and increasing the prestige of journalists’ (pp. 21–2). Moreover, the BBC has assumed the role of ‘opposition’ to the government and has developed a haughty arrogance that can manifest itself in dismissive, contemptuous and mocking commentary. In contrast to Marr, who feels that politically inflected news can be easily detected and avoided, Lloyd also suggests that the line between news and comment or opinion is all too often crossed in the pursuit of attention-grabbing and audience-pulling journalism: ‘The reporter and the presenter are much freer to suggest, or even impose, their own explicit or implicit judgement on the process described than at any time since the broadcast media became dominant’ (p. 16). If this is a danger at the BBC, some observers feel that the threat is all too real with respect to commercial broadcasting, and it is sensed that there has already been a pronounced and dangerous erosion of the public service ethos. As Ursell (2003) puts it, competitive pressures mean that …[the] values of neutrality and balance will be tested by the drive towards niche news production, and the values of completeness and

12

Press and Television in British Politics

factualness have already been tested and damaged by tightened budgets, reduced manpower, raised workloads, and accelerated production schedules. (p. 44) Murdock (2004) endorses this pessimistic reading of developments in the commercial broadcasting domain, commenting that In an increasingly competitive environment commercial players argue ever more vocally that they cannot be expected to bear the losses involved in continuing to provide public service programming and that this task should be the sole responsibility of publicly funded organisations. (p. 12) Implicit here is notion that the BBC is pivotal in filling the gap left by commercial broadcasting in its headlong drive for audiences and revenue (O’Hagan and Jennings, 2003, p. 38). This notion of ‘gap filling’ goes hand in hand with the idea that the presence of a public service provider like the BBC helps maintain standards throughout the industry. Padovani and Tracey (2003) argue that public service provision sets up a ‘virtuous cycle’ with the commercial broadcasters, and they cite a McKinsey and Company report which suggested that ‘… there is a strong linkage between the health and funding model of the PSB and the overall quality of each national broadcasting market’ (quoted p. 139) – a sentiment echoed in Andrew Marr’s comment that ‘We need a culture of public service broadcasting to keep the rest honest’ (p. 320). The situation in Britain is, then, quite different from that in the United States, where, in a fully competitive and commercial market, the economics of news production and a weak regulatory framework have lead to the marginalisation of hard news or to highly inflected political commentary, as broadcasters target consumers who have identifiable types of political preference (Hamilton, 2004).

Motivations beyond public service Subsequent chapters in this book will attempt to determine if the broadcasters in Britain continue to fulfil their public service obligations or whether they are, indeed, complicit in a general erosion of standards. But as we noted earlier, the broadcasters are not the only set of actors in the drama of modern mediated democracy, and a range of other players

Connecting the Media and Politics 13

operate in this domain. The press make an obvious contribution to debate, but if anything, it is a contribution to diversity or plurality of output, and not one that necessarily embraces loftier ideals. The broadcasters are bound by charter to ‘educate and inform’, but the press – which is scarcely regulated in any meaningful way – embrace no such obligation. As a result, political coverage is opinionated, partial and imbalanced, often raucously so. The motivations of those who own and those who run the press (and who, in large measure, determine the tenor of political coverage) are varied. With some there is the drive to support particular political positions in a way that broadcasters cannot. The Mirror and the Independent have done so over the Iraq war, the latter, in the words of its editor, positioning itself as ‘viewpaper’ as much as a newspaper. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper and Paul Dacre’s Mail have consistently railed against the EU. The former has done so in part as a response to the EU’s interventionist and quasi-corporatist characteristics, but also in response to its interference in his corporate plans (Dyke, 2005). For Dacre, the position on the EU is perhaps more an act of faith and a reflection of a longer standing loyalty to Mrs Thatcher’s enduring hostility to Europe. Both examples illustrate how control of the press can result in inflected and imbalanced commentary. But there are more subtle influences at work which mix both political and commercial impulses. For instance, Richard Desmond’s Express dutifully endorsed New Labour in 2001, after the Department of Trade and Industry cleared his purchase of this newspaper and the Star. Rupert Murdoch’s support for New Labour may be seen in a similar light. In a fiercely competitive climate, it would have been unwise for News International to continue supporting the Conservative Party when the tide of public support was so clearly in Tony Blair’s favour. To have done so would have risked alienating a significant part of its readership, which would not have made sense in purely business terms. Nevertheless, the support of particular proprietors or titles cannot be guaranteed, and Richard Desmond’s Express is a case in point. Support for New Labour was short-lived, and it reverted to a stridently antiLabour, anti-Blair stance. But this sort of ‘flip-flop’ is not unknown in the newspaper industry, and some staunch, erstwhile supporters of New Labour have become much more hesitant (Bartle, 2005). This fickleness in support – in conjunction with the perceived power of the press to shape debate, lead the agenda and influence public attitudes – explains why politicians have been so strongly motivated to curry favour with newspaper proprietors and editors. Blair’s attempts to woo News International may be seen in this light, as can his less successful bid to

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charm the Mail group’s editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre (Lloyd, 2004, p. 94). A combination of fear and the urge to generate positive (or, in any event, less negative) coverage also explains the motivation of politicians to manage the media environment through effective PR and relentless political marketing (Scammell, 1995; Kavanagh, 1995; Davis, 2002). The range of stratagems used here can vary from the innocuous (like speech writing, instant rebuttal, statement coordination, ‘photo-oping’, creating sound bites or lobbying journalists), through the just about pardonable (selective leaking/briefing, burying bad news, and attempting to define the rules of engagement for political interviews), all the way to the wholly unacceptable (the bullying or harassment of journalists, lying by omission or commission, and character assassination). This has reached its apotheosis in New Labour spin doctoring, or so it is claimed. But it is as well to remember that in a ‘public relations culture’ almost all politically active groupings and organisations are earnestly engaged in image management (Miller, 2002). Businesses, trade unions and pressure groups are, like everyone else, trying to get their message across (Davis, 2002). Consequently, through a variety of techniques, a range of ‘spin doctors’ and PR people hope to shape the agenda, define the terms of political debate and limit the damage from the attacks of their opponents (Andrews, 2006). Much ink has been spilled over the extent to which this sort of media management is, in fact, a pernicious development (Franklin, 1994 and 1999a; Barnett and Gaber, 2001; Jones, 2004). Directed at both press and television journalists alike, there is an obvious question of whether the various stratagems used and the motivations they manifest are a bad thing for informed democracy. But in terms of public service broadcasting they certainly represent a further pressure on balanced, authoritative and impartial political commentary, over and above those outlined in the last section.

The media and citizen motivation Where does this leave the public, i.e. where do they figure in all of this? In an ideal world, citizens will take an interest in politics and in the media’s coverage of social developments. They would make rational decisions, based on an appraisal of relevant information, gleaned from a range of sources, among them the insights gained from personal experience. However, as a number of observers have been quick to point out, we do not live in an ideal world. Anthony Downs (1957), for instance, has suggested that it is, in fact, quite rational to be ignorant of politics. The citizen voter is, after all, one person amongst countless millions, and his or her decisions or actions (however well informed) are highly

Connecting the Media and Politics 15

unlikely to have a significant impact on the outcome of any election. So the cost of keeping informed far outweighs any conceivable benefit, and a state of ‘rational ignorance’ is therefore quite understandable. Few have an obvious motivation to learn about politics, policies and political programmes – from the media or from any other source. This is a concern for many scholars, some of whom have busied themselves constructing mathematical simulations of what public opinion might look like under conditions of fully informed engagement (Bartels, 1996; Althus, 1998). Others have stressed that having limited information or knowledge does not prevent people from making choices and decisions on political matters that still have reasoned and informed dimensions. Rather than become fully informed, the citizen need only take his or her cue from sources that are considered to be knowledgeable and trustworthy or are incentivised to tell the truth – including family and friendship networks, trusted members of the political elite or the informational output from respected institutions (Lupia and McCubbins, 1998). Partisanship is also a short cut to a ‘reasoned’ rather than a fully informed appraisal of politics (Popkin, 1991). This visceral and emotive attachment to a political party constitutes a rolling summation of the individual’s assessments of the way politics has impinged on their immediate interests – it is, as Popkin puts it, ‘…affected by voters’ beliefs about how government works, by information they obtain in their daily lives and connect with government policies, and by the information they absorb simply because it is interesting or entertaining’ (p. 14). So in operating in the political environment the average citizen need not know much about the details of a party’s policies in order to act as if informed. They only need to be aware of the partisan complexion of the principal players, and act or decide accordingly – partisan identification, in this way, acting as a shortcut to a form of rationalised connection with politics. We have to acknowledge that this understanding of ‘low information rationality’, based as it is on the American experience, is not necessarily directly relevant to Britain, since US political institutions and political processes have a complexity and structure that make them quite different from their UK counterparts. Nevertheless, this model does alert us to the psychological dynamics at work in the way citizens deal with politics generally and the mass media in particular. For instance, we should be aware that British people’s partisan orientations can and do affect the way they act and think politically (Clarke et al., 2004), and partisanship continues to influence the way a citizen makes sense of media representations of politics (Goddard et al., 1998). This makes the individual an active interpreter of information and not just a passive recipient. We also have

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to acknowledge that the British public are not captivated by politics, and few take a deep and serious interest in it (MORI, 2003). Indeed, British citizens can be switched off by political coverage at some crucial junctures (Blumler and Gurevitch, 2002). Nevertheless, there is evidence suggesting that there is an appetite for and interests in mediated information about some ‘bread-and-butter’ issues like the economy (Newton, 1997). British citizens, then, do not sponge up news about politics or the economy, but nor do they necessarily ignore or dismiss it. This places the average UK citizen somewhere between Downs’ rationally ignorant voter and the fully informed citizen of a notionally idealised democracy, and puts the issue of the calibre of political coverage firmly back into the frame – i.e. its quantity, quality and balance, how much and what kind of political information can be picked up at minimal cost to the citizen, and the extent to which coverage influences attitude formation. However, we need to be aware that when British citizens use a range of sources as cues for understanding politics, these may be quite different from the ones employed by their American cousins. For instance, it is unlikely that family and friendship networks are the principal cues, given the evidence suggesting that the proportion of the public who look to personal contacts as their most significant source of political information is very small indeed – almost vanishingly so, according to some studies (Dunleavy and Husbands, 1985; Hargreaves and Thomas, 2002). Moreover, as Table 1.2 suggests, the public do not particularly trust the political elite either, and consequently their statements or Table 1.2 How much do the public trust various actors and organisations to tell the truth? (February–March 2003) Response Catagories Organisations ITV News journalists Channel 4 journalists BBC News journalists Broadsheet journalists Black top journalists Labour government members Leading Conservative politicians Red top journalists

A great deal/ Not much/Not A fair amount (%) at all (%)

Net trust (%)

82 80 81 65 36 25

17 15 18 34 62 74

65 65 63 31 26 49

20

78

58

14

83

69

Source: YouGov: www.yougov.com/archives/pdf/TEL020101018_2.pdf

Connecting the Media and Politics 17

pronouncements are unlikely to be used as a shortcut to rationalised engagement. The same might be said of the press, particularly the red tops and mid-market black tops. The broadcasters, on the other hand, are trusted and unsurprisingly are the main source of the public’s political information (Independent Television Commission, 1996; and Barnett, 1989). All of these considerations force us to consider the sort of mediated cues that give the citizen the ‘gist’ of what is going on in society and politics (Goddard et al., 1998). And if broadcast news is, indeed, a significant source of information, it is doubly important that we have a clear understanding, not only of the impact of the forces, imperatives and pressure that shape its coverage of politics, but of the contours of the coverage itself. For if there is, indeed, an erosion in the quantity and quality of political news, this presages a decline in the overall health of informed democracy itself – as Hamilton (2004) quite rightly notes, ‘If too many voters lack information on too many topics … politicians can enjoy too much freedom to pursue policies that constituents would reject if they were the actual decision makers’ (p. 5).

A research agenda The political game is no longer about public meetings, parliamentary activities, diligent work by civil servants or about pressure from organised groups and other interested parties. There is clearly a ‘mediatisation’ of politics in contemporary Britain – in an important sense, politics is now carried on through the mass media, and this is where it is ‘located’ (Mazzoleni and Schulz, 1999; Schulz, 2004). The media no longer ‘look in upon politics’, simply recording what happens – they are now key players in the political process in their own right, with their own resources, interests and agendas. And in terms of power wielded they are perhaps on a par with the political parties themselves. But we need to know whether these facts of political life have a negative and corrosive edge. The preceding analysis should alert us to the sort of themes and issues that need to be addressed empirically if we are to get a full and rounded appreciation of the media’s position in modern democracy. Is news, for instance, ‘dumbed down’ or marginalised? Many commentators have unflattering things to say about contemporary news coverage, based on the assumption that we are, indeed, seeing a conspicuous dumbing down of news content (‘Whodumbed-It?’, Daily Mail, 20/8/03). But prior to determining what truth there is in these accusations, we need a clear definition of what actually constitutes

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‘dumbed down’ coverage, and in Chapter 2 there will be an attempt to probe these definitional issues, before looking critically at the ‘tabloidisation’ thesis. It is only at this point that we can begin to address some important issues. Can we, for instance, frame general conclusions about the level of tabloidisation, or do we need to differentiate between particular news themes/issues, or between the BBC and their commercial counterparts? The results speak to the issue of television’s contribution to informed democracy, and are relevant to the question of whether the balance between popularised and more informative coverage is tipping away from the latter and towards the former. But if we are to assess the media’s, and particularly television’s, contribution to political debate and social dialogue, there is a responsibility to look beyond the issue of the ‘quantity’ of serious news, and instead examine its substantive and formal characteristics. Otherwise, how are we to determine whether television does, in fact, make the sort of contribution to enlightened and informed democracy that advocates of public service broadcasting envisage? A range of questions needs to be addressed. For example, are there subtle signs of a populist tone creeping into the way television news handles serious topics? Or have organisational changes at the BBC counteracted the ‘bias against understanding’ that is said to have been embodied in news output (Birt, 1975; Birt and Jay, 1975a, 1975b and 1975c; Birt, 2002)? Do broadcasters fail to explain social and political phenomena in the way that it ought to if they are to fulfil its public service responsibilities? And is it apparent that BBC coverage is keeping the commercial sector, to use Andrew Marr’s term, ‘honest’? Broadly speaking, the issue here is one of ‘quality’, but do we have or can we develop a defendable set of criteria for determining what this would look like, especially in terms of balance and objectivity? Chapter 3 will explore this theme, before comparing the BBC and its commercial rivals. But looking at the broader climate of debate, what can be said about the broadcaster’s ability to counterbalance the inflected and overtly partisan coverage of the press – in other words, does weighty, balanced and unbiased coverage from the broadcasters compensate for the obvious deficiencies of politicised coverage in the press? Subsequent chapters will examine these issues, but will also touch on a range of other important themes. For instance, is there evidence that ‘spin’ has a significant and negative impact on the balance of coverage, i.e. does the commentary bear the imprint of effective image management and is the quality of coverage thereby affected adversely? Or can a case be made that in some instances more effective

Connecting the Media and Politics 19

use of image management could actually enhance the balance and objectivity of coverage? Can it actually contribute to the provision of informative coverage, and in doing so enhance the quality of public debate? This line of reasoning does presuppose that the broadcasters are capable of providing impartial, objective and informative coverage, a notion that is hotly disputed by a number of critical observers (Hall, 1978; Glasgow University Media Group, 1980; Jensen, 1987; Emmison, 1983; Rae and Drury, 1993). From their perspective, news still bears the subtle but unmistakable imprint of political bias – introduced by the way stories address social and political trends, explore their causes, attribute responsibility for important developments – and reproduces the utterances and ideologies of a narrow section of the community. This is a damning criticism and, if true, would represent a serious indictment of modern mediated democracy. The analysis presented in Chapters 3, 4 and 6 will explore whether this critique has evidential support with respect to coverage of a range of themes, including the domestic economy, anti-globalisation protest and the euro. But beyond this we need to know whether any of this actually matters, i.e. does the press and television coverage we will be analysing actually affect the way the public think about economics and politics? Who, in fact, is influenced by the coverage, in what ways and through what mechanisms? What is the actual rather than the supposed, the imagined or even the idealised (Habermas, 1990) contribution to debate and social dialogue. Can the media actually direct the gaze of the public towards significant political issues? And, finally, what political implications follow for our understanding of the way we connect news output, ideology and political power? Chapters 4 and 6 will address these themes in some detail. The emergent conclusions should help us develop a broader understanding of the role of media in general and of broadcasters in particular. For instance, it should help us contextualise the debate about image management and PR. The overall significance of public relations is at least partly contingent on how far the product of spin (inflected coverage) impacts on public consciousness. Therefore, an appreciation of the impact of coverage should place such activities in perspective. Answering these questions will help us extend our understanding of the media’s position in and contribution to contemporary democracy and will help us to describe and characterise more effectively what mediated democracy actually is, as well as where it may be going. Answers should also illuminate the way contemporary mediated

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democracy articulates to our general understanding of politics and power. But first we need to assess the most appropriate way to address the associated questions.

Approaching the analysis of mass communication As already noted, the analysis of news content and its impact in subsequent chapters will focus primarily on economic stories. The economy and economic developments are clearly of central importance in modern politics. Their growing significance is reflected in what some have termed the ‘economisation’ of society (Mårtenson, 1998): It is manifested by the tendency of economy to dominate over politics, above all through the superiority of economic policy over other political areas, an increasing share of the political agenda being discussed in economic terms. … And we can see further tendencies concerning the growing influence of economic aspects and perspectives on other areas of society, notably culture, arts and sports. (p.115, emphasis in original). The idea is that we are witnessing a transformation of society to a point where people are seen less as citizens and more as consumers – a facet of contemporary reality that extends into almost every aspect of life, from health to education and much else besides (Corner, 2007). Therefore, ‘the economy’ and ‘economics’ are central to politics, not least as important determinants of the electoral success of British governments (Lewis-Beck and Paldam, 2000; Sanders, 2000). This makes the themes suitable topics for the exploration of media’s role in contemporary democracy. The subsequent chapters look at trends in the coverage of a range of subthemes, noting the substantive and formal characteristics of the news, and exploring its impact. The initial focus is domestic, with particular reference to news about unemployment and inflation. From here the emphasis changes to embrace the analysis of the coverage of unconventional politics and the anti-globalisation movement. Finally, there is an assessment of the coverage and impact of news about Europe, with particular reference to the euro. This thematically uniform approach is in contrast to studies which range across a disparate set of themes (Barnett et al., 2000) or which focus solely on topics that are only intermittently of interest to the public, like international affairs (Franks, 2004 and 2005).

Connecting the Media and Politics 21

The analysis of economic news themes will, however, be firmly underpinned evidentially. This is in contrast to a good deal of political communication research which touches upon news coverage issues, but does not address them systematically or extensively. For instance, the analysis of the strategic, regulatory and managerial responses by the broadcasters to economic and technical change is not complemented by a rigorous and sustained exploration of their impact on content, although the implications for coverage are immanent in what is argued (Born, 2003; Ursell, 2003; Coppens and Saeys, 2006). The problem can extend to the theoretical exploration of the role of political communication. Murdock (2004) can mount a strong and compelling defence of the public’s right to full and comprehensive information and access to the fullest range of interpretations of societal developments, but there is no clear sense of what would constitute ‘full’ or ‘comprehensive’ in terms of actual coverage. And concerned observers – some of them media insiders or journalists – can also, on occasion, fall into a similar trap, focussing almost exclusively on the journalistic process, but not dealing in any systematic way (and sometimes not at all) with the product of the processes described or criticised (Humphrys, 2000; Lewis, 1993a and 1993b; Marr, 2004; Lloyd, 2004). This is not really surprising, since hard-working practitioners are hardly in a position to do the timeconsuming work of monitoring news (or any other output for that matter) in the extended time frame necessary to draw satisfactory conclusions. But it is a concern when strong claims are made about the quality of mediated democracy. This is part of a broader pattern in media research, where either limited evidence is relied upon too heavily or where evidence is largely absent. For instance, individual cases of real or supposed pressure on journalists can be taken as representative of a significant and generalisable pattern of influence on coverage, but with little by way of sustained evidential support for the inferential leap. And so a notable intervention by a proprietor like ‘Tiny’ Rowland on his newspaper’s coverage of Zimbabwe – in order to protect his commercial interests in the country – can be made to look like a successful and across-the-board assault on the integrity of broadsheet journalism (Hollingsworth, 1986, pp. 8–12). Likewise, some clear attempts to suborn the media through spin can seem like they support the notion that these strategies must always be uniformly successful (Jones, 2004). The case of Jo Moore – the government advisor who was caught suggesting that 9/11 2001 was ‘a good day to bury bad news’ – is also trotted out regularly as though it were

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testament in itself to the successful management of news content. Finally, the mere fact that a number of BBC Director Generals have had identifiable political leanings is used to similar effect, with the inference that the organisation’s coverage must surely and necessarily be debauched or degraded as a consequence. Now it must be admitted that a narrow focus on content and its impact is, potentially, the direct analogue to, and mirror image of, studies dealing exclusively with news production processes and with all the attendant imbalances. However, it will be a useful counterpoint to the enormous amount of useful research that has already been done on the journalistic and contextual dimensions of newspaper or television production (for a good example, see Harrison, 2000). So it may well be true that …broadcasting and broadcasting institutions cannot be understood merely as a collection of separate programme ‘texts’. As an ACCT Report commented, judging broadcasting organizations by their product ‘was like being asked to evaluate the Milk Marketing Board by drinking milk – relevant but not adequate’. (Curran and Seaton, 2003, p. 370) But frequently in serious political communication research – and almost always in journalistic criticism of or speculation upon news content – the milk fails to touch the lips. To address this issue the primary evidence for the following chapters is derived from an archive of television news stories on the British domestic economy and the euro, drawn from an unbroken corpus of BBC and ITV broadcasts, extending over a number of years, while often comparing and contrasting this with what is already known about press coverage. This avoids the problem of spot sampling, which can – potentially – miss out important coverage (Barnett et al. 2000). The data are supplemented and balanced by news material on particularly significant events, including the Trafalgar Square anti-globalisation riots of 2000 or the introduction of the euro in 2002. The news materials straddle the respective events over the preceding and subsequent weeks, augmented by a primary assessment of press coverage where there is no existing research or data available. The analysis looks at the coverage surrounding a significant event, embracing their run-up and aftermath. In formal terms and following Warner and Molotch (1993), Anderson and Weymouth (1999) and Gavin and Goddard (1998), the analysis of this material takes the form of an interpretative exploration of the broad discursive themes that emerge from

Connecting the Media and Politics 23

the coverage, regularly augmented with a formalised and structured quantitative content analysis. This approach is able to combine longitudinal analysis and focussed event data, while avoiding two important dangers. One of these can occur when very large amounts of data are assessed, and ‘data-overload’ becomes a problem. There can be a temptation here to simply track the prominence of significant ‘key words’ or terminology over time, as Lindhoff (1998) does when looking at the prevalence of economicsrelated terms when tracking the ‘economisation’ of press coverage. However, this means that, generally speaking, the details of the stories (and the context in which they are told) are lost. A second danger concerns the problems associated with in-depth, qualitative microanalysis of individual stories (see Jensen, 1987). The technique can highlight subtle forms of inflection, identify the significant structural feature in stories and expose the tonal quality of news. However, it can bring with it attendant problems with interpretative objectivity, as Harrison (1985 and 1987) and others have quite rightly pointed out, and is particular problematic when the fine detail of a news story is deconstructed (Pan and Kosicki, 1993). This intensive, time-consuming and detailed approach is particularly ill-suited to the assessment of a discourse which develops over a long period of time. Yet as we will argue in subsequent chapters, it is precisely this sort of longitudinal analysis that is required before we can draw valid conclusion about the quality of coverage. The enquiry into the impact of coverage also has a longitudinal dimension. But the nature of the approach necessitates a more stringent quantitative analysis of news content, designed to allow its incorporation into what is called a ‘multiple regression analysis’.3 Essentially, this seeks to establish the nature and strength of the relationship between a set of notionally ‘causal’ factors (which include media coverage) and ‘dependent’ or affected variables – in this instance, political attitudes measured via regular and consistently worded ‘omnibus’ surveys. But in order to do this the news coverage material has to be rendered into a numerical format in order to allow its incorporation into the formal mathematical regression models. This is accomplished through structured content analysis, where the essence of the coverage is systematically distilled into a quantitative form.4 The technique is able to illuminate significant correlations and highlights the independent weight that should be accorded to each of the various factors involved. Nevertheless it has significant weaknesses, not least in establishing beyond doubt the nature and direction of the cause–effect relationships exposed (Gavin, 1998). The case is often made that these aspects are

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best explored though alternative techniques, such as focus groups (Berger, 2000; Philo and Berry, 2004) or the experimental method (Norris and Sanders, 2003). However, while these techniques can illuminate causal processes, they are also ill-suited to assessing the impact of coverage over extended periods of time. Consequently, in the chapters that follow, studies that deploy this technique will be referred to only in passing to illuminate possible cause–effect relationships. The opening analytical chapter will, however, adopt a simpler approach. The object is to assess whether television news is, in fact, ‘dumbed down’, and the focus will be on the prevalence of stories with particular economic themes. This entails nothing more complex than counting the number of stories and counting their word-length. However, the results bear upon important trends in the coverage and are relevant to the assessment of television’s contribution to informed democracy.

2 Going Down Market? The Evidence on Tabloidisation

Down the drain? As the Corporation’s chief archivist said to me when I first joined: ‘You do understand, don’t you, the BBC has been accused of dumbing down from the day Reith invented it.’ (Dyke, 2005, p. 160) One thing that most commentators might agree on is that the media cannot adequately serve democracy if, in the process of covering politics, it trivialises events and developments or ‘dumbs down’ its content. The result would be to degrade British culture and debase public debate. And this would be, at least for the broadcasters, an abdication of their public service responsibilities, as generally understood. In recent years there has been a growing concern that there has been what can be characterised in general terms as the ‘tabloidisation’ of press and television coverage. Commentators have been critical of what they see as a general erosion of British culture, with headlines like ‘BBC Accused of “Dumbing Down” Political Coverage’ (Financial Times, 19/9/02) or ‘End of Risk TV?’ (Guardian, 15/12/03). The broadsheets see this as a threat to informed debate and, therefore, to the democratic process. The claim is that ‘serious’ topics like foreign affairs are neglected (‘Bell Accuses ITN of Dumbing Down’, Guardian, 19/2/02) and that infotainment and the trivialisation of politics have become the norm (Hunt, 1999). If these accusations are correct, they represent a serious threat to the body politic. The more lurid claims have an apocalyptic tone, suggesting that if the media pander to the three-minute culture and citizens are fed a remorseless diet of trivia, sleaze and celebrity, the civic culture that 25

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sustains democracy will be seriously and irremediably damaged or degraded. Tabloidisation is, the critics argue, a pernicious aspect of the media’s recent evolution, and one that is an unambiguous threat to democratic norms, values and practices. The accusation is a serious one and clearly needs some exploration. The academic debate on tabloidisation is a little more subdued in tone, and the claims that are made are more measured. However, one important point to note is that the charge that we are experiencing significant dumbing down or trivialising of content is not a new one. It has, in fact, accompanied almost every major change in media structure in the last 100 years. The launch of the brazen and unapologetically populist Daily Mail in the 1890s is a case in point. More worrying in respect to public service television, this claim was made on the arrival of the ITV in the 1950s and on the advent of multichannel broadcasting. This sort of claim often goes hand in hand with the notion of a ‘golden age’, where the public were adequately served by an effective and public-spirited media. But critics of this position point out that this age never, in fact, really existed (Barnett, 1998; Greenslade, 2003). The tabloidisation thesis is also criticised for its reliance on casual observation and anecdote, rather than a systematic analysis of news or media content (Hargreaves, 1999). Tabloidisation, in this view, is perhaps little more than a synonym for perceived ‘bad taste’, and the term may be inherently subjective or, perhaps, even patronising. One of the main problems in the debate is that if we are to assess whether democracy is, in fact, in danger from media tabloidisation or the rise of ‘infotainment’, we need to be able to define what precisely we are talking about. Sadly, not only is there no consensus in the literature on what constitutes tabloidisation or what characterises infotainment, but there are a bewildering and confusing array of features that are associated with this supposed dumbing down of politics. Some authors identify whole genre of programmes, such as ‘docusoaps’, talkshows and magazine programmes (Blumler, 1999) or ‘advertorials’ (Bromley, 1998). Others focus more on the topics covered, and here a wide and disparate set of issues figure in different studies. A fixation with personalities, personal histories, human interest and vox pop figure widely, as do stories that focus on issues which are dramatic, spectacular or which involve catastrophic or tragic events (Bromley, 1998; Brants, 1998; Barnett, 1998; Hvitfelt, 1994; Barnett et al., 2000; Winston, 2002). Standard infotainment fare also includes the royals and other showbiz celebrities – often in the context of scandal, sex or general prurience (Esser, 1999). Finally, too great an emphasis on sport and

The Evidence on Tabloidisation 27

crime are thought to denote tabloidisation, as does the focus on politics presented simply as a horse race between competing parties or candidates. The definition of tabloidisation encompasses not only whole genre or particular topics or issues, it also revolves around style, format and the tone of coverage. Reports are said to be tabloid in nature if the coverage is superficial, gossipy and entertaining or is, alternatively, bright, cheery and humorous. Tabloidisation is also associated with the accessibility that can be attained by the use of simple vocabulary, syntax and presentation, or through the use of a demotic, convivial or casual tone (McLachlan and Golding, 2000; Winston, 2002). Moreover, news that is raucously chauvinistic and self-consciously politically incorrect is said to be tabloid in character (Bromley, 1998). One of the most salient stylistic features of infotainment is that stories are either picture driven, short or focus on sound bites rather than substance. And lastly, some authors see the celebrity status achieved by some commentators and anchors as a symptom of tabloidisation, a feature that seems to have little to do with either the style and format or, for that matter, the genre of programme or topic of news (Blumler, 1999; Winston, 2002). The debate is, therefore, clouded by a general lack of clarity about what constitutes tabloidisation and this lack of clarity extends to the definition of specific terms, i.e. what exactly is a ‘sound bite’ and what actually counts as a ‘gossipy’ or ‘superficial’ story? How do we differentiate a serious from an overly dramatic tone? Moreover, some important features of tabloidisation do not seem to travel well when comparing different media. For instance, a picture-driven emphasis may, indeed, constitute a tabloidisation of coverage in the press, but this is barely meaningful in terms of a great deal of news on television, characterised as it often is by voiced-over location pictures. Finally, stories about royals, sexual shenanigans or scandals may, on the surface, be tabloid in nature, but if they revolve around the tax status of the royal family, the moral values of politicians or the honesty and integrity of public figures, they are at least partly relevant to how the public, in all seriousness, might (or even should) judge politics, political institutions or their representatives. One way round these seemingly intractable problems is to define tabloidisation negatively, i.e. in a sense by addressing what it is not, rather than what it is. There is a good deal more agreement on what constitutes hard or serious news and on which types of news or coverage are definitely not tabloid. The antithesis of tabloidisation seems to be a form of critical, current affairs or investigative journalism that is

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objective, sceptical and adversarial, but has analytical depth and interpretative punch (Bromley, 1998; Barnett, 1998; Blumler 1999; Esser, 1999). While these terms might be as difficult to define as those used to describe tabloidisation, there is greater agreement on the sort of topics that constitute hard news. Chief amongst these are political, parliamentary and campaign coverage, alongside economics, business news and finance (Brants, 1998; Brants and Neijens; 1998; Esser, 1999; Barnett et al., 2000). Also featuring strongly is news that deals with foreign affairs or overseas news (Bromley, 1998; Barnett, 1998; Barnett et al., 2000; Connell, 1998; McLachlan and Golding, 2000; and Winston, 2002). The literature, therefore, narrows down the topics which are clearly ‘serious’, but in the British context different authors disagree about whether there is a discernable drift away from this form of content towards greater tabloidisation. Bromley (1998) and Blumler (1999) are concerned that tabloidisation is muscling out serious journalism in the quality press or on television. Esser’s (1999) analysis of the British press illuminates a perceived decline in professional standards and points to the anxiety expressed by journalists about the downgrading of hard news. This, and a decline in the number and overall length of political stories, is seen as a symptom of tabloidisation. Barnett (1998), on the other hand, is less sure that tabloidisation is overtaking and displacing serious journalism. With considerable justification, he points out that newspapers are larger, and with round the clock broadcasting there is much greater air-time to fill, so serious journalism is just harder to find amidst the tabloid coverage, and in any event, tabloidisation may actually make dull and worthy topics more accessible and easily understood by the audience. Many of the studies discussed here are, however, not based on detailed analysis of what is actually broadcast on television or printed in the press. When this sort of work is actually undertaken, a mixed picture emerges. McLachlan and Golding (2000) look at press coverage in the late 20th century and, in particular, at the number of stories on political and international affairs, their size and picture emphasis and finally at the number of news items dealing with human interest or entertainment topics. They see a continuous decline in foreign coverage, with human-interest stories increasing in number in the tabloids, and entertainment more widely represented in the broadsheets. However, stories are getting longer, and politics still seems to figure prominently in the coverage. When the focus changes to television news, a complex picture also comes through. Winston (2002) compares a short snapshot of BBC and ITN news in 1975 with a comparable one

The Evidence on Tabloidisation 29

in 2001, and sees a modest decline in political, industrial relations and foreign news, and at the same time, a rise in crime and human-interest coverage. He is, however, keen to stress that there is a slight increase in economic commentary, and ‘tabloidised’ news does not in any sense dominate the coverage or submerge serious commentary (Winston, 2002, p. 9). Barnett et al.’s (2000) study of television coverage over the last 25 years also takes a set of snapshots of news in each of six years between 1975 and 1999. The results suggest that there is no discernable upward or downward trends in the weight of tabloid and serious coverage on BBC, over this period. They do, however, note a worrying drop in hard-news content on ITN news (particularly in foreign coverage), along with a commensurate rise in coverage of soft news topics like crime, royals, quirky or human interest stories and tragic or dramatic events. But on the whole the tabloidisation thesis is, at best, not proven, a conclusion mirrored in some of the studies undertaken outside the UK (Brants, 1998; Brants and Neijens, 1998).

Tabloidisation in the 21st century The studies outlined here have not been conclusive and suffer from some important limitations. Looking at snapshots of coverage, isolated at some distance apart, may fail to show any steady increase or decline in serious or tabloid coverage over time, and peaks or troughs in coverage may be mistakenly identified as part of a broader trend. There is also a need to focus on the recent past, where – as we have seen – there has been growing criticism of television’s perceived descent into tabloidised coverage. Importantly, the recent past saw two developments that were potentially significant in relation to the supposed tabloidisation of news. The first was ITV’s decision in March 1999 to shift its flagship ‘News at Ten’ broadcast from its peak viewing position. The development was seen by some as a sign that this prime-time slot was being freed for entertainment and movies, and by others as a clear indication that we were witnessing the marginalisation of serious journalism. In any event, the move drew the critical attention of politicians and television regulators alike. Subsequently ITN re-establishmed its flagship bulletin at its ten o’clock slot in October 2000, where it went head-tohead with the BBC’s re-scheduled late evening bulletin. Many feared that the direct competition would lead to coverage that was designed more to increase or maintain audiences than to inform or educate the public. The period is also significant in second sense, i.e. in terms of important political developments. Not least amongst these was the

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Press and Television in British Politics

establishment of the euro, first as a traded commodity on the international markets, then as a live currency circulating throughout the ‘eurozone’. This represented a sea-change in Europe, with important implications for its future, but also for Britain’s position within the EU. But the period also saw a general election where the economy played a significant role in the outcome (Sanders et al., 2001). The question is, were serious economic topics like these given sustained coverage on television? Did the late-20th and early-21st centuries witness increased tabloidisation of news? We sought to address these issues by looking at television news between August 1997 and late September 2001. The wide time frame acknowledges the need to take a longitudinal approach when examining tabloidisation, since the processes involved may work themselves through in the longer term (Brants, 1998; Esser, 1999). Within this time frame we chose to look at BBC and ITN mid-week, late evening flagship bulletins, for a number of reasons. First, these bulletins have high audiences and reach a broad cross-section of the British electorate. Secondly, on both channels, flagship bulletins often duplicate stories broadcast in earlier news programmes or on other channels. Thirdly, the focus was on peak-time viewing, on the assumption that the average citizen is unlikely to actively seek out political coverage at outer margins of the television schedules. And finally, the analysis of BBC and ITN news allows us to compare the degree of tabloidisation across channels which face differing operating imperatives, placed as they are on different sides of the public–private divide. Here we can address directly the notion that any decline in serious coverage will be more pronounced in the commercial sector than in public service broadcasting (Brants, 1998). The immediate focus of analysis was domestic economic coverage, news about the Single European Currency and stories that dealt with continental economic developments. These issues combine a range of features that mark them apart from anything that might resemble infotainment. ‘Economics’ is seen as an archetypal hard-news topic and is the antithesis of the sort of ‘other news’, seen by some as tabloid in nature (Langer, 1998). And if tabloidisation is indeed an important part of the recent evolution of media coverage, we should expect to see its marginalisation. Certainly if we are interested not only in the overall balance of serious and tabloid coverage, but also in how much television is able to contribute to civic understanding and the creation and maintenance of an informed electorate, we need to get a clearer sense of how heavy-duty topics like these are reported.

The Evidence on Tabloidisation 31

The decline of serious news? If the public are indeed being offered a diet less rich in serious journalism, we should be able to see a decline in the number of news stories dealing with the domestic and foreign economic issues and perhaps a decrease in their overall length (Esser, 1999; Barnett et al., 2000; Winston, 2002). Figure 2.1 illustrates the number of domestic economic news stories that featured on the BBC’s mid-week, prime-time flagship news programme. ‘Economic’ here means any news stories that dealt with a range of generic subtopics, including jobs and unemployment, inflation or prices, interest rates, taxation, sales and spending, wages, pay and disposable income, imports and exports, the balance of payments, short-time working, state borrowing and the housing market. Also included in this inventory were stories encompassing recovery, recession, trade, production, investment, growth or ‘business’. A number of features immediately stand out in Figure 2.1. Over time there is considerable variation in the number of economic news stories, with some conspicuous peaks and troughs, most notably in September 2000 during the so-called ‘petrol crisis’. The pattern highlights some inherent problems in exploring tabloidisation via the analysis of snapshots of coverage dispersed over long periods of time. Had we found only these peaks and troughs in such a cross-sectional search, the resultant conclusions might well have given a highly misleading impression of the extent of tabloidisation. That aside, we can clearly see that ‘the economy’ is covered every month throughout the period in question, often

40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 Aug-01

Apr-01

Dec-00

Aug-00

Apr-00

Dec-99

Aug-99

Apr-99

Dec-98

Aug-98

Apr-98

Dec-97

Aug-97

0

Figure 2.1 Number of domestic economic news stories: BBC (August 1997– September 2001).

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Press and Television in British Politics

with as many as five stories broadcast in any one week. In other words, we are looking at an average of one story a day, between any particular Monday and Friday. However, if we look at the overall shape of Figure 2.1 we see what looks like a gradual decline in the coverage over the four years. To test this more stringently we have superimposed a line on Figure 2.1, which summarises the overall trend of coverage.1 The ‘slope’ or gradient of the line confirms that the trend in coverage is definitely downward. If this represents a real and persistent change in the status or prominence of economic news, then we may indeed be witnessing a worrying decline in this particular type of serious story. Figure 2.2 shows the corresponding shape of coverage on ITN’s ‘News at Ten’. It tells much the same story as Figure 2.1. Again there are conspicuous peaks and troughs in the number of stories, but equally there is significant coverage throughout the period. Like BBC coverage, the overall trend is, again, downward.2 The trends exhibited in both graphs have to be seen in the context of general economic developments. After all, the period in question saw the bursting of the ‘dotcom bubble’, the continued decline of the manufacturing sector and, after the boom years of the 1990s, the slowing of projected and actual growth figures. The period assessed fell in the aftermath of an election whose result was heavily influenced by the perceived economic incompetence of the sitting government (Gavin and Sanders, 1998). It also straddles a second election where the economy had an important influence on the outcome (Sanders et al., 2001), not least because the government had launched a whole raft of economic policy in its first term. So economic topics were

40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 Aug-01

Apr-01

Dec-00

Aug-00

Apr-00

Dec-99

Aug-99

Apr-99

Dec-98

Aug-98

Apr-98

Dec-97

Aug-97

0

Figure 2.2 Number of domestic economic news stories: ITN (August 1997– September 2001).

The Evidence on Tabloidisation 33

no less politically controversial nor intrinsically less ‘interesting’ and significant than they had been formerly. We would not, therefore, anticipate a downward trend and it is difficult to explain the decline in terms of the withering away of the economy as a politically relevant issue. In this perspective, the downward trend is, indeed, a concern. The difference in the absolute level of coverage between BBC and ITN is not terribly great. The average number stories per month on BBC is 19.4, with 15.7 as the corresponding figure for ITN. The commercial imperatives that are more dominant at ITN than in the BBC do not, in this instance, seem to have effected conspicuously the overall level of coverage. What is also clear is that the rate of decline is broadly similar for both BBC and ITN, the downward trend is a general one that is equally apparent in both stations. Although both sets of coverage only seem to slope gently downwards, there are nevertheless still grounds for concern. If we project the summary line forward in time, notionally we can anticipate when it is likely to hit the horizontal axis, i.e. when coverage is likely to drop off almost entirely. If past experience is anything to go by, variations around this line will be large, and we would therefore anticipate that coverage never will actually reach this notional zero point, i.e. headline-grabbing stories are always going to be present on both channels, regardless of general trends. But if the downward slide we have uncovered continues on its present course, we can anticipate that coverage of the economy will be approaching worryingly low levels by November 2007, in the case of BBC. The corresponding date for ITN is slightly later, September 2008, reflecting the fact that the rate of decline on this channel is marginally less steep, despite the initial lower amount of coverage. But in both instances, and if the present trend continues, there is clearly considerable cause for concern about coverage of the domestic economy in the medium term.

The euro and the European economy We can extend this form of analysis to encompass trends in the coverage of the Single European Currency and the European economy. These, again, are intrinsically important issues. The euro will influence Britain’s economy whether the UK is within the ‘eurozone’ or outside it. Our continental neighbours are also important trading partners, so what goes on in the European economies is of direct importance for Britain. The health or otherwise of other European economies is, moreover, indirectly reflected in the value of the new currency. Indeed, the period under analysis, saw a sharp economic decline first in Germany, then in France – two of Britain’s principal trading partners. For these

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reasons alone one might expect the European economic issues to be and to remain reasonably prominent in the news. More significantly still, the period saw the initial trading of the euro on the financial market and was a time when there was a momentous move towards full circulation of the euro, a development that would effect Britain whether it were a part of it or not. Therefore, an actual increasing amount of coverage might have been anticipated. Figure 2.3 and 2.4 illustrate the actual amount of coverage of the euro on the BBC and ITN respectively, and shows how this has changed between 1997 and late 2001.3 They tell a similar story to the one in Figures 2.1 and 2.2, i.e. the same peaks and troughs are seen and the summary lines suggest a decline in coverage on both channels. The slopes are virtually the same for BBC and ITN, although with twice as many stories on BBC than on ITN it is clear that

D

Au

g-

97 ec -9 7 Ap r-9 8 Au g98 D ec -9 8 Ap r-9 9 Au g99 D ec -9 9 Ap r-0 0 Au g00 D ec -0 0 Ap r-0 1 Au g01

18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0

Figure 2.3 Number of euro news stories: BBC (August 1997–September 2001).

Au

g97 D ec -9 7 Ap r-9 8 Au g98 D ec -9 8 Ap r-9 9 Au g99 D ec -9 9 Ap r-0 0 Au g00 D ec -0 0 Ap r-0 1 Au g01

18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0

Figure 2.4 Number of euro news stories: ITN (August 1997–September 2001).

The Evidence on Tabloidisation 35

the coverage is much fuller on the former than on the latter, more so than with domestic economic coverage.4 When we extrapolate using the summary lines an alarming story emerges. BBC on this reckoning, should be approaching negligible coverage by August 2006, but more worrying still, ITN’s already rather limited treatment should, on this estimate, have approached a notional zero point by June 2003. Although, this date stands outside the period for which we have a full corpus of news broadcasts, we can use ITN’s extensive and comprehensive Web-based archive, to assess whether this ‘prediction’ is confirmed.5 From this archive we found that there were only three mid-week ITN ‘News at Ten’ euro stories in June 2003. The first focussed on a cabinet discussion on the euro in the first week, while the other two were broadcast a few minutes apart in a bulletin the following week – on a day when the Chancellor finally delivered his longawaited and highly significant statement on the Treasury’s verdict that Britain was not yet ready to join. There were no further stories in the rest of June and none at all in either July or August. This does not suggest beyond doubt that our projection in Figure 2.4 has unequivocally come to pass or that we can anticipate no reporting of the issue hereafter – news on the euro will always be newsworthy and should, therefore, never totally disappear from the coverage. However, our ‘test’ is a further indication that we ought to be worried about the general level of coverage of this important topic, especially when it remained firmly on the British political agenda at the time, and if anything, was getting more rather than less politically significant. If instead of extrapolation, we look at what was actually broadcast at the time of the introduction of euro notes and coins in January 2002, a mixed picture emerges. Table 2.1 illustrates the results of a month-long survey of news stories around the time of arrival of the euro, but includes Channel Four’s hybrid news and current affairs reports as a point of reference. Over the course of that month, the two main channels had 13 items focussed exclusively on the topic of the euro. Table 2.1 BBC, ITN and CH4 coverage of the euro at notes and coins introduction (15 December 2001–15 January 2002) No. of Stories

No. of Stories

BBC

ITN

Subtotal

CH4

Overall

Pre-introduction Post-introduction

4 5

2 2

6 7

6 5

12 12

Total

9

4

13

11

24

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Press and Television in British Politics

It should be noted that the BBC gave the issue almost as much attention as the more ‘current affairs’ oriented CH4 News. And the number of stories was well above the general level of monthly output as expressed in Figure 2.3. On the other hand, the output from ITN consisted of only two very short pre-introduction stories, followed by two rather modestly sized stories on the first two days of euro circulation. Now it should be appreciated that at this time of the year the schedules are often disrupted, and ITN reporters – like their audience – would be coping with the Christmas distractions. Furthermore, the transition was smooth and almost faultless, so the stories lacked the ‘disaster factor’ that would have given them legs – tellingly, one Dutch bank representative said, ‘One of the biggest problems is that we don’t have any problems and therefore we don’t have any news’ (BBC, 02/01/02). The rapid movement to a calm, ‘business as usual’ atmosphere meant there were few new angles that would have kept the story running, and despite attempts to stage manage a visual extravaganza at the changeover, the stories were rather dull visually, with few scintillating images and a high proportion of ‘talking head’ interviews. So the event lacked the newsworthy punch that would have secured it eye-catching headlines or assured sustained news prominence. And journalists obviously have to balance their public service commitment to inform and enlighten against this sort of concern, and therefore against potential audience disinterest and inattention. Nevertheless, given the gravity of the occasion, we might have expected that the event would have received more coverage than it actually got on ITN. Their output may have been a product of a complex balancing off of public service impulses, journalistic imperatives, space constraints, and the perception of the limits of audience interest. But there is a question mark over whether ITN got the balance right on this occasion. The final set of figures we can look at concern stories about the European economy.6 Like stories about the euro the coverage here rarely focusses on the European economies alone, so again we have looked at the number of stories where the topic is touched upon in conjunction with the domestic economy, or more usually, the euro.7 Figures 2.5 and 2.6 show the trends in coverage for the BBC and ITN respectively. The BBC coverage seems fairly static and consistent. While there is a very slight downward trend in the coverage, the slope is shallow.8 In contrast, the picture that emerges from the analysis of ITN coverage is similar to that which we see for coverage of domestic economic news and stories dealing with the euro. The trend over the four-year period is clearly downward. Not only does ITN carry, on average, only half the stories the BBC broadcasts (three per month to the BBC’s five or six),

The Evidence on Tabloidisation 37

Au g97 D ec -9 7 Ap r-9 8 Au g98 D ec -9 8 Ap r-9 9 Au g99 D ec -9 9 Ap r-0 0 Au g00 D ec -0 0 Ap r-0 1 Au g01

18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0

Figure 2.5 Number of EU economy news stories: BBC (August 1997–September 2001).

Au g97 D ec -9 7 Ap r-9 8 Au g98 D ec -9 8 Ap r-9 9 Au g99 D ec -9 9 Ap r-0 0 Au g00 D ec -0 0 Ap r-0 1 Au g01

18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0

Figure 2.6 Number of EU economy news stories: ITN (August 1997–September 2001).

the summary line predicts negligible coverage by September 2007.9 So again, it appears that there is an increased marginalisation of this particular variant of hard news. Overall, the evidence outlined above suggests some decline in the coverage of the domestic and international economy on both BBC and ITN. However, the sole emphasis on the number of stories broadcast, may give a misleading picture of the breadth of coverage. John Simpson, the BBC’s World Affairs editor has argued that when reports start going below two minutes, it is a sure sign that a news organisation has gone downmarket (quoted in Barnett, 1998, p. 77). While the twominute threshold is a rather arbitrary benchmark, the size of a broadcast

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news story does matter, and it could be the case that as story numbers decline, the stories themselves become longer, fuller and more complex. If this were indeed the case, there would be much less cause for concern about the overall decline on the number of stories, and the broadcasters would still be fulfilling their public sector remit, only in a different way. The data we have at our disposal allows us to take a look at this alternative understanding of what is happening with economic coverage. Although stories were likely to vary considerably in size from day to day and month to month, over the entire period the average word length for domestic economic stories was just over 360 for BBC and slightly less for ITN, at just under 350. Nevertheless, the data shows that while the word length of BBC stories was increasing very slightly, it was virtually static on ITN.10 The BBC word length increase may, at the margins, counter the decline in the number of stories, but the same cannot be said of ITN output. With story numbers declining and duration static, the coverage looks slimmer. When we turn to coverage of the euro and of European economies, the story that unfolds is only slightly different. The trend in average euro story length was down for both BBC and ITN. For reports concerning economic developments in the EU, BBC average length was down very slightly but for ITN there was a conspicuous lurch downwards. Overall, our picture of economic coverage is not altered by a change of focus to the length of story. For the most part, we saw the BBC holding the line (though sliding a little), but ITN coverage suffered pretty much across the board.

Whither economic coverage? Should we be concerned about the trends observed in the preceding analysis? An answer to this question can only be offered in the context of what we actually expect from the televisual media. Certainly the broadcasters have the remit to educate and inform which is framed by charter, bolstered by a self-imposed professional commitment to the public service ethos, and policed in the commercial sector by the broadcasting regulators. Since the press certainly cannot be relied upon to generate dispassionate and impartial coverage, television has a vital role in contemporary democracy. This is especially the case if we want our citizens to be able to engage in politics in a reasoned and informed manner, and if we want them to understand and interpret difficult and complex political issues. The economy is just such a topic. Indeed, it is the archetypal ‘bread-and-butter’ political issue. So if economic coverage is downgraded or relegated to the margins, the calibre of public

The Evidence on Tabloidisation 39

debate and the vitality of our democracy could, indeed, be at stake. But how would we recognise if there was a problem? The style and content of domestic economic news will be explored in the next chapter, but we were able to look at the weight of economic news carried on the BBC and on ITN, its main rival in the commercial sector. And rather than a exploring the relative preponderance of serious and soft news topics on these channels, we focussed only on the hard news broadcast, since Bromley (1998) and Barnett (1998) are essentially correct when they argue that it is not so much the weight of tabloid coverage or infotainment that is the crucial issue (especially when airtime is increasing and we have around the clock broadcasting), but the supposed or actual displacement or disappearance of serious, politically engaged and informative coverage. So the conclusions drawn from the analysis speak to trends in this sort of coverage. The picture that emerges is a complex and mixed one, but definitely does not conform to some of the more lurid and apocalyptic visions of the evolution of contemporary broadcasting, where hard news is almost completely displaced by trivia. With an average story length of over three hundred words, and with numerous stories broadcast across the two channels, the cumulative amount of ‘televisual ink’ spilled on hard news would be enough to fill several shelves worth of book sized volumes, at least with respect to the domestic economy (cf. Ursell, 2001). Overall, the broadcasters seemed to acknowledge that the domestic economy was still important and interesting, even if it was not perceived to be a problem as far as the electorate were concerned. There was a recognition that it continued to be central to the everyday lives of most citizens. The broadcasters also seemed to acknowledge that the economy was politically important, conditioning the electoral prospects of the main parties, and assuming a central role not only in their political strategies, but in some of the government’s flagship policies (the economy figured prominently in a whole raft of public policy under New Labour, particularly with regard to employment). And the broadcasters seemed to recognise that a range of economic issues were still of societal significance and should therefore figure in mainstream news, not least the fallout from the bursting of the ‘dotcom bubble’, alongside uncertainties over important issues like interest rates. But on both channels there is a progressive and discernable decline in coverage of the domestic economy, although at the BBC this was offset marginally by an increase in story length. This was a slow decline and was not precipitated by ITN News shifting its place in the schedules or its subsequent toe-to-toe competition with BBC news at the ten o’clock

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slot, and Michael Grade, Channel Four’s former chief executive, was surely overstating the case when he suggested that, ‘…the day they moved News at Ten was the day public service broadcasting died at ITV’ (Guardian, 3/10/03). Nevertheless, in tip-toeing the tightrope between heavy duty coverage that informs public debate and the potential overemphasis of news that might well switch off and fail to engage a broad spectrum of viewers, both the BBC and the commercial broadcasters seem to have an increasing tendency to wobble in the direction of the latter. This can perhaps be understood in terms of developments at the time. The economy had been chugging along quite nicely, and as a consequence was perceived as less of a problem in the eyes of the public. And the issue was often devoid of the sort of drama and excitement that accompanies economic collapse, and that gives any associated stories wings as a consequence. Nevertheless, given the experiential, political and societal importance of the economy, it is still a moot question whether a steady decline was entirely justified or appropriate. And what can also be concluded is that whatever the factors that are driving this, they are not unique to the commercial sector, but are a broader sectoral issue. However, there is far less ambiguity with respect to news that centres on Europe and the euro. The BBC seems to have held the line quite strongly when it came to coverage of developments in other European economies, and it continued to produce a great many more euro stories than its principal competitor. This is to be applauded and is in the best traditions of public service broadcasting. But in a context where the euro had started trading in the financial markets, where it was a persistent and central issue in political debate and where, eventually, it started circulating as a real currency in what has been described as the most momentous monetary changes in recent history, the coverage should not have been in such obvious decline. The, situation at ITN was more problematic still, and we can say without much doubt the treatment of European issues by ITN was seriously deficient. News on these topics was extremely limited and, subsequently, looks to have almost trailed off to a vanishing point, even when there were important political developments afoot. These findings are important and pose a number of significant questions. Is ITN in danger of letting its public service obligations slip in this domain? Is it risking falling off the public service tightrope completely by leaning too far away from hard news and towards more populist fare? Worryingly, this seems to be part of a broader pattern, since other observers have noted an equivalent decline in ITV’s coverage of

The Evidence on Tabloidisation 41

news about developing countries (Barnett et al., 2000; Franks, 2004 and 2005). Now, developments in far off countries may not be central ‘public interest’ concerns and, in addition, coverage of them may not be of particular interest to the audience. But in terms of public service provision, it is the general pattern that is alarming, and a defence of ITN coverage mounted on the grounds of ‘lack of audience interest’ alone, is not terribly convincing, especially where there were particularly significant European developments at the time. There is no disguising the fact that if the trend in coverage continues its decline at the current rate, it will not be long before serious news stories about the European economy and the euro will be a thing of the past on ITN. And, indeed, for euro news, that time may already be at hand. This also has serious implications for the role of regulation and regulatory intervention in the commercial sector. There is almost certainly a role for regulation in the maintenance of public service standards in broadcasting. But the regulators at the time seem to have been overly concerned with where ‘ITN News’ was placed in the schedules, and perhaps should have taken more of an interest in what is actually being broadcast or, in the case of ‘news from Europe’, not being broadcast. And although a strong argument can be made for a ‘light touch’ in broadcasting regulation, this may not be wholly appropriate if the commercial sector is to be encouraged to sustain its full contribution to public service. The findings on ITN’s performance, also have indirect implications for the BBC’s relationship to the commercial sector, and for the overall health of public debate. Clearly it is not necessarily nor uniformly clear that the BBC’s contribution maintains the standards of broadcast provision across the board. There is not always a ‘linkage’ between the BBC’s funding structure and output, and the behaviour of the broader broadcasting market, and it seems optimistic to suggest that the position and actions of the principal public service provider necessarily establish a form of ‘virtuous cycle’ with their commercial counterparts (Padovani and Tracey, 2003). The BBC does not necessarily ‘keep the rest honest’, to use Andrew Marr’s (2004) words, if by ‘the rest’ is meant commercial broadcasters like ITN. The BBC may cover difficult, challenging and perhaps not particularly scintillating topics like Europe, but the idea that this will compel, cajole or embarrass the rest into providing similar provender, looks shaky at best. This is particularly alarming in a context where, at important junctures, the BBC coverage is also getting slowly and inexorably more slight. The broadcasters may cease, in respect to Europe, to act as a counterbalance to a press which is

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vocal, raucous, opinionated, highly partial and occasionally dishonest, as we will see in Chapter 6. Such a cessation would not only pose a threat to the diversity and plurality of coverage, but would have a broader and more corrosive impact on the body politic, and this is an issue about the broadcaster’s collective role in political debate and social dialogue. The results also have a bearing on what some regard as a ‘communication deficit’ with regard to Europe, i.e. the notion that there may be insufficient coverage to engage the attention of the public or, more worryingly, to help citizens judge European political structures and hold them to account (Meyer, 1999; Peter, Semetko and de Vreese, 2003; Trenz, 2004 and Meyer, 2005). And this should be seen in conjunction with Murdock’s (1992) argument for the citizen’s right to access as a full a range of information and analysis as possible – a minimum requirement for the exercise of the public’s meaningful engagement with social issue (Europe no less than any other). Trenz (2004) suggests that in press coverage of Europe there is a higher level of visibility than has generally been conceded (although other research suggests the EU Parliament may well maintain its near invisibility – Morgan, 1999). And clearly, news about the euro and about the European economy is far from absent from the airwaves. Indeed the cumulative weight of coverage is quite considerable, though obviously not on a par with the domestic economy. What our survey revealed was that, effectively, an average of around thirteen stories a month either dealt with the euro or touched upon the economies of our European neighbours. Since the survey deals only with the mid-week broadcasts, this amounts to roughly one story every alternate mid-week day. Whatever this is, it does not look like a dangerously problematic ‘communication deficit’, nor is the right to access information compromised by it. But if current trends in television’s output continue, the broadcasters in general (and ITN in particular) will make less and less of a meaningful contribution. And if access to significant quantities of media coverage is a necessary condition for adequate public deliberation on Europe, European interdependency and European integration (Peter and de Vreese, 2004), then that condition, on the face of it, may no longer continue to be met in future. Here the ‘Europeanisation’ of coverage is in danger of lagging behind the ‘Europeanisation’ of the British polity. There is still no integrated and uniform pan-European public sphere (Schlesinger, 1997 and 1999; Meyer, 2005), and the results from our survey suggest that we are in danger of loosing the makings of what Meyer terms a ‘compensatory

The Evidence on Tabloidisation 43

Europeanisation’, i.e. a Europeanisation of national public debate and commentary (Meyer, 2005). The evidence presented so far has a number of positive dimensions, but it also suggests that there is not much room for complacency. Many of the trends we have uncovered suggest a slow erosion in the weight of attention given to hard news. This surely represents one kind of significant danger to informed, elevated and rational public debate in the United Kingdom. Yet if we are to get a full appreciation of how real this danger is, we need to look not only at how much is broadcast, but at the substance of that news (at its style, format and content). It is to this aspect of news that we shall now turn, focussing initially on domestic economic coverage.

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Part II The Politics of Economic News

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3 Bias and Imbalance in Economic News

What do we expect from our media? We saw in the previous chapter that, although there was a decline in the coverage of the economy, the issue was a consistent part of the agenda. However, consistent coverage does not necessarily equate to compelling or satisfactory coverage. From the assessment undertaken in Chapter 1 it is clear what is expected of the broadcasters in terms of public service provision. The coverage should be accessible, informative and one giving the audience explanatory purchase on events. Reports should not only engage an audience (Gurevitch and Blumler, 1990), but should also educate. Coverage should be accurate, balanced and objective, reflecting the nation as a whole and its various constituent communities back to themselves, i.e. serving the whole community and not just narrow elements within it. Beyond this, a range of authors demand more from the broadcasters. For example, Habermas certainly envisages a public sphere where, ideally, the media help create rational debate and reasoned social dialogue (Garnham, 1986; Dahlgren, 1995). The media in this view have an educative as well as a communicative role to play, helping the public understand the political world, but also helping them appreciate each other (Curran, 2000). Others argue that the media should mirror a range of opinions on social and political issues (Street, 2001), and reflect the diversity evident in contemporary society through the articulation of a wide range of positions (Curran, 1991; Baker, 2002). In politics, the coverage should also offer more explanatory context so that audiences can understand the issues involved (Birt, 1975; Birt and Jay, 1975a, 1975b and 1975c). Enough information and commentary should be available to allow people to judge social and political developments, or the calibre of their political representatives – the media’s so-called 47

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‘watchdog’ function (Street, 2001). Finally, the media should, in as far as possible, give an unbiased account of the world in order that citizens avoid inappropriate judgements about events or issues (Gunter, 1997). These aspects of media provision underpin political accountability, but the last of them – bias – is by far the most complicated and contested. It is inextricably bound up with a range of disputed concepts, straddling the notions of factual accuracy, balance and even-handedness, and journalistic objectivity, i.e. the extent to which news conveys a true or faithful representation of politics. Yet even the notion of factual accuracy brings into play consideration of what constitutes the full facts or, indeed, the relevant facts about any particular political position, event or development (Newton, 1988). The notion that the news should be balanced begs a question. Balanced across what? Different contesting political parties (Semetko, 1986), different sectional interest, or different sources? Or balance between contesting understandings or interpretations of events? On the other hand, critics suggest that the notion of objectivity wrongly presupposes that there is a truth ‘out there’ that the news can and ought to convey. Others seek clear or self-evident criteria for judging between the competing ‘takes’ embodied in the news (Street, 2001). Moreover, the idea that news either prefers or systematically downgrades and devalues particular sectional, class or social interests, rests on the related notion that the real or objective interests of these groupings (as opposed to their conscious, subjective preferences) are themselves easily characterised or defined – a highly problematic and contested notion, as many argue (Clegg, 1989; Rosen, 1996; Hay, 2002). How, then, are we to tell which interests are favoured by news coverage? The difficulty in establishing whose interests are served (and how) further problematises the issue of identifying the ideological inflection of coverage.

What is wrong with economic news? There has certainly been a great deal of criticism of economic news, and much of this turns on the issues touched on above – the rational content of news, its balance, factual adequacy, implicit biases, interpretative inflection and ideological content. A range of critical themes recur. News is thought to be ‘dumbed down’, and the imperative to keep the audience interested and engaged is said to favour bad news over good, since the former tends to be more dramatic, arresting and attention grabbing (Lewis, 1993a and 1993b; Niven, 2001 and 2002). While there are obvious dangers in trivialisation and negativism, some have argued

Bias and Imbalance in Economic News 49

that there is a more damaging aspect of coverage, concerning what is left out of bulletins, rather than what is included. News, in this view, lacks the depth and background necessary to give the audience a firm sense of what is happening in the world. Insufficient context and explanation are offered and, as a result, the public are not able to fully understand complex and pressing issues (Birt and Jay, 1975a, 1975b and 1975c). Where news does explore economic issues in any depth, there is the suggestion that a limited set of sources are used and these ‘voices’ are from a narrow community, notably business, the City, economic experts or the government (Herman, 1982; Miller, 1991). As a result, so the arguments go, the ideas and opinions conveyed tend to serve the interests of these selective sources. And with respect to the government, the resultant commentary legitimises executive authority or existing parliamentary arrangements (Thompson, 1988). Furthermore, their expressions of opinion are often pervaded by the assumptions of orthodox economics, a discipline regarded as not in any sense neutral, but often intimately involved in the justification of neo-liberal or conservative policy programmes. So these voices are thought to convey an identifiable ideology, and in the process, existing economic and political arrangements are legitimised or shielded from criticism or the interests of the economic elite are served. The imbalances introduced into coverage through journalists’ choice of sources are in some senses easily characterised, since the respective voices are often clearly evident in commentary – quoted directly, referred to obliquely or appearing as ‘talking heads’. So we are able to judge their social, institutional or political origins. But other biases are said to pervade economic news. These are more subtle, less easily detected and are, therefore, more insidious. Coverage, it is suggested, consistently ‘reifies’ the economy – a criticism often directed at the press (Emmison, 1983; Rae and Drury, 1993), but also levelled at television ( Jensen, 1987). The idea is that the individuals and agents responsible for economic events or developments are largely absent from coverage. News portrays the economy as a selfcontained system of inter-related factors (such as inflation, unemployment and interest rates), which are largely beyond direct political control. The economy is something impinging on citizens, companies and the government alike, rather than constituted by their actions, inactions and decisions. It is, therefore, abstracted from the combined actions of socially located actors, with the unspoken assumption that the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ are separate spheres, and governments have only a limited role in macromanagement (Emmison, 1983). Implicit here is the

50

Press and Television in British Politics

notion that the common interest is served by minimal intervention, when in fact class interests are at stake. The resultant commentary has neoconservative ideological undertones, and an economy of blind, unstoppable, indiscriminate and ‘asocial’ force carries with it an underlying, neoliberal, laissez-faire political agenda, thus obscuring important political and economic realities. A final source of bias in the coverage is said to stem from the style or structure of economic news. The way in which various actors are addressed, and the language in which their actions are described has, in this view, important implications for the nature of the message conveyed to the public. For instance, union leaders are challenged on their actions and on their repercussions, whilst the captains of industry rarely receive this treatment (Glasgow University Media Group, 1976). Government sources are treated with respect and deference, but politicians with radical economic agendas are interrogated and questioned (Glasgow University Media Group, 1982). Finally, and perhaps most important of all, distortion creeps into coverage when the news deals with the causes of economic problems. For example, when inflation has been explained, the trades unions led by radical agitators figure prominently, and high prices are represented as the product of excessive wage demands. Meanwhile explanations figuring government (in)action, industrial mismanagement, underinvestment or excessive profit-taking, are under-represented or absent (Glasgow University Media Group, 1980). All in all, this represents a fairly serious indictment of economic news. The coverage is, we are told, trivialised, sensationalised or marginalised, projects the voices of established power brokers, is overly negative in tone and is incapable of helping citizens to understand the world they inhabit. Worse still, it is structurally biased in favour of a narrow set of sectoral interests. If such claims are substantiated, we might be entitled to conclude that the broadcasters are failing to fulfil their public service obligations. However, we need to remember the Glasgow University Media Group critique was mounted a quarter of a century ago and was subsequently challenged on evidential grounds (Anderson and Sharrock, 1979; Harrison, 1985). And as noted in the opening chapter, much has changed in 25 years, with the pace speeding up and the media world almost in constantly in flux. Growth in public relations professionalism means that almost all politically active organisations – including the trades unions – have become much more media savvy and, therefore, more adept at producing the best spin on their actions (Davis, 2002). Media organisations have also changed. The broadcasters in particular

Bias and Imbalance in Economic News 51

are highly sensitive to criticism concerning bias, and the BBC have reorganised their news-room structures, fusing news and current affairs specialisms in an effort to give their coverage more depth, background and explanatory context. But economic debate has moved on too, modifying in response to changing circumstances and, therefore, figuring different forms of commentary on economic developments (Gavin and Goddard, 1998).

Coverage of (un)employment So does television coverage still manifest the failings critics ascribe to it? Clearly we cannot look at all economic coverage, because as we saw in the last chapter, its overall quantity is enormous. What, then, should we focus on? Two general points are clear. First, we need to be guarded about conclusions drawn from the analysis of a limited corpus of reports, since a snap-shot can give a highly misleading impression of the sweep of coverage. Glasgow University Media Group surveyed months of news reports, but were criticised for ignoring counter-evidence that fell outside their survey period. Other studies are based on even less evidence – Jensen’s (1987) claims about reification are derived from just one week’s coverage on two channels, with attendant problems in generalising beyond this time frame. Furthermore, it is sensible to avoid periods when conditions are in some sense extraordinary. Focusing on coverage of crises or emergencies, which are by definition extraordinary, may again give a misleading impression of typical news output (Warner and Molotch, 1993). With these issues in mind, our focus is on two years’ worth of midweek, prime-time television coverage on the main terrestrial channels, from January 1998 to the end of 1999 – a reasonable span and one preceding the ‘dotcom bubble’ crisis.1 As such, it represents a period of ‘normal’ coverage. The object was to look at reports on a topic which was a recurrent feature of economic news, but which was also topical, potentially controversial and genuinely important. Employment is just such a topic. A secure and stable job is, after all, a primary concern for all citizens. It is the only source of income for most people, and employment security affects almost everything in a citizen’s life. By the same token, unemployment can blight lives, ruin careers, undermine an individual’s confidence, disrupt families and destabilise whole communities. Consequently employment is an important government performance indicator, and a great deal of research suggests it is a determinant of government popularity (Lewis-Beck and Paldam, 2000;

52

Press and Television in British Politics

Sanders, 2000). Finally, unemployment was a fairly constant background issue throughout New Labour’s first two administrations, reflected in numerous social security, tax and public spending initiatives, amongst these their flagship ‘Welfare-to-Work’ programme. Can we say how well the public is served by television’s coverage of unemployment and jobs? First, was there a sufficient quantity to fully inform the public? How rational was the discourse, and was it balanced or accurate, i.e. did it reflect faithfully the economic situation in the country? Did the range of voices heard reflect diversity of opinion on the topic? And, finally, was enough effort put into contextualising and explaining the issue? We can start with the issue of quantity. We can see from Figure 3.1 that the BBC and ITN between them broadcast a substantial number of bulletins touching on the subject.2 The two years of coverage saw 165 reports on BBC, with 96 on ITN news, and there was a slight tendency for the number of stories to diminish. For a number of reasons the hefty quantity of coverage is actually quite surprising. Firstly, in mid-1999 Britain was in a war in Kosova, but this did not unduly affect the level of coverage. Secondly, as we will see later, unemployment was on a downward trend over this period, and, therefore, we might actually have expected it to receive less attention. Lastly, it is

16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2

-9

9

99

ov N

9

pSe

9

l-9 Ju

-9

9 -9 ar

ay M

99 M

nJa

-9

8

98 p-

ov N

8 Se

8

l-9 Ju

-9

-9

ay M

ar M

Ja

n-

98

8

0

Note: The top line represents BBC; the bottom, ITN. Figure 3.1 Number of BBC and ITN employment stories (January 1998–December 1999).

Bias and Imbalance in Economic News 53

remarkable because the public over these two years were getting less and less concerned about unemployment as a national problem.3 So it is surprising that in this context, both BBC and ITN successfully resisted any pressure to marginalise the jobs issue or pander to audiences’ desire for less challenging or more visually exciting subject matter. Weighty topics like employment were still on the agenda, and to quite a significant extent. And one final observation can be made at this juncture. If we can characterise unemployment news in general, broad-brush terms, we can say that the overall tenor of the reports was rational, judicious and fairly dispassionate. In this sense, story structures and content were consistent with Habermas’s notion of rational public dialogue, and they conformed to his idealised notion of the media’s constructive contribution to critical debate (Curran, 2000). On the whole the commentary was sober, serious, informative and quietly reflective, establishing a range of reasoned and plausible responses to and explanations for (un)employment. While vox pop interviews were occasionally quite animated, they were largely devoid of invective and polemic, and there is widespread popular inclusion, largely shorn of acrimony. However, news cannot be judged solely on the quantity of coverage or its general tenor, and there is an important analytical distinction to be drawn between a debate and its content. The substantive dimensions of coverage are equally important, and some authors claim that news over-emphasises arresting and dramatic footage and panders to populist instincts (Lewis, 1993a and 1993b; Humphrys, 2000; Niven, 2001 and 2002). This may produce newsworthy reports, but gives undue emphasis to the negative aspects of stories, skews debate and deflects or distracts the audience, giving them a misleading impression of events, or causing them to misjudge the situation. There may be an open dialogue and the resultant debate may be rational, yet imbalance in favour of negative coverage will mean that it is less than comprehensive. Moreover, it could also be viewed as reflecting too great an emphasis on the dramatic and the newsworthy, or symbolising too narrow a focus on material that excites and stimulates, rather than educates and informs. We can assess whether there is a negative imbalance in employment coverage by using a technique borrowed from research on the impact of economic news – content analysis. As we will see in the next chapter, researchers have been interested in using this technique to measure the quantity of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ news, and subsequently relate it to changes in public perceptions (Sanders et al., 1993; Gavin and Sanders, 1996 and 1998; Sanders and Gavin, 2004). We will look at the details

54

Press and Television in British Politics

of the technique in the next chapter, but for the present it is sufficient to note that it can give us a measure of whether a news item emphasises either the positive or the negative aspects of any particular economic development. This technique was applied to our employment stories,4 and a clear picture emerges in Table 3.1. Over the two year, ‘bad news’ stories about job losses outweighing ‘good news’ about job creation by over two-to-one on both BBC and ITN. This was so in all but three (BBC) or four (ITN) of the 24 months examined, the ‘good news’ coming almost exclusively at the beginning of the survey. And it is apparent that news on jobs is much more often about unemployment than employment. This finding is important for a number of reasons. First, as we can see from Table 3.2 the picture on Table 3.1 Balance of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ news on BBC and ITN ( January 1998–December 1999) Codable Year

1998

1999

Months

J F M A M Ju Jy A S O N D J F M A M Ju Jy A S O N D Totals

Total

BBC

ITN

Combined: BBC & ITN

BBC

ITN

ve

ve

ve

ve

ve

ve

9 15 6 5 2 6 9 8 10 11 11 6 5 6 8 5 5 6 5 3 6 3 9 6 165

4 4 4 4 2 2 5 6 10 6 7 4 4 6 2 4 1 3 3 4 3 3 2 3 96

1 7 1 1 0 3 6 4 4 4 7 5 3 2 4 2 3 5 2 2 2 2 7 3 80

3 6 1 2 2 1 2 3 0 0 3 0 1 2 1 0 0 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 35

0 1 1 1 0 1 2 3 7 4 5 2 2 3 2 2 1 2 1 3 1 2 1 2 49

2 3 3 1 0 1 3 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 26

1 8 2 3 0 4 8 7 11 8 12 7 5 5 6 4 4 7 3 5 3 4 8 5 129

5 9 4 3 2 2 5 4 0 1 4 1 2 3 1 0 0 2 3 2 2 2 2 2 61

Bias and Imbalance in Economic News 55

unemployment was far from overwhelmingly negative at the time.5 The Labour Force Survey, considered the more accurate measure, showed some job losses in late 1998 and early 1999, but these were far outweighed by the overwhelming drop in unemployment in the preceding and subsequent months. The ‘claimant count’ dropped almost continually throughout the period, and the Labour Force Survey showed a relentless rise in the number of people in work. Furthermore, as one news item quite rightly recorded, the unemployment statistics were repeatedly breaking records, particularly towards the end of this period (‘Unemployment is down again to its lowest level for nearly 20 years’, anchor, BBC, 15/12/99).

Table 3.2 Levels of (un)employment in Britain (January 1998–December 1999) Year

1998

1999

Month

J F M A M Ju Jy A S O N D J F M A M Ju Jy A S O N D

Unemployment: Labour Force Survey Estimates (in 10,000s) NA NA NA NA 33 35 55 62 55 9 3 16 26 15 37 32 24 23 36 62 86 83 39 12

Source: Office of National Statistics.

Claimant Count (in 1,000s)

Employment: Labour Force Survey Estimates (in 1,000s)

1400 1380 1364 1359 1350 1344 1344 1340 1327 1321 1325 1314 1309 1304 1297 1288 1273 1263 1244 1229 1229 1200 1184 1159

2668 2672 2671 2671 2677 2681 2682 2687 2692 2694 2698 2701 2701 2702 2704 2708 2709 2714 2718 2718 2723 2728 2728 2729

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Press and Television in British Politics

True, the coverage is most negative around the time when the Labour Force survey seems to suggest job losses (late 1998, though not early 1999), but this does not explain the overall pattern of coverage. This seems much more negative than the figures would justify, particularly in the context of historically low and sharply declining unemployment. The results from the survey confirm that there was, indeed, a ‘negativising’ imbalance in news commentary – although this does not mean that the news is, in some broader or determinate sense, inaccurate. The faithful treatment of a plant closure or business failure may alert the viewing public to the conditions in a particular sector of the economy or geographical location. The situational dynamics and community repercussions of microeconomic changes in the jobs market are thus graphically and effectively conveyed. The dramatic and arresting elements of the stories may be interesting, and will therefore catch the viewer’s attention and keep them diverted and engaged – surely some of the principal functions of public service commentary. Nevertheless, a relentless focus on the job losses at the microlevel will give a misleading impression of macroeconomic trends, one that could seriously distort a citizen’s perception of general trends. This macrolevel or microlevel disjunction leads to a clash of public service imperative, for while it may be wholly appropriate for the broadcasters to focus on the travails of individual communities, this may be taken too far. The consequence is a failure to accurately represent the whole nation to itself in a faithful manner. A balance should be struck, but the results suggest it is not.

The voices in employment news But before we jump to any general conclusions about broadcast output, we need to look at some other aspects of the coverage. We need, for instance, to be aware of the sources accessed by journalists. Some authors suggest that the journalist’s choice of sources is highly significant, politically (Bennett, 1990). These ‘voices’, in this view, can define the contours of debate and articulate their own narrow interests or re-produce a dominant ideology (Hall, 1978). When looking at the sources accessed in the unemployment news, a number of features emerge which are at odds with the way ‘sourcing’ is generally understood. Table 3.3 shows a complex but clear picture in the distribution. Working men and women (the ‘vox pop’ element in the table) were the most numerous interviewed voices on both channels. How are we to judge this distribution? Some authors view a strong vox pop contribution to programming as a symptom of the tabloidization of coverage (Bek, 2004).

Bias and Imbalance in Economic News 57 Table 3.3 Sources interviewed on BBC and ITN (un)employment coverage ( January 1998–December 1999) Sources Interviewed

BBC 1998–9

ITN 1998–9

Total

‘Vox pop’ Unions NGOs/Consumer Groups

74 29 6

62 13 5

136 42 11

Company/Business Representatives Economic Experts Job Centre, Civil Servants,Bank of England Politicians: • Government • Opposition • Unspecified Others Total

90

34

124

27 10

12 10

39 20

42 12 5 15 315

32 16 1 1 185

74 28 6 16

But given the rational and informative tone of the unemployment news as a whole, it is equally plausible to suggest that this input will inform debate rather than debase or sensationalise it. Bennett et al. (2004) consider that wide ‘access’ for a range voices is not in itself enough to guarantee high quality coverage that contributes effectively to informed debate. Instead, they see an absence of ‘recognition’ (consistent failure to identify an individual by name or group membership), as a symptom of their actual marginalisation. Now admittedly, the vox pop contributions in Table 3.3 come from individuals who are rarely given an organisational, group or company identifier or affiliation. But this can often be inferred from the surrounding coverage, and in any case, the logic of Bennett et al.’s argument is flawed. ‘Recognition’ does not necessarily confer status or authority, but by the same token, it cannot be assumed that voices are devalued simply as a consequence of their relative anonymity. An alternative and more convincing way to conceptualise the vox pop contributions is in terms of ‘diversity’ (Habermas, 1990), where access to a plurality of different perspectives is seen as an important element of effective public discursive deliberation. The audience need to be made aware of how social and political developments impact on fellow citizens, in order that collective decisions about common good are as widely informed as possible. Likewise, a strong vox pop dimension to

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coverage is consistent with Murdock’s defence of the idea of the ‘right to experience’ (‘…the right of access to the greatest possible diversity of representations of personal and social experience’, Murdock, 1999, p. 11). In this view, a citizen’s sense of ‘self’ (their personal identity) is constructed through his/her awareness of ‘others’. Exposure to the experiences of fellow citizens allows a fair and judicious response to their plight, making the ‘right to experience’ a significant civic entitlement. This is one of the television’s more important contributions to effective citizenship, and the vox pop contributions observed here should be seen in this light. Admittedly these individuals were often only allowed a line or two to express themselves. But this caveat aside, the people most badly affected by unemployment (or who stand to gain most through jobs creation) are very strongly represented in the coverage. One other significant feature of Table 3.3 concerns relative distribution. Researchers have tended to suggest that some groups or actors are widely over-represented in the media, notably business interest groups and the government (Schlesinger, 1990; Bennett, 1990), primarily as a function of their strategic position and their resources, or due to their institutional authority and power. These ‘primary definers’ or ‘indexed’ sources are thought to delineate debate and foreclose on critical commentary, giving coverage a distinctive class- or interest-based inflection (Hall, 1978). Herman (1982) suggests that regular sources in economic news – notably academic economists, think-tank representatives and City-based pundits – are also far from disinterested, though flagged as neutral ‘experts’. They are, in fact, spokespersons of (or apologists for) entrenched economic interests and have a distinctive role to play in reproducing capitalist ideology. Of course, we need not accept the rather simplistic notion that economic experts are only and always the ideological foot soldiers of global capitalism (Gavin and Goddard, 1998). Nor should we ignore the obvious weaknesses in the theory of ‘primary definers’ (see Schlesinger, 1990). Nevertheless, our survey shows the vox pop chorus outnumbers all other voices on both channels. And even if we set them aside, Table 3.3 suggests that trade union representatives, consumer advocates and customer pressure groups not only outnumber economic experts, but are heard more often than Her Majesty’s Opposition. Their prominence is, in fact, almost on a par with that of the Government. The idea that the ‘usual suspects’ (business and government) are necessarily and automatically over-represented in news, and to the exclusion of others, is flatly contradicted by this survey. Strategic position and money may well count in terms of access to television

Bias and Imbalance in Economic News 59

(Schlesinger, 1990, p. 80), but do not in themselves assure command of the airwaves. Power and resource inequalities may facilitate effective PR, but they do not seem to ensure dominance – not in the realm of unemployment coverage, at any rate. So we can say with some confidence that if public service broadcasters are expected to serve the whole community, rather than just reflect the position of its dominant elements, the observations made here are grounds for cautious optimism. They certainly confound some of television’s most strident critics.

Explaining the jobs situation But what is said in a report is arguably more important than who says it. In particular, the way an issue is explained has significant implications for news framing (Gamson and Modigliani, 1989) and subsequently for how audiences understand the world (Pan and Kosicki, 1993). Attribution of responsibility is also an important determinate of the level of political fallout that results from perceived changes in the economy, affecting how people feel about the issue and, in turn, influencing their perceptions of politics and politicians (Peffley, 1984; Abramowitz et al., 1988; Gavin, 1997; Taylor, 2000; and Gomez and Wilson, 2001; Johnston and Pattie, 2002). Public service broadcasting’s contribution to informed democracy hinges, in part, on its ability to address these important aspects of economic reality, and much effort has gone into ensuring that news organisations are structured in a manner appropriate to handling them effectively – notably at the BBC where there was perceived to be a distinct ‘bias against understanding’ on economic matters (Birt, 2002). The obvious question is, has this been successful? To answer this, and using the approach deployed by Warner and Molotch (1993), our two years of news was surveyed to isolate the story elements emphasising the causes of (un)employment. The explanations offered were grouped into six categories relating to, (i) the actions and behaviour of companies and businesses, (ii) the economy and economic developments, (iii) government actions and inactions, (iv) the European dimension to unemployment, (v) the role of trades unions, and finally, (vi) regional circumstances (see Table 3.4). The amount of space spent in explanation was not great (typically only a few allusions to causal factors in any one bulletin); therefore while news on this was not expansive, it was certainly extensive and wide-ranging. One other point is immediately evident. The results strongly contradict the claim that news commentary consistently and necessarily reifies the economy. There were some ‘factors’ that were

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Press and Television in British Politics

Table 3.4 Causes of (un)employment cited in BBC and ITN news (January 1998–December 1999) Causes

(A) Company: 1. Company takes on/ lays off/opens/shuts 2. Merger(s) or takeover(s) 3. Investment 4. Costs or losses 5. Profit/loss: 6. Competition 7. Sales/trade/orders/ output/demand 8. Contracts 9. Production 10. Transferring abroad 11. Sourcing abroad 12. New product line(s) 13. Reorganisation 14. Prices that customers are charged 15. Relocation 16. Wages paid/pay 17. Chang(e)ing of supplier 18. Efficiency targets or gains or savings 19. Management failures 20. Building project(s) 21. Being ‘uneconomic’ (B) Economic: 1. National/regional: slowdown/upturn 2. High pound 3. Interest rates: increas(ing)/ decreas(ing) 4. Global: slowdown/ upturn 5. Inflation: high/low/(de) increasing 6. Bank of england (action/inaction) 7. Telephone/Internet banking

BBC

ITN

1998

1999

1998

1999

BBC & ITN Total

29

20

18

8

75

10 12 9 13 2 8

13 5 10 4 8 3

3 13 4 2 5 4

7 0 5 5 3 2

33 30 28 24 18 17

2 7 5 2 5 5 3

6 0 3 7 3 3 2

4 5 1 1 2 1 0

1 0 1 0 0 0 2

13 12 10 10 10 9 7

1 3 0 2

0 1 2 1

4 0 2 0

0 0 0 0

5 4 4 3

3 0 0

0 2 1

0 0 1

0 0 0

3 2 2

28

7

12

4

51

22 9

4 3

13 13

0 1

39 26

11

1

8

0

20

6

1

3

0

13

8

1

2

0

11

0

5

1

2

8 (Continued)

Bias and Imbalance in Economic News 61 Table 3.4 (Continued) Causes

8. Asian: slowdown/ upturn 9. Computerisation 10. Trade war(s)/ sanctions (U.S.A) 11. Internet sales/ revolution (C) Government: 1. Action(s)/inaction(s)/ decisions/spending 2. ‘New Deal’/ ‘Welfare-to-Work’ 3. Aid/subsidies/grants 4. Taxation/tax system 5. Benefit/welfare system 6. Utility regulations/ price review(s) 7. Regulation 8. Minimum wage 9. Nationalisation/ privatisation (D) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

European Union: ‘Duty free’ abolition Fisheries policy Aid or aid withdrawal Environmental rules Tax harmonisation Regulation

(E) Trades-Unions/ Industrial Disputes (F) Regional Politics: 1. Scottish independence 2. Northern Ireland peace dividend

BBC

ITN

BBC & ITN Total

1998

1999

1998

1999

4

0

3

0

7

1 0

0 4

0 0

3 0

4 4

0

3

0

0

3

26

14

19

5

64

12

1

8

0

21

5 7 9 0

4 0 0 3

2 5 1 0

1 0 0 3

12 12 10 6

1 0 2

4 0 1

0 3 0

0 1 0

5 4 3

0 0 0 0 2 0

3 1 3 2 0 1

2 0 0 0 0 0

3 2 0 0 0 0

8 3 3 2 2 1

8

2

3

0

13

0

1

0

2

3

0

1

0

0

1

62

Press and Television in British Politics

reported as having influenced job creation and job losses, often without much by way of elaboration. Notable amongst these are economic slowdowns and upswings, alongside inflation and the high pound (BBC, 26/11/99). But there is a much greater emphasis on a wide range of ‘actors’, prominent among which are companies and businesses, who are portrayed as prime-movers in hiring or, more often, firing employees. A good number of these references did little other than briefly flesh out the processes involved: ‘The AA, the Automobile Association, is to close all of its 142 high street shops. The AA blames low customer usage. Most members now do business by telephone. It’ll mean the loss of around 1,000 jobs’ (anchor, ITN, 5/08/98). While there may be precursors (in this case lack of trade and telephone-based transactions), the company is a prime mover. The government too was portrayed as a job creator (‘And Tony Blair today launched a new drive to get the unemployed young into work’, anchor, ITN, 11/02/98), but was also an agent directly responsible for job losses (‘Union leaders are calling on the Government to change its mind over the closure of a number of the Remploy factories which supply work for more than 1,000 disabled people’, anchor, BBC, 27/08/99). A large number of other organisations, institutions and individuals are also depicted as having responsibility for (un)employment – including the Bank of England and the EU (‘Fisheries ministers from the Euroepan Union have agreed the biggest cuts for a decade in the amounts that fishermen are allowed to catch, and some fishermen’s leaders have warned of possible job losses as a result’, anchor, BBC, 17/12/99). The commentary certainly does not disguise or obscure ‘agency’, and viewers would have little difficulty in ascribing blame for job losses and job creation. The conclusion must be that the causal mechanisms behind employment are not always or, more accurately, not often obscured or abstracted from their social or political roots, as critics suggest. Television’s representation of the causes of (un)employment are, in fact, firmly anchored in concrete social and political processes, where those responsible are readily identified. So in this sense, the claim that news habitually or consistently reifies the economy is, at best, woefully overdrawn, if not wholly misleading. Furthermore, many of the principal ways in which economics as a discipline explains unemployment, are represented in the news. Some of the issues featured in Table 3.4 would certainly not look out of place in a Keynesian ‘demand-deficit’ model of unemployment, such as the buoyancy or otherwise of the regional, national and global economies,

Bias and Imbalance in Economic News 63

costs and profits, or investment, trade and output. On the other hand, references to wages or to nationally set minimum wages or the rigidities in the labour market imposed by trade-union activity, reflect a neoclassical or monetarist appreciation of the driving forces behind unemployment. ‘Structural unemployment’ and the impact of new technologies figure in the news too. The former is implicit in news references to the training element in New Labour’s ‘welfare-to-work’ programme. Here retraining or re-skilling is necessary when changes in the structure of the economy – like the movement from ‘twilight industries’ of coal and textiles to high tech or light industry – produce unemployment. The relative infrequency of some of these explanatory factors, while perhaps politically significant, is not particularly surprising – references to the introduction of new technology, for example. We see that it does not figure terribly conspicuously in the explanatory commentary, but as one set of economists have noted, ‘Even if technological progress is a cause of unemployment it seems unlikely to have caused almost 3 million extra unemployed in just over ten years. In the past, technology has generated more jobs than it has destroyed, although of course these jobs may not have been in the same skills or geographical areas’ (Griffiths and Wall, 1992, p. 390). Although not touched upon with any regularity, this sort of diagnosis was reflected quite faithfully in at least one of the reports surveyed, ‘The latest estimates show that within a decade 5% of all retail sales in Britain will be made on-line. The change is bringing down prices and creating new companies. But it also threatens to destroy thousands of jobs in the high street’ (anchor, BBC, 10/12/99). So the attention afforded to new technology was perhaps warranted. But the omission or underemphasis of some other explanatory factors is less easy to justify, for instance neoclassical and monetarist explanations featuring restrictive trades-union practices. The items in the category ‘TRADES-UNIONS/INDUSTRIAL DISPUTES’ might have reflected this sort of theme, but more often than not the stories highlight the weaknesses of trades unions rather than their strength: The entire workforce at an offshore production yard on Tyneside has been sacked after rejecting a pay offer. … Their union had urged them to accept the offer, which would have given them an initial rise of 8.6%. anchor, BBC, 20/2/98

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Over-powerful unions only seem to emerge in commentary about the history of industrial disputes: Rover car workers at Longbridge in Birmingham are expected to vote in favour of a radical new pay deal announced today, which includes the loss of 2,500 jobs. … It’s all a far cry from the old British Leyland of the 1970s when union militancy and regular strikes brought the car industry close to the brink of collapse. ITN, 27/11/98 But should we be surprised by this aspect of coverage? The answer is no. The labour market rigidities that beset industry are largely a thing of the past, to the extent that New Labour is often heard preaching to other European governments the virtues of British labour flexibility. In this sort of context we would hardly expect the old neoclassical certainties to figure prominently in coverage. We can also see that limited emphasis is given to wages, while the ‘natural rate of unemployment’ so beloved of the monetarist does not figure at all in the commentary. However, the absence of the latter is also unsurprising, for as one economist notes, The apparent large variations of the natural rate of unemployment in Europe, however, have caused some doubt about the usefulness of the concept as a guide to the conduct of macroeconomic policy. Robert Solow, for example argues that ‘a natural rate that hops around…under the influence of unspecified forces, including past unemployment rates, is not ‘natural’ at all. (Froyen, 1999, p. 230–1; emphasis in the original) It should not, therefore, be considered particularly remarkable that such concepts should crop up relatively infrequently in broadcasts, even if we set aside the inherent difficulties in reporting such abstruse and mathematically formalised notions. Likewise, the lack of emphasis on wages, labour costs or ruinously high social security benefit payments, is not difficult to understand. While exploring the evidence about the relationship between wages and jobs across the EU, Gartner (2003) notes, ‘Altogether, the cloud of unstructured data points certainly does not lend support to the view that changes in labour costs lie at the heart of Europe’s unemployment problems’ (p. 413). Similarly, the lack of emphasis on the neoclassical view that overgenerous benefits help

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explain unemployment is understandable, since this too is heavily disputed: Can unemployment benefits explain a substantial part of the rise in unemployment over the last twenty years? The consensus view would be no, although some [monetarist] economists would disagree. The variable that is most likely to influence unemployment is the replacement ratio, that is the ratio of total benefits (unemployment and/or income support) when out of work compared to average net income from work. (Griffiths and Wall, 1992, p. 388) This nuanced appreciation of the problem is, however, clearly reflected in commentary: ‘It would be a mistake to make a too close link between economic development and creation of jobs and the problem of the level of social protection and particularly unemployment benefit’ (Michael Hansenne, International Labour Office, BBC, 20/2/98) or ‘The key to the Chancellor’s strategy lies in persuading those now claiming benefit to get a job by making work more lucrative and reducing the cost to employers’ (reporter, BBC, 17/3/98). We could conclude from Table 3.4 that television news coverage has an imbalance in favour of Keynesian over neoclassical or monetarist explanations. But this would be premature. A great many of the factors that emerge do not fit neatly into any of the general theories of unemployment. These might include the EU decision to end duty free sales, the high value of the pound, specific product-line developments, or trade wars, the so-called ‘peace dividend’ in Northern Ireland or the largest category of all, ‘mergers’ (‘British Steel is merging with the Dutch company Hoogovens. The deal will create the world’s third largest steel producer behind South Korea and Japan. British Steel said jobs would go where there was duplication, but there were no plans to close plants’, anchor, BBC, 7/6/99). The emphasis here is on what Warner and Molotch (1993) have termed ‘embedded’ explanations, and in their analysis of the stock market crash of 1987, they note that ‘The financial press reflects the mundane human habit of searching the environment for explanations of consequential events, often using what appear to be temporally proximate occurrences to ‘explain’ what happened’ (Warner and Molotch, 1993, p. 184). These forms of explanations were present in our survey, but Warner and Molotch go further, suggesting that ‘embedded’ explanations are inconsistent with a neoclassical understanding of

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economic processes and therefore represent an implicit slant in the coverage. However it is equally fair to say that these embedded explanations do not reflect any of the more abstract, mathematically formal models so beloved of academic economics, regardless of their political tenor. As such, they might be considered theoretically, if not politically, neutral. So, overall, we can say that television offered its audience a variegated, and seemingly impartial and balanced assessment of the causes of (un)employment. As such, it seems to have fulfilled its public service obligations to inform and educate the audience. Moreover, the efforts by the broadcasters to redress the ‘bias against understanding’ seem to have had a measure of success. This might vindicate the efforts of the one-time BBC Director General, John Birt, to drive through organisational reforms in newsroom practice designed to do just that (Birt, 2002), if it were not for the fact that this was also apparent on ITN.

From coverage to interpretation But does the news surveyed embody any other biases that we have, as yet, not identified? Crucially, this depends on how bias is defined, and definitional issues are important if we are to make a clear judgment on whether the broadcasters are fulfilling their public service commitments or are providing a quality news ‘product’. Perhaps the clearest way to think about bias is in terms of political imbalance – for McQuail ‘…a consistent tendency to depart from the straight path of objective truth by deviating either to left or right…’ (1992, p. 191). We will return to the issue of ‘objective truth’ shortly, but the survey in the previous section certainly highlighted some imbalances of this sort. Some voices were represented more often than others and news tended to accentuate negative developments on the jobs scene over more positive ones. Some explanations of unemployment figured more prominently than others in the commentary. Clearly there could be other imbalances, for instance, more men than women in the news or conveying it, more voices from the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum than the upper end, or focus on one set of geographical locations to the exclusion of others. More worryingly, stories may have contained more of one particular sort of news frame or subtheme than another (Pan and Kosicki, 1993 and Entman, 1993) or may have embodied a particular range of assumptions, formal and substantive characteristics or stylistic qualities, giving stories a particular interpretative colour (Glasgow University Media Group, 1980). The list is potentially endless.

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There are two issues that are important when considering this catalogue of potential and actual imbalances. The first bears upon their clear identification in the context of long-term surveys of news output. The second concerns how imbalance relates to social or political realities, i.e. to their ‘truth content’. On the issue of identification, some imbalance in coverage – like our hypothetical one concerning gender – are easily detected. However, with more subtle, nuanced biases, detection is much more difficult, and the room for subjective interpretation, greater. Indeed, studies focussing on these subtle aspects of coverage (Glasgow University Media Group, 1976, 1980) have attracted pointed criticisms. And conclusions based on close textual analysis are amongst the most eagerly contested (Anderson and Sharrock, 1979; Harrison, 1985 and 1987). The problems of identification and verification are compounded when it is admitted that general conclusions about news content require long-term assessment of coverage, lest unrepresentative aspects be homed in on. But given the difficulties which attend the task of identifying these characteristics of political news, the amount of effort needed to generate conclusive results would be Herculean, and hence unlikely to ever actually materialise.6 Yet without such an effort, general conclusions are at best unproven and at worst mere conjecture. What, on the other hand, we can say is that universal assertions about a prevalence of biased coverage can be undermined by modest amounts of relevant counter-evidence, as we have more than convincingly demonstrated with respect to reification. A related and perhaps more important consideration is not whether imbalances or biases in coverage exist. Rather, it concerns whether they necessarily and always represent an inaccurate and flawed account of events. From McQuail’s definition cited earlier, we can see that bias is often considered the antithesis of objectivity – a view echoed by Street (2001, p. 18). Objectivity, in turn, corresponds to an accurate and truthful portrayal of events: as Lichtenberg notes, ‘Our most fundamental interest in objectivity is an interest in truth. We want to know how things stand in the world, or what happens and why. In this sense, to claim that a particular piece of journalism is not objective is to claim that it falls short of providing the truth and the whole truth’ (1991, p. 218). Here bias and truth are juxtaposed and considered to be polar opposites. However, there is much to be said for Niven’s (2001) assertion that balance in coverage does not necessarily render it accurate or valid, but only assures fairness. Similarly, imbalance does not automatically mean that news lacks authenticity. He asks why there should be equal treatment for different political positions where one side is

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palpably untenable. Should all explanations be given equal weight when some are more obviously valid than others? Why should political protagonists be handled equally if one is patently more qualified than the others? Imbalance, then, need not mean ‘distance from the truth’, just as balanced coverage does not necessarily assure accuracy. Imbalance is only and always just that – an identifiable weighing off of any (or all) of a range of positions, explanations, voices, interpretations, frames, dramatis personae, locations, or whatever. Objectivity and bias should, therefore, be seen as different – both conceptually and evidentially – rather than as connected and opposed. And there is a real need to clearly differentiate these conflated concepts before we can hope to make any judgement about the media’s coverage or its contribution to democracy.

Towards a criteria for judging public service news? How, then, are we to judge economic news if not in terms of imbalance or bias? The news surveyed definitely contained these, but should we conclude that it lacks objectivity or truth content? An answer to this turns on what we consider to be ‘the truth’. One approach might assess whether the news offers ‘a full and fair treatment of the facts’ (Newton, 1989). But can news ever cover ‘the full story’? An over-worked – but not necessarily empty – cliché states that news is constituted by the choice of a finite set of facts, interpretations etc., from a nearly infinite pool of story elements. News, therefore, can never be ‘a full treatment’, since this is as much a physical impossibility (a question of limited time and space) as a metaphysical one. Instead, news might be judged against what could be termed a ‘spectrum of plausibility’, where we stop thinking about whether reports convey the full story or the truth, and begin looking at the range of truths about political events (Kellner, 1995). This acknowledges the need to look at an array of potential expositions, competing explanations, facts or ‘truths’. How is this ‘spectrum of plausibility’ to be defined, either conceptually or as a practical guide to the assessment of media output? Here we appeal to a juridical notion as a guiding ideal, where the analogy is with the forensic enquiry, royal commission or tribunal, with the defining principle the rational, sober, detached, dispassionate and impartial pursuit of understanding. Who is to make up this ‘jury’? We can say what this jury will not look like. It would not be constituted by political or interested parties, nor by moral or religious authorities. McQuail includes all these sources in his search for a ‘“reality” record’ against which to gauge or measure media content,

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and also makes reference to prestige newspapers. But if the defining feature of our standard for judging news output is a degree of detachment and disinterest, then all these ‘jurors’ fail. McQuail notes that his choice of sources for his ‘“reality” record’, ‘…is based on the assumption that these sources are likely to be reliable, relatively complete and also impartial’ (McQuail, 1992, p. 207; emphasis in the original). But we can scarcely claim reliability or impartiality for any of them, since few strive consistently for full detachment. The jury that best fits the bill might, then, be a pedagogic one. The academy or, as a surrogate, the academic literature on a social or political topic, is a useful gauge of what should be conveyed in coverage. For all its failings, one of the guiding principals of the scholarly community is, or at least ought to be, the pursuit of knowledge and understanding for its own sake. Its mission is the deliberate application of critical judgement, and it shows (or at least ought to show) an aversion to dogmatism, a sensitivity to questions of empirical veracity, and a commitment to verification. Moreover, a pedagogic ‘jury’ should be sensitive to difficulties of delineating any singular, definitive or unitary ‘truth’ and show appreciation of the fact that competing understandings, facts, interpretations, positions or ‘truths’ are not only possible, but likely. Some studies have, indeed, used an academic literature to assess the quality of coverage, though few have consciously formalised the approach. Anderson and Weymouth (1999) use a European studies literature and assess the range of themes that could be addressed in press coverage, though lamenting their limited reproduction. Philo and Berry (2004) look at a range of historical explorations of the Middle East before assessing the coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Nissani (1999) and Boykoff and Boykoff (2004) look at the correspondence (or, more accurately, the lack of correspondence) between the scientific literature on global warming and coverage of it. All use a scholarly literature to define a finite ‘spectrum of plausibility’, though none frame it in explicit terms. Obviously it has to be admitted that the academic literature can be afflicted by controversy and uncertainty. Likewise, it can be partisan and partial. Therefore, it should be stressed that the notion of the ‘spectrum of plausibility’ not only requires an impartial body of relevant reference material as a datum, but also entails the impartial reading of it. It is valid only insofar as this reading and any subsequent definition of a ‘spectrum’ is itself open-minded, dispassionate and impartial. Anderson and Weymouth’s study (1999) exemplifies the danger here. They make reference to those parts of the literature on

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the EU which focus on optimistic and upbeat assessments of European developments, and they go on to criticise the press for ignoring or under-emphasising these themes. However, they under-explored or fail to consider some fairly weighty critiques of EU politics which also figure in this literature, and their presence or absence is seldom used to assess the integrity of press commentary. In short, their reading of the literature on Europe focuses on a narrow choice of themes – those, indeed, that sit most comfortably with their evident europhile predispositions (Gavin, 2001a). This case is an illustration of the danger inherent in too narrow and inflected a judgement on how the ‘spectrum of plausibility’ is constituted. As a counterpoint to this, one could hazard that ‘the academy’ is reasonably good at detecting and exposing implausibly controversial or partisan propositions, or identifying the contentious or tendentious dimensions of an approach, evidential claim or theory. Equally obviously, the characteristics that define the academic approach can be found outside academe, and where these are expressed, should be given due consideration. The suggestion here is not that the academic literature has a monopoly on the sort of analysis that might be used to assess the breadth and integrity of coverage, merely that the canons and conventions of the academic community seek to institutionalise rational, evidence-based exploration in a way that other organisations or sources palpably do not. This community is not exclusively rational, nor in any sense is it necessarily and always the best, but it maybe the ‘least worst’ pool from which to draw consistent criteria for judging what ought to figure in coverage. The approach is also intrinsically dynamic, in the sense that what is considered plausible on any given topic inevitably changes over time. What is plausible at one point in time may look less convincing subsequently, in the light of reflection on social, political or economic developments, the marginalisation of high monetarism theory in economic coverage, perhaps being a case in point (Gavin and Goddard, 1998). What falls within the spectrum is, therefore, historically contingent and will evolve over time, but its parameters should at least be discernable at any given juncture. The ‘spectrum of plausibility’ also has implications for what might reasonably be excluded from news. Inherent in the concept is the mirror image of ‘implausibility’. There seems to be an under-explored consensus that news ought to carry as wide a range of ideas and expressions as possible. Newton commended ‘…airing all opinions, including those which are unpopular, eccentric, or supported only by small minorities’ (Newton, 1988, pp. 5–6). Likewise Murdock (1999) affirms that, ‘It [the media] must

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demolish the accepted divisions between mass and minority, mainstream and margins, and develop forms of representation, participation and scheduling that promote encounters and debates between the widest possible range of identities and positions’ (p. 17). This commitment to diversity is admirable and the sentiment is echoed elsewhere (Gurevitch and Blumler, 1990, p. 271; Curran, 1991, p. 30). The approach perhaps has validity if it relates to inclusion within the broad sweep of factual, documentary or entertainment programming. But within the flagship news broadcasts – the very broadcasts which so many citizens use to inform themselves about politics – there is limited time available to air a multiplicity of issues and sub-issues. The question is, does diversity necessarily serve the public interest, especially where the public have limited enthusiasm for public affairs and little energy for information gathering? The concept of a ‘spectrum of plausibility’ tends to imply that ideas at or beyond its fringes do not have the right to be reported, nor is their inclusion necessarily a bonus. Indeed there is the danger that their inclusion will crowd out evidence, issues and interpretations from closer to the centre of that spectrum. In this context we might enquire whether democracy is best served by an eclecticism in mainstream coverage, sought for its own sake.

Judging television coverage What can we conclude about the calibre of economic news judged by these criteria? The survey suggests that the news paints a vivid and expansive picture of the causes and consequences of unemployment and job creation. The elements therein were often consistent with the way the academic literature handles the topics concerned, for example coverage touching on demand or the health of the economy, stories on rigidities in the labour market, or news figuring the impact of new technologies. What was absent from coverage was also consistent with how the discipline has come to understand economic realities, with the limited reference to high monetarism being a case in point. Moreover, a very wide range of factors were canvassed, and this lack of a straightforward single explanation or unified ‘take’ on the causes of unemployment, is fully in line with Griffiths and Wall’s assertion that, ‘It is clear that there is no consensus amongst economists as to the causes of unemployment’ (1992 p. 390). Where such dissensus exists we would anticipate that a range of explanations should be on offer, and this is precisely what was found. To be sure, the picture is not perfect, but we would anticipate there would be at least some coverage that would fall

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beyond the bounds of the notionally ‘acceptable’. A case in point is perhaps the range of ‘embedded’ elements apparent in coverage, although it should also be noted that these did not have any obvious theoretical or political imbalances. So overall the survey suggest that by the criteria of approximation to an identifiable ‘spectrum of plausibility’, there is a pretty positive story to tell about how the broadcasters handled the issues. However, this is not the only way in which news output can or should be judged. Another way is to judge it against the claims of its critics. On this score we can also say the coverage comes out quite well. For one thing, the lurid claims about consistent reification are at best, heavily exaggerated and at worst wholly misleading, and this form of ‘distortion’ is not a essential part of the economic coverage. The reports also embodied a wide range of voices, confounding those who suggest that the news consistently favours the powerful and the privileged, and suggesting that Bennett’s notion that journalists habitually ‘index’ news against elite, governmental sources in such matters, does not in fact travel particularly well. Furthermore, this finding is consistent with the public service imperative to connect the audience to the way the British community (in all its manifestation) experiences the world. The range of vox pop views expressed would have given the audience an appreciation of how people around the country were handling economic developments. Finally, it is obvious that we need to qualify substantially the claim that television news necessarily suffers from a debilitating ‘bias against understanding’. The wide and expansive commentary on the causes of (un)employment is sharply at odds with the dismal picture painted by the Glasgow University Media Group, whose earlier study suggested that economic coverage gave an almost mono-causal or onedimensional account of the reasons behind country’s problems (Glasgow University Media Group, 1980). Evidently something has changed, and the news is now more comprehensive and much fuller. As a result, it is perhaps better placed to perform the educative and informative functions expected of them in the public service canon. This is especially important where the detached and rationalist tone of television reports can contrast so vividly with the tenor of press coverage. Nonetheless, there were some worrying aspects to the coverage. There was an almost relentless negativism to reports on employment, with job losses and business closures figuring much more prominently than job creation. This may represent nothing more than a focus on the newsworthy aspects of job losses which may well have kept the widest possible audience interested and engaged, and this is surely what public

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service television should be about. But this can also look like slippage in the direction of a tabloid emphasis on the dramatic and the arresting, and is all the more worrying because it is at the expense of the need to give the audience a clear and objective account of what is going on in the country at large. At the time, unemployment was at a historical low, and the notion that rising unemployment was a dominant feature of economic reality would surely have fallen beyond any serious spectrum of economic plausibility. Consequently, what was observed was disproportionate attention on the negative aspects of economic development. Clearly the balance here between what is informative and what is engaging or entertaining could use reassessment on the part of the broadcasters. There is, however, one positive dimension to this picture. The negative aspects of employment news could have reflected quite badly on the government’s general performance in office, as New Labour could have seemed to have presided over a situation where job losses were common. Likewise, the leaders of the business community were frequently implicated in decisions that adversely affect their employees. This undermines the notion that the government and business are both actively and, what is more important effectively, engaged in image management and image manipulation (Franklin, 1994 and 1999; Barnett and Gaber, 2001; Davis, 2002; Jones, 2004). Clearly, given the nature of the coverage of unemployment exposed in our survey, there are limits to what can be achieved by such activities. On the whole then, and with some exceptions, broadcast coverage of the economy is better than we might have anticipated, and certainly richer and more comprehensive than its critics admit. However, a case can be made that the political significance of the coverage, and its contribution to informed democracy, can only be fully understood in the light of its perceived or actual impact on the audience, and it is to this that we now turn.

4 Economic News and the Public

The significance of economic news The preceding chapter noted the weight of the coverage of (un)employment. The subsequent analysis highlighted some of its most significant characteristics, one of which was what seemed like a relentless negativism in the coverage, somewhat surprising at a time when unemployment was approaching a 25-year low. However, on the plus side, a wide range of voices were heard in this news, suggesting that in this domain at least, elite sources do not seem to dominate the coverage in the way they are normally thought to. Through the news bulletins, the audience were offered a sense of what was happening to other citizens, and in a way that potentially could help viewers understand their own experiences and place them in perspective. The survey of coverage also suggested that some of the wilder claims about the media’s reification of the economy were largely unsubstantiated. ‘Agency’ was clearly apparent, and the economy is not portrayed as a set of abstracted and interlocking ‘factors’. Underlying social and political realities were not obscured. On top of this, an assessment of the explanatory commentary around employment showed that, in the long run, television offers the public a fairly wide, balanced and encompassing exposition on the sort of things that cause it to rise and fall. For a number of reasons, this pattern of coverage has potential significance. First, it connects to the way the public perceive the economy, and it does so in ways that have potentially important political implications. For instance, models of political attitude formation and voting behaviour often have a strong emphasis on perceptions of the economy, and on trends in unemployment and inflation (Lewis-Beck and Paldam, 2000; Sanders, 2000). A buoyant economy, declining unemployment 74

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and slowing inflation engenders optimism, while economic decline, rising unemployment and rising prices lead to pessimism. In both instances there is a measurable knock-on effect on the public’s inclination to vote for the incumbent government (Clarke et al., 2004). The economy, therefore, matters to citizens in their evaluation of governments, and coverage was sending strong and consistent signals about the way it was developing. Not only that, but media exposition on the causes of economic turbulence offer the viewer the opportunity to attribute blame. The issue here is that there will be public approval or disapproval of particular actors only insofar as people are aware of their responsibility for economic change. News reports, in this perspective, can give the viewer a sense not only of what is happening, but of why it is happening. Businesses can make investment decisions bringing employment to specific regions or make the decision to lay staff off. Governments can be seen to launch initiatives designed to lower unemployment, or its decisions can be implicated in significant job losses, as we saw in the Remploy example in the previous chapter. And jobs can be lost because ‘Europe’ has wound up duty-free sales. In other words, news connects a range of specific social, economic and political actors to changes in the economic environment, and in a way that has important consequences for the image of those implicated, be this the business community, the government or the EU. The significance of the media’s coverage of the economy or its identification of the agents of economic change is, however, partly contingent on the audience’s level of dependency on news. The public will be unmoved by reports, especially where they have pre-existent attitudes, perceptions and affective attachments derived from their immediate experience. However, they can be more vulnerable where they are dependent on the media for information and cues (Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur, 1976; Becker and Whitney, 1980; Ball-Rokeach, Rokeach and Grube, 1984; Ball-Rokeach, 1985; McQuail and Windahl, 1993; Thussu, 2000). In other words, citizens may have their own sense of what is going on in the economy, based on personal and vicarious experience or on observation of their community. The viewer, then, will not necessarily be dependent on the media, and reports may be reinterpreted or ignored in the light of locally derived information. However, the public may be more reliant on the media when it comes to the issue of the causes of economic turbulence (Gavin, 1997). These ‘responsibility’ issues are often abstract, operating at a meta-level, and consequently are less easily grounded in everyday experience. As a consequence, the public may be more dependent on the media for exposition, clarification

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and commentary. The importance of this lies in the fact that the existing British literature on opinion formation and voting behaviour shows that attribution of blame is a mediating factor conditioning the link between the public’s perception of the economy and any subsequent punishment or reward for the government (Lewis-Beck, 1986; Paulson, 1994; Johnston and Pattie, 1995). So the perceived level of government responsibility for economic developments can count and is important. But the same general proposition holds true for coverage of the behaviour of the business community. As we have seen, their direct actions and decisions were most closely associated with unemployment in the economic reports, and the coverage therefore reflects rather badly upon them as agents of economic change, a point we will return to later. Although there is little by way of direct evidence of the sort there is for the way attribution affects political perceptions, it is difficult to see how this sort of report could fail to tarnish the image of the business community. While mediated information about the agents responsible for economic change is significant in itself, so too is the underlying structure of coverage. For one thing, there are close similarities in the way television reports the causes of both (un)employment and inflation (Gavin and Goddard, 1998). Mediated explanations, in both instances, were not expansive and did not contain a lot of detail. Nevertheless, they were extensive, with a wide range of causal factors illuminated. When both of these important economic issues were reported, a bounded ‘constellation’ of actors and agents were identifiable. The distribution of causal elements was also ‘consonant’. In other words, the ‘unemployment constellation’ on both channels was quite similar and gave comparable prominence to their constitutive elements, and the same could also be said for coverage of inflation (Gavin and Goddard, 1998, pp. 455–60). An important additional point to note here is that there was also consonance on the kinds of casual explanations that were largely absent from the coverage of inflation and (un)employment, notably those with a neoclassical or monetarist inflection. While this might appear to be an instance of inappropriate and politicised imbalance, it can be justified along much the same lines as their absence in (un)employment coverage, as we saw in the previous chapter. Neoclassical and monetarist explanations of inflation and (un)employment are among the more controversial and evidentially contested, and therefore arguably fall outside what we termed the ‘spectrum of plausibility’. But perhaps equally important is the fact that theoretical elaboration in these traditions is often abstract, highly formalised and mathematically complex. This makes their distillation and presentation particularly difficult in

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the conventional two or three minute story slot. The lack of the sort of personalisation that would give them intrinsic news value is, therefore, an issue. Story lines carrying these themes may suffer accordingly. Nevertheless, significant explanatory issues were absent from the commentary, a point we will also return to later.

Does economic news matter? The obvious question, though, is does any of this matter to the public? Do they, in fact, take any notice of this type of news? And if they do, what influence will it have on their thought processes. Will it change their attitudes, and will the negativising bent in coverage have knockon implications? Will it direct their attention to the sort of important issues that perhaps a well-informed citizen ought to be interested in? Answers to these questions have a bearing on a number of substantive and theoretical issues. For instance, would media scholars or journalistic commentators be as worried about news management as they evidently are, if ‘spun’ news had little or no impact on the public? On the other hand, if the public do not watch, do not understand what they see and are completely unaffected by the coverage they are exposed to, then what is the contribution of the broadcasters to informed democracy? Is the supposed ‘bias against understanding’, which is thought to be inherent in the structure of reporting (Birt and Jay, 1975b), compounded by a failure to make an impression on the viewer? Finally, we need to understand the extent and limits of media impact in this important domain if we are to place the coverage in broader social and theoretical perspective, since notions of media ‘effect’ are often implicit in some conceptualisations of bias and in theoretical elaborations upon the relationship between bias and power. As one author notes: The claim that the media are biased begins with the idea that the practices of journalists and editors result in articles and programmes which favour one view of the world over another, providing sustenance for one set of interests while undermining an alternative. (Street, 2001, pp. 16–17) The notion of impact is immanent in this idea of ‘favouring’. It is also implicit (but often under-explored empirically) in much theorising on ideology and ideological reproduction, where again there is the notion that specific interests are served in the process (Curran, 2000). This is normally the province of critical or Marxist theorising (Thompson, 2004), but the same might also be said of elite theory, whether this is the

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classical models of Mosca, Pareto or Michels, the later Schumpeterian variant, or more recent attempts to redraw and refine elite theory (Evans, 1995; Baker, 2002; Davis, 2003). But does television coverage register with citizens or affect their perceptions in the way that critical or elite theorists imagine? And if it does, is it therefore the case that the broadcasters are failing to serve the whole civic community (as its public service remit would demand), and only serving a part of it? The general situation is relatively clear. We can say with some certainty that people do watch the medium we have been dealing with – television. In the last ten years there has been little change in the number of hours that the public watch news on television, but it is clear that the average household can watch in excess of eight hours of news bulletins in any one month (Hargreaves and Thomas, 2002, p. 25 and p. 29). Furthermore, television is the public’s most important source of news, and as Table 4.1 shows, and it is way ahead of either the press or the web in this respect. Broadcast news is also the public’s principal source of political information (Dunleavy and Husbands, 1985; Independent Television Commission, 1996), and, we can say with some confidence that television is, by a long way, the most trusted source of news, and thought to be the most truthful and politically impartial (Barnett, 1989;Worcester and Mortimore, 2001; Hargreaves and Thomas, 2002). Although the evidence here only gives a generic sense of the position of television in the eyes of the public, the results from a survey reported by Newton (1997) and reproduced in Table 4.2 indicate that a substantial segment of the public do take notice of economic news. Finally, research based on focus-group reactions to economic news suggests that while the public do not find economic news stories particularly scintillating, they still take note of what the bulletins have to say (Goddard et al., 1998). So audiences evidently do pay attention to economic coverage, but do they do so in a way that affects how they view the world? The most well developed literature on the effects of economic news is American, Table 4.1 The public’s main sources of news Name of the news source

%

Television Radio Press Internet Word of mouth

65 16 15 2 1

Source: Hargreaves and Thomas, 2002, p. 45.

Economic News and the Public 79 Table 4.2 Attention to news topics in the press and on television O-level/GCSE or less Newspapers Percent paying attention to economic news in their paper Percent paying attention to political news in their paper Television Percent paying attention to economic news on television Percent paying attention to political news on television N=

A-level

HE or degree

24

26

38

31

47

57

48

48

55

51

52

60

2244

431

911

Source: Newton (1997) p. 156.

and while some evidence suggests that the media have little effect on the way the public think (Haller and Norpoth, 1997), the bulk concludes that it does. A large number of studies show that the coverage has measurable effects on public evaluations of the economy, notably levels of optimism or pessimism (Tims et al., 1989; Stevenson, Gonzenbach and Prabu, 1994; Hetherington, 1996; Dalton et al., 1998; Nadeau et al., 1999; Shah et al., 1999; Shah et al., 2002; De Boef and Kellstedt, 2004). And, on occasion, it can have a knock-on effect on the appraisal of the President and on voting intention. However, for a number of reasons it would be unwise to extrapolate too freely from these findings to any likely impact in Britain. For a start, one of these studies assesses surveybased evidence of people’s exposure to media and marries this to a set of assumptions about what was actually in news reports, rather than explore the actual impact of news content (Hetherington, 1996). This methodological issue aside, the American media and political systems are rather obviously and markedly different from their British equivalents, rendering any direct comparison inappropriate. Finally, the studies outlined here almost all assess the impact of press or wire service coverage of the economy, and in doing so often look at a limited range of sources (the New York Times, Washington Post or Associated Press figuring prominently). The focus on these commanding titles is understandable given their status in the United States, but few if any titles have such standing on this side of the Atlantic. And, in any event, the press in Britain is, as we have shown, not the most trusted or widely used source of political information.

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Comparable research on the impact of press coverage of the economy has, however, been undertaken in the UK (Mosley, 1984; Sanders et al., 1993; Gavin and Sanders, 2003b; Soroka, 2006). The focus here was on the coverage of a number of economic themes, but this consistently includes the sort of unemployment- and inflation-related news discussed above. Nevertheless, the results tend to suggest that, overall, the impact is rather weak, where there is any at all. Press coverage has a minimal impact on economic attitudes and appears to have a limited influence on the salience of the economy as a significant issue for the public (i.e. it lacks ‘agenda-setting’ power). In addition, where an impact actually is discernable, it is largely confined to the low circulation broadsheet titles. Finally, economic news in the more salacious tabloid titles almost wholly fails to influence the public, and there is little sense that in the domain of economic news at least, the ‘red tops’ have quite the power they think they have. The accumulated evidence is consistent with what we know about the public’s trust in and use of the press as a source of political information. The results have much in common with evidence of the impact of the press on voting behaviour, which is also thought to be quite limited (Newton and Brynin, 2001). This may be no bad thing, given the fact that press coverage has often been criticised for tone, tenor and political inflection of its economic coverage (as we saw in the previous chapter). However, it does put a further onus on the broadcasters to keep the public informed, over and above their conventional public service obligations. And indeed, the situation, as far as television is concerned, does appear to be quite different. A range of studies that straddle Conservative and New Labour governments, show that television coverage of the economy has a consistent influence on economic attitude formation and, subsequently, on the viewer’s inclination to vote for the government (Gavin and Sanders, 1996, 1998 and 2003a; Sanders and Gavin, 2004).1 These studies encompassed the sort of unemployment and inflation stories referred to above, and their raw data was sourced from the BBC and ITN flagship bulletins analysed in the previous chapters. The results suggest unambiguously that this trusted medium has an impact on how the public view the government’s handling of the economy and on how citizens perceive their financial prospects, these attitudes (in turn) influencing how people intend to vote. The studies referred to here are highly formalised and are all heavily dependent on correlating the results from quantitative content analysis with survey measures of public opinion. However, complimentary qualitative evidence reinforces the notion that economic coverage has an impact on the viewer. Focus-group research

Economic News and the Public 81

has given us a flavour of how the public encounter and make sense of this sort of economic news. Viewers, it has shown, can be indifferent to economic news, can find it difficult to understand at times, and can be sceptical about its absolute ‘truth-value’ (Goddard et al., 1998). Nevertheless the same people thought the coverage was reasonably fair and accurate, and they do credit it with a degree of factual veracity. What is more, they were able to make sense of the stories, grasp the ‘gist’ of what the reports conveyed and get a sense of who was responsible for economic developments. This accumulated evidence is important in two respects. First, the manner in which the quantitative studies measured the prevalence of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ economic news is consistent with the way the negativising tone of (un)employment news was assessed in the previous chapter. Consequently, we can say with some confidence that the negative turn of news was likely to have influenced public perceptions of the government and of the economy. Second, the qualitative research provides circumstantial evidence that viewers do register, and are able to make sense of, the cause-and-effect connections embedded in the economic coverage.2 This makes the distribution of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ news more significant than they might otherwise be. Nevertheless, the results from the accumulated research need to be treated with caution. For a number of reasons, we cannot conclude that the coverage has a decisive or determinant impact on the thought processes of the average viewer. For a start, while the effects illuminated are consistent, measurable and, in the case of the quantitative analysis, statistically significant, they are by no means large. Again, this is consistent with what is known about the dynamics of audience engagement with news, where processes of attitude reinforcement rather than direct impact are thought to be at work. The qualitative research referred to above is at its most clear in showing how the partisan affiliations of the viewers influence their reading and interpretation of economic news (Goddard et al., 1998). The same research also illustrates the fact that the public can find this sort of coverage quite dull, dense and uninspiring, even if they do keep a weather eye upon it, and so we could actually anticipate that the effect on the public might be quite modest (Gavin, 1998). The notion that news about the economy does not exactly grip the viewing public is also highlighted by our direct analysis of its agendasetting power. A considerable weight of research is testimony to the agenda-setting power of the media in general, and of television in particular (McCombs, 2005). Nevertheless, the agenda-setting power of the media can vary from medium to medium, from topic to topic, and from

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country to country, so we cannot simply assume that economic coverage will be a potent agenda-setter in the United Kingdom. Since little or no work has been done in this area, the opportunity was taken to test the agenda-setting power not only of specific types of economic news (in this instance employment and inflation stories), but also of a wider range of reported economic themes.3 The analysis took the form of a ‘multiple regression model’, which is designed to isolate the independent weight of impact of each of a number of ‘casual’ or ‘independent’ variables, on a specific ‘effected’ or ‘dependent’ variable (Schroeder and Sjoquist, 1986). The dependent variable of ‘salience’ in this instance was derived from MORI’s omnibus survey data which each month prompts respondents to consider specific economic issues (like ‘unemployment’, ‘inflation’ or ‘the economy’) when asked the question ‘What would you say is the most important issue facing Britain today?’ For the coverage variables the corpus of news analysed in previous chapters was interrogated for stories dealing with (un)employment and inflation, which were isolated and subsequently coded to give us two measures of the weight of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ news on the issues (‘unemnews’ and ‘infnews’ respectively).4 The salience variable lagged one month (t1) was introduced, as were control variables representing the notionally ‘real’ level of unemployment (‘unemployment’) and inflation (‘inflation’) derived for the standard Economic Trends data.5 Finally, dummy variables were entered corresponding to some of the most significant political events in the period – the start and finish of the bombing in Kosovo, March 1999 to June 1999, (KOSOVO) and the petrol crisis in September 2000 (‘petrol crisis’ ’00). Table 4.3 represents the results of this model. The conclusion here must be that, with respect to both unemployment news and inflation stories, the coverage failed to set the public agenda, and it seems, moreover, that public appreciation of the importance of unemployment is driven more by the actual levels of unemployment than by television reporting upon it. However, a slightly different story emerges when we look at the salience of the economy in general. A further regression model was run that entered a variable representing interest rates (‘interest rates’) alongside those entered in the earlier model – ‘real’ unemployment and inflation, the petrol crisis and Kosovo War. But the model also included a variable measuring the balance of news on a wide range of economic issues that included unemployment and inflation news, amongst many others (‘econnews’).6 The initial model on the left of Table 4.4 shows the variables that were considered significant. The model on the right is a pared-down version, which is re-run with only these variables

Economic News and the Public 83 Table 4.3 OLS regression of the salience of unemployment and inflation (August 1997–April 2001) Unemployment Salience  SE Salience (t1) Unemnews Unemployment Petrol crisis ‘00 Kosovo Constant r2 n Note:

∗∗

0.55∗∗ 0.06 0.01∗∗ 1.09 0.73 16.72 0.87 44

0.13 0.04 0.00 2.51 1.28 5.76

Inflation Salience  SE Salience (t1) Infnews Inflation Petrol crisis ‘00 Kosovo Constant r2 n

0.46∗∗ 0.01 0.04 0.72 0.23 0.99 0.25 44

0.14 0.02 0.21 1.04 0.58 0.68

p  0.01; ∗ p  0.05.

Table 4.4 OLS regression of the salience of ‘the economy’ (August 1997–May 2001) Economy Salience  1

Salience (t ) Econnews Econnews (t1) Unemployment Unemployment (t1) Inflation Inflation (t1) Interest rate Interest rate (t1) Petrol Crisis ‘00 Kosovo Constant r2 n Note:

∗∗

SE ∗∗

0.89 0.01 0.07∗ 6.97 20.38∗ 2.16 1.41 3.39 2.18 4.57 0.63 0.02 0.86 45

0.07 0.03 0.03 9.84 9.72 2.26 2.16 3.48 3.68 3.57 2.09 2.02

Economy Salience (Reduced Model) 

SE ∗∗

0.92

0.06

0.06∗∗

0.02

17.50∗

8.69

1.63 0.84 45

1.22

p  0.01; ∗ p  0.05.

included. The results show a fairly complex picture. They suggest that the balance of economic news (inclusive of unemployment and inflation coverage), in conjunction with actual levels of employment, did have an impact on the salience of ‘the economy’. Good economic coverage causes the economy to be downgraded as an issue priority (i.e. economic

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problems are less important), while at the same time more ‘real world’ unemployment meant greater salience for economy. What we can say then is that, in essence, a combination of ‘real world’ and mediated cues conspired to help set the public agenda on the economy, results that are consistent with some of the conclusions drawn from experimental work carried out at the 1997 general election (Norris et al., 1999, p. 122). The overall conclusion must be that coverage of employment and inflation have a measurable influence on the salience of the national economy as an issue, even if this is rather weak and elliptical. This means that economic news, taken as a whole makes a contribution to maintaining public attention on an issue that might otherwise slip from the public gaze.

The impact of economic news in perspective The coverage of the economy clearly influences the way people think about the economy, the government’s handling of the economy, and the salience ascribed to the economy. The impact may be small but it is measurable and consistent. What does this tell us, and how might we put the results in perspective? If we are making a judgement of broadcast news, the conclusions are rather mixed. If we consider that informing the public and making a contribution to debate implies that news stories have at least a minimal impact, the results are fairly reassuring. The public do appear to be picking up information and use it to inform their appreciation of the economy, their evaluation of the government’s competence and their voting inclinations. However, this cannot be separated from the actual messages that are being conveyed. As we saw in the previous chapter, there was an almost relentless negativism in the coverage of the jobs situation which was very much at odds with what seemed to be happening in the real world. Now we might ultimately conclude that the broadcasters had no ulterior motive in conveying the economy in this manner – they may simply be addressing stories of economic dislocation which were intrinsically dramatic and, therefore, newsworthy. The resultant stories would have had an impact on public perceptions and will have had a more subtle and elliptical effect on the salience of ‘the economy’ in general. Nevertheless, in the process, this is successfully conveying information that could be deemed inappropriate, given the rude health of the economy at the time. Television, therefore, did ‘inform’, but it did so in a manner that was out of place, given the circumstances. On the other hand, we can say less about the impact of the news concerning who or what could be blamed or praised for changes in

Economic News and the Public 85

employment, although there is reasonably strong circumstantial evidence pointing in the direction of the public at least registering the sort of connections made. Here the record of the broadcasters is better, in the sense that a broad range of causal connections were highlighted, and if the public were indeed affected, the overall contribution to informed democracy and debate would have been a positive one. Also on the positive side, a case can be made that the broadcasters were, in fact, fulfilling their civic duty, in the sense that they continued to cover (un)employment, despite its diminished salience for the public. From Figure 4.1 we can see that, early on in the period analysed, the public did register unemployment as a significant issues facing the country. Latterly, though, there is a sharp drop off in interest – not surprising given that unemployment, as we have shown, was falling sharply at the time. However, while employment at the time was less of a problem for the country, it was still an important political and economic issue. Employment has profound consequences for those denied it or those successful in seeking it. Job-related policies were an important part of government’s political programme, and New Labour was inviting the public to judge them accordingly. To their credit, the broadcasters continued to cover employment-related stories well into a period when public concern was waning. Figure 4.2 extends the analysis of

50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5

l-9 7 n98 Ju l-9 Ja 8 n99 Ju l-9 Ja 9 n00 Ju l-0 Ja 0 n01 Ju l-0 Ja 1 n02 Ju l-0 Ja 2 n03 Ju l-0 Ja 3 n04 Ju l-0 4 Ja

Ju

Ja

n-

97

0

Source: MORI: www.ipsos-mori.com/polls/trends/issues.shtml

Figure 4.1 The salience of ‘unemployment’ (January 1997–December 2004).

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20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2

-9 8 Ju l-9 8 O ct -9 8 Ja n99 Ap r-9 9 Ju l-9 9 O ct -9 9 Ja n00 Ap r-0 0 Ju l-0 0 O ct -0 0 Ja n01 Ap r-0 1 Ju l-0 1

-9 Ja n

Ap r

8

0

Note: The top line represents BBC; the bottom line ITN.

Figure 4.2 Number of BBC and ITN employment stories (January 1998–September 2001).

the quantity of (un)employment coverage beyond the 1999–2000 time frame assessed in the previous chapter. What emerges is a fairly random pattern with some peaks and troughs, but there was still a sustained treatment by both the BBC and ITN which extended over the best part of four years. This may simply be a product of the sort of news values discussed earlier, since provisional analysis tends to suggest that the bulk of jobs-related coverage was still more about dramatic closures and company staff-shedding. But at the same time we can say that the broadcasters maintained a focus on a topic which can be complex and technical. They could well have spiked reports on the pretext that they were ‘just more dull and uninteresting stories about jobs’ and would therefore switch of the audience. But in the event they did not. The broadcasters maintained a focus on the topic, even when the public did not. These conclusions about impact speak to a debate about the adequacy of broadcast news, but they are also relevant to the way we theorise issues like bias and ideology, and how these are thought to operate in the interest of powerful social and political actors. In the definition of bias outlined in the quote from Street, reproduced earlier, the notion of

Economic News and the Public 87

impact is only implicit. However, the following quote reflects a more explicit idea of ‘influence’, with respect to the related notion of ideological reproduction, where again the messages embodied in or excluded from news coverage are thought to impact upon public opinion in a politically inflected manner: A ... complex process of contestation takes place between rival groups at the level of ideology. Different ways of making sense of society, different codes and explanatory contexts, different premises and chains of association privilege some social interests against others. The media’s role is never solely confined to imparting information, but necessarily involves arbitrating between discursive frameworks of rival groups. Which frameworks are included or excluded matters because over time it can affect collective opinion and, indirectly, the allocation of social resources in society. (Curran, 2000, p. 138) This idea of ‘influence in the service of interests’ is also echoed in Thompson’s concept of ideology as, ‘... ideas or symbolic forms which in some way distort or misrepresent the social world, or which serve the interests of some individuals or groups at the expense of others’ (Thompson, 2004, p. 7170). But the results from the preceding analysis of impact, alongside the assessment of formal and substantive characteristic of coverage undertaken in the previous chapter, suggest that this conception of the role of economic coverage is seriously flawed and may be misleading. The notion of ideologically significant bias within media content is in many ways quite attractive, since it promises to connect media coverage, audience reactions and patterns of social and political power. But it embodies a range of assumptions which are either contentious, hotly disputed or evidentially suspect. To start with, one sort of ‘symbolic form’ which is thought to distort or misrepresent the social world’, namely reification, is patently not a commanding feature of economic coverage. Where a broad corpus of news is analysed, actors and agents are clearly apparent. Furthermore, the actual identification of the actors and agents who are embedded in news, only highlights important problems for those who believe that economic news persistently acts in the service of entrenched economic interests. For instance, our survey of the causes of changes in the jobs market highlighted particular companies as prime movers in the creation of unemployment. And the human suffering that resulted could be heard frequently in the voices of the

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workers directly affected. So not only is there little by way of ideological obscurantism in this coverage (i.e. reification), but on the face of it these news stories are not doing a particularly good job in servicing the interests of the business community. The business elite may well expend a good deal of energy on public relations (Davis, 2002), but seemingly have not been able to moderate, obscure or camouflage their association with these deeply damaging actions. On top of this, the neoclassical and monetarist themes that are thought by some to be a re-expression of business-friendly ideology (Herman, 1982) are fairly conspicuous by their absence from the coverage. Beyond this, the coverage also seemed to undermine the position of the governing elite – if we can call New Labour that. The coverage saw New Labour implicated in job creation as well as job losses, but they presided over what must have looked to audiences like a relentless increase in unemployment. Again, we know that governments are keen on spinning news, perhaps New Labour more than most (Franklin, 1994, 1999a and 1999b; Barnett and Gaber, 2001; Jones, 2004). However, it is clear that even at a time when these efforts were thought to be at their most effective, economic coverage was actually quite damaging and was fully capable of eroding the government’s image of competence. And this was broadcast to what looked like a modestly receptive public. The notion that the government has complete control of the economic agenda or, indeed, the idea that the media habitually and uniformly serve the interests of the governmental arm of the capitalist elite, look a lot less convincing from this perspective. Now, of course, the evidence outlined in the previous section does not speak directly to the impact of news that bears upon causal attribution, although there is circumstantial evidence to this effect in the qualitative assessment of audience engagement with economic news (Goddard et al., 1998). Still, it does tell us that economic coverage plays a modest part in setting the public agenda, and has the capacity to influence what people think about the economy and the government, even if that capacity is not great. But it is the very modesty of these effects that, again, has a bearing on the plausibility of orthodox conceptions of ideological reproduction. For surely these presuppose an altogether more robust impact on the thought processes of citizens than we have been able to observe here. Of course, it is conceivable that beyond reification there are even more subtle, embedded and structurally obscure dimensions of economic news that have an equally subtle impact on the way that the public think about politics and the economy. But these cannot be assumed into existence and they have to be established empirically. As we have noted throughout, a real sense of the structural contours of

Economic News and the Public 89

economic coverage can only be established by looking at a broad corpus of coverage. Consequently, analysing this amount of coverage for any subtly embedded messages would be a Herculean task. And, as a corollary, the effort involved in uncovering the impact of such messages would be immense, making the task of establishing their ideological power all but impossible. Indeed, one is tempted to wonder whether evidence for any form of profound ideological influence is ever likely to surface. As it stands, the evidence for even a modest form of ideological reproduction looks tenuous at best. But the argument here is not that the concept of ideology is somehow redundant (though some critics seem to be moving in this direction, Corner, 2001). Nor is it that the search for an embedded ‘ideology’ cannot or should not be undertaken. Indeed, the coverage assessed in the previous chapter – combined with what has been established in terms of its likely or actual impact – has allowed us to sketch a credible link between text, audience and interests. Unfortunately, it is just not one that critical theorists of ideology would necessarily find agreeable. The text seems to compromise or undermine business and government interests, and indeed could be read as suggesting that even in advanced capitalist countries, the system still produces misery and alienation for those without work, even in times of supposed plenty. What, instead, we are arguing is that the process of fleshing out the concept of ideological reproduction married to powerful, elite or capitalist interests, is much much more awkward and problematic than is commonly imagined. Those who posit the notion of the ideological power of biased news need to convince us that they have a clear, transparent, self-evidently plausible and inter-subjectively verifiable sense of what those interests are, how they are embedded in news coverage and how, exactly, they come to favour the interest of specific actors or, indeed, the system. All in all, a pretty tall order. And in the final analysis this has to be an issue of evidence, and the quest has to be an empirical one. Yet until these issues are addressed and answered coherently and convincingly, ultimately the search for ideology may prove to be, at best, simply conjectural, and at worst, fruitless.

Economic news and the business elite There is, however, another way in which media coverage may be influenced by corporate or business elites – a way in which broadcasters with a notional public service ethos may, in fact, service narrow, sectional interests. The locus here is not the text per se, but concerns the generic ‘climate of opinion’ in the social and professional circle that broadcast

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journalists inhabit. A flavour of this can be discerned in the comments of Evan Davis, a prominent and respected television journalists whose specialism is the economy. He writes: Finally, in reporting the economy, one has to take account of the fact that the mood-swings of those whose job it is to understand and comment on the economy, are often more substantial than one would like them to be. If the markets – supported by economists – change their mind over the course of a week, and if they do so in a newsworthy way, then it is not surprising that those who report the economy change their tone over the week as well. (Davis, 1998, p. 158) This gives an insight into the great difficulties that journalists face in covering what can be an esoteric and fast-moving subject. Yet at the same time it could be interpreted as a signal that broadcasters are just a little too close to a community whose political affiliations are known to be to the right of the political spectrum (Gavin, 1992, p. 610). The coverage might be coloured accordingly, but this need not take an explicit form, with City talking heads conveying a specific message direct to camera. A form of ideological transmission may be at work here, but at the more subtle level of the circulation of ideas and perceptions. There is, indeed, some evidence to suggest that the business and corporate communities actively seek to influence elite journalists, and as much (if not more) energy is expended doing this, than attempting to influence the British public directly (Davis, 2002 and 2003). If this is indeed the case, we might anticipate that City perceptions of the economy will be reflected in news commentary in a way that is detectable. The data we have already been looking at give us the opportunity to test this notion. The object was to determine whether changes in City opinion on things like the health of the economy, and trends in inflation and interest rates were reflected in the tenor of broadcast news on these topics. We know how the news has been covering the economy and inflation, and this is reflected in the variables used earlier to measure the broadcaster’s impact on the salience of the issues (our ‘econnews’ and ‘infnews’ variables respectively). The corpus of BBC and ITN news we have been analysing also easily facilitated the isolation of interest rate news, and this was coded for its balance in exactly the same way as news about the economy generally and stories about inflation. We can correlate these variables with City opinion via data collected by

Economic News and the Public 91

the Gallup polling organisation and that derived from the ‘Merrill Lynch UK Fund Managers Survey’ reported in the monthly volume, ‘The Gallup Political and Economic Index’. This data reports month-by-month changes in the perception of City respondents, and in much the same way as our news data reflects month-by-month changes in the coverage. Respondents were asked a range of questions, though sadly none of these touch on unemployment. However, some of the questions that were included can be related to television news output, i.e. ‘How do you think the UK economy will develop over the next 12 months?’ and ‘In comparison with what is happening now, do you think that in 12 months time, the prices of goods and services will be increasing at a faster rate, increase at the same rate, or be increasing at a slower rate?’ Finally, the respondents were also asked their thoughts about likely trends in interest rates, ‘In 12 months time, what do you think the base rate will stand at?’ The detail of the results of this exploration of the connection between City opinion and economic news will not be reproduced here, because they are uniformly negative.7 There was no discernable relationship between Fund Managers’ perception of the economy as a whole and the balance of good and bad news broadcast on television. What the community of City specialists thought was their best guess about what was happening in the economy, was completely unrelated to the balance of broadcast economic news. Likewise, there was no correlation between the Fund Managers’ projection of either prices or interest rates, and the way the news handled stories about these topics. Aeron Davis (2005) argues that, for professional reasons, the economic analysts need to be aware of what the City consensus is on important economic indicators and on likely market movements, so we might anticipate a degree of uniformity of thought on how market and economy are ‘trending’. Insofar as the Fund Managers’ Survey is a reflection of that consensus, it does not seem to be the case that news in any sense reflects, let alone reproduces, this. Now, it has to be admitted that our test may not be the best or the most exacting way of assessing the influence of this elite climate of opinion, and it is, of necessity, confined to what can and has been measured by way of City opinion and economic coverage. However, if the corporate and economic elites are, indeed, as powerful as some imagine, in helping to define economic reality for other elements of the governing and journalistic elite (a theme, again, developed by Aeron Davis, 2003), we might have anticipated at least some sort of connection between their views and the contours of the coverage. In fact there was absolutely none at all. Not only does the business

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community seem unable to ‘bury’ commentary about their part in the creation of unemployment, but their influence on the journalistic community (and through this, the public) is not overly conspicuous either. If anything, the journalists seem to be responding to something other than a City consensus on what is happening in the economy (though they may do so in specific instances from time to time, and at specific junctures, as Evan Davis suggests), and perhaps stories with intrinsic news value are a case in point, as we have noted before. A focus on newsworthy stories may, indeed, result in a distorted portrayal of what is going on in the ‘real economy’. But it is not obviously or transparently apparent that it is ‘distorted’ by, for or in the interests of the business, corporate or City communities.

Evaluating economic news How then, in the round, does the analysis in this and the preceding chapter reflect on the way public service broadcasting handles the economy? The answer must flag the positive alongside the negative. On the down side, the reports seemed to linger on what were some pretty negative dimensions of the economy, namely job losses and unemployment. In this sense, some longstanding criticisms of the broadcast fixation with ‘bad news’ at the expense of ‘good news’, continue to have some validity (Lewis, 1993a and 1993b). The emphasis was often on those aspects of the jobs issue that were as dramatic and shocking to the viewer as they were for those actually laid off or indirectly affected. The social, political and experiential significance of the topic can, therefore, help explain its prominence in the news. And perhaps this can also explain why the broadcasters continued to dwell on employmentrelated issues, even when the public seemed to sense that they were less of a problem for the country as a whole, and even when other dramatic and arresting and international issues (like the petrol crisis and the Kosovo War) demanded attention and could have displaced the jobs theme. This, at least, is to the broadcaster’s credit. Nevertheless, it seems apparent that not only did this inaccurately reflect what was going on in the country at large, but in all likelihood it will have influenced the economic attitudes and political orientations of at least some of the viewers. The broadcasters may well have been sharing with the audience the dramatic lived experiences of a range of communities around the country, many of which will have seen jobs lost, as the inevitable result of the market moving people into and out of employment, even in times of plenty. In this sense the broadcasters

Economic News and the Public 93

would have been fulfilling their public service remit to re-present to the viewer the various communities that constitute the country. By emphasising the dramatic nature of such events they may have kept an audience interested and engaged, which might otherwise have been indifferent. However, at the same time they will have reflected to them a view of the nation which was sharply at odds with what was going on in the nation as a whole, and this will have impacted on their perceptions of the vitality of the economy and their attitudes towards the economic competence of the government. The audience, then, would have learned, but not in a manner that was politically neutral – least ways, not for the government. This jars with the remit to maintain objectivity and impartiality. And it is a moot question whether the various public service obligations that the broadcasters try to fulfil (and which are frequently in tension) were in this instance properly balanced. What we can say is that television did handle the explanation of (un)employment rather well. The analysis suggests that while individual stories rarely contained wide ranging explanatory exegesis, the coverage as a whole, viewed as a rolling commentary across a range of subthemes and carried on across a series of bulletins, touch on a balanced range of themes. Likewise, the voices heard within the broadcasts were quite diverse, with those directly affected the most prominent. Seemingly, the corporate and governmental elites did not dominate the coverage in the way we might have expected. Nor is it clear that their interests were served in other ways. There was no reification of the economy and there was no camouflaging their role in the creation of unemployment. The conclusions here are significant in themselves. But they also suggest that in this domain at least, government spin doctors and corporate PR professionals do not appear to have been as active or as successful as they are often given credit, and we should remember that this was at a time when government spin control was thought to be at its most effective. Our analysis argues for an assessment of their role and influence which should be time and issue specific. Clearly, we cannot assume, for instance, that because the so-called ‘sultans of spin’ were successful in managing the coverage of parliamentary affairs and other important policy domains, they necessarily have the power, the will or the energy to manage the media agenda across the board. ‘Stuff’, rather obviously, continued to happen, even when the spin doctors were successful elsewhere. The conclusions drawn here, and their wider social, political and theoretical implications can, however, only be fully understood in the context of the likely or actual impact of the coverage surveyed. A combination of

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accumulated ‘effects’ research, alongside the analysis of agenda-setting influence undertaken in this chapter, draws us inexorably to some specific as well as some broader conclusions. More than ever, they underline the idea that we need to focus not on the ‘globalising’ theme of whether the media do or do not have an effect. Rather, we need to concentrate research attention on specific topics of coverage, assessed in the context of specific and related aspects of attitude formation (Gavin, 1997, pp. 140–1). Perhaps this also needs to be undertaken at specific junctures (Cowley, 2001; Pattie and Johnston, 2002). However, the endeavour has to be an empirically driven and data dependent one, lest our assumptions about the nature of coverage and its supposed effects be wildly off the mark. The results from out analysis also speak to a broader range of substantive and theoretical issues, revolving around the notions of ideological reproduction, bias and power. They are relevant at the level of coverage and impact but can only be understood where the coverage and influence themes connect. Take for instance the notion of the maintenance of elite power. Conventionally, this can be about setting the political and media agendas, and confining these to issues that are innocuous to elite power holders, the so-called ‘mobilisation of bias’ thesis (Bachrach and Baratz, 1962). Alternatively, the elite (whether capitalist or otherwise) can influence public preferences, the so-called ‘third face of power’ (Lukes, 2005). Neither of these propositions seems to fully hold for the issue of the economy or more specifically, news about (un)employment and inflation. Neither the business nor the governmental elites were able to prevent the broadcast of coverage that was potentially damaging to their image. On the other hand, the impact of such news as was actually broadcast suggests that its power to influence attitudes is more modest than we might imagine, certainly if it was to reproduce and disseminate an ideological message effectively. This argues, at a minimum, not only for the modification or refinement of the notion of elite dominance, but also for the reappraisal of the very notion of ideological reproduction.

5 Anti-Globalisation Politics: The Trafalgar Square and Seattle Demonstrations

Beyond the mainstream economy The last two chapters looked at the domestic economy and sought to explore the substantive and formal characteristics of coverage in the light of debates around balance, objectivity, bias and impact. They dealt with mainstream, domestic issues. But perhaps the broadcasters’ contribution to public debate and democratic practice should be judged not just on how they handle the familiar and the commonplace, but on how they approach the controversial and contentious, or politics ‘at the margins’. Here the limits of public discourse on ‘the economy’ can be explored, and boundaries of effective debate mapped. In doing so, we need to consider whether the amount of space devoted to the topic is appropriate. Are television reports informative, balanced and objective, and how do they look in comparison to press coverage? What, if anything, is absent from coverage, and can this be justified or at least explained? All this has a bearing not only on whether television does what we expect of it, within its public service remit, but on the health of public dialogue within the public sphere. If the object is to explore unconventional economic themes, there are a number that fit the bill, one such being ‘anti-globalisation’. ‘Globalisation’ itself is not a particularly well defined term, as Giddens notes (1990, p. 64), and ‘anti-globalisation’ is also a catch-all term encompassing a wide range of actors, organisations and subthemes: Green and Griffiths (2002), Crossley (2002) and Brooks (2004) offer a heterogeneous catalogue which includes, amongst others, anarchists and anti-capitalists, those against genetic engineering, logging and nuclear power, plus feminists and environmentalists (pp. 562–3). The issues they espouse or mobilise around are becoming increasingly 95

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important in contemporary life, as party politics gives way to ‘singleissue politics’. They are certainly more significant than they once were, and they embrace a number of subthemes which some observers think have lost their relevance in contemporary society, notably socialist, communist and anarchist politics (Fukuyama, 1992). Of course, we could not hope to analyse the coverage of all the groupings associated with anti-globalisation. Instead, we want to focus on one significant moment in the development of anti-globalisation protest in Britain, namely the Trafalgar Square demonstration that took place on May Day 2000. This was one of the first reasonably large-scale public demonstrations closely associated with anti-globalisation and mimicked the Seattle protests of the previous year. A potpourri of groupings and individuals were represented there, and the protest was something a prototype for a series of comparable demonstrations that ran through to ‘Live 8’ in 2005.

The coverage of protest The Trafalgar Square demonstrations got a lot of coverage and this persisted on and off for some weeks. These reports should perhaps be assessed in the light of a literature which places such protests in their social, political and economic context (McQuail, 1992; McCarthy et al., 1996; Oliver and Meyers, 1999; Watkins, 2001; Smith et al., 2001; Koopmans, 2004). However, there is some research which deals directly with coverage of anti-globalisation issues, although much of it concerns America and the 1999 Seattle demonstrations (McLeod and Hertog, 1992; McLeod and Detenber, 1999; DeLuca and Peeples, 2002; Rojecki, 2002; Owens and Palmer, 2003; Wall, 2003; Bennett et al., 2004). The British literature is much more limited, older and focusses on a wider array of protests: Halloran et al. (1970) on the anti-Vietnam Grosvenor Square demonstration of 1968, Tumber (1982) and Murdock (1984) on the coverage of the riots in the 1980s and Deacon and Golding’s (1994) analysis of coverage of poll tax protests in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What does this accumulated literature tell us about the way the media treat protests? For one thing, size does, indeed, matter – the larger a protest, the more it will get covered (McCarthy et al., 1996; Oliver and Meyers, 1999), a conclusion consistent with the news value placed on numbers and scale. The prominence of a protest is also contingent on the media’s existing or ongoing agenda, i.e. demonstrations around issues that are already part of the media’s agenda tend to get more attention than those just emerging (McCarthy et al., 1996; Smith et al., 2001).

Anti-Globalisation Politics 97

Importantly, the level of coverage also depends on the level of conflict or violence involved in the protest, with dramatic scenes of conflict getting more attention than their peaceful counterparts (Oliver and Meyers, 1999). When we turn to how protests are covered, a form of ‘protest paradigm’ begins to emerge (Chan and Lee, 1984; McLeod and Detenber, 1999). Typically, violence is a prominent feature of coverage, even when it is a minor part of the actual event. The peaceful behaviour of most protesters is often underemphasised, going hand in hand, it is claimed, with a corresponding overemphasis on criminality and lawlessness amongst participants (Tumber, 1982; Murdock, 1984; Philo, 1990; Deacon and Golding, 1994; Small, 1994; McLeod and Detenber, 1999). There is often a focus on the clear up costs of demonstrations, and the media tends to demonise protesters and delegitimize their activities. This is achieved in a variety of ways. Firstly, reports tend to highlight how protesters are frowned upon by bystanders or condemned by the public at large (McLeod and Hertog, 1992; Deacon and Golding, 1994; McLeod and Detenber, 1999). Secondly, there are often explicit references to the violation of social norms, with language describing protester behaviour in mocking or sarcastic undertones (McLeod and Hertog, 1992). Thirdly, the media have a tendency to cast protesters as ‘outsiders’ (foreigners, interlopers or agent provocateurs), emphasising their intention to organised premeditated criminal or disruptive behaviour (Halloran et al., 1970; Tumber, 1982; Murdock, 1984), and overemphasising their flamboyant appearance, or strange and unconventional behaviour (McLeod and Detenber, 1999; Rojecki, 2002). Finally, violence, criminality and ‘deviance’, often displace coverage of the aims, motivations and demands of protesters (Halloran et al., 1970; Tumber, 1982; Murdock, 1984; McQuail, 1992; Deacon and Golding, 1994; McLeod and Detenber, 1999; and Smith et al., 2001). Indeed, the participants in protests and demonstrations are often completely absent from the coverage (Tumber, 1982; McLeod and Detenber, 1999) or where they are given voice, are not accorded an organisational affiliation or an opportunity to debate the issues (Bennett et al., 2004). The voices that are heard tend to be those of the elite, with a particular emphasis on those in high political office or senior police officers. And the cool, professional, ‘softly softly’ approach of the law enforcement agencies is often contrasted (quite unjustifiably, it is claimed) with the unruly behaviour of protesters (Halloran et al., 1970; Tumber, 1982; McQuail, 1992). The ‘protest paradigm’ is especially significant because it is very much at odds with what is expected of public service commentary and it raises

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many of the issues touched upon in Chapter 1. If there is a narrow focus on violence and little by way of explanation of protester motivation, the coverage would fail to fully inform the viewer about the particular action, event or development. The failure to figure protesters in reports is also very much at odds with the notion that the broadcasters should re-present and explain all manner of disparate communities to the nation of viewers (an inclusive notion), otherwise television may be in danger of only revealing some groups to its audience (an exclusionary notion). If, indeed, the protest paradigm is manifest in television coverage (or in media coverage in general), it would express a high degree of partiality, where protesters are demonised and excluded, while elite sources are given airtime. All in all, such coverage would lack the balance and objectivity which is said to be at the heart of the public service ethos. But there is also a sense that this lack of objectivity has distinctive political edge. A range of authors suggest that the protest paradigm either lends support to the status quo, protects and insulates existing power structures or marginalises groupings that threaten or criticise the capitalist order (McLeod and Detenber, 1999). Implicitly, the coverage, in this view, serves conservative political ends (McQuail, 1992, p. 244). Smith et al. (2001, p. 1403) find some support for the notion that political movements hostile to the capitalist order are less well covered than we might anticipate. And for McLeod and Hertog (1992), ‘… the bottom line seems to be that the coverage serves as a social control reinforcing the social order’ (p. 268).

Coverage of the Trafalgar Square demonstration These would be quite important and damning conclusions, if bourn out by evidence of actual coverage. However, we are dealing, largely, with generalisations derived from a generic and, in Britain, aging literature on different types of protest. British studies do not encompass antiglobalisation protests and we cannot assume the associated issues will be reported on television (or in the press) in a fashion consistent with the ‘protest paradigm’. To get a sense of how they do actually addressed protests the coverage of the Trafalgar Square demonstration in 2000 was addressed. The exact details of what happened are disputed, although some general facts would probably go unchallenged. The march included around six to eight thousand souls, including a colourful kaleidoscope of groups and organisations, a number sporting flamboyantly and eyecatching apparel.1 They demonstrated, for the most part, in a reasonably peaceful and good natured manner, some engaging in what might be

Anti-Globalisation Politics 99

described as unconventional forms of protest, like ‘guerrilla gardening’, where turf on the lawn outside Parliament was dug up and replaced with flowers and vegetables. Part way through, the police corralled a large number of demonstrators into Trafalgar Square, only letting them disperse later, in dribs and drabs. At one point a McDonalds restaurant and adjacent properties in Whitehall were damaged extensively. The police intervened, though whether this caused the damage or was a consequence, is contested. Some of the statues in and around Parliament Square were spray painted (including Winston Churchill’s), as was the Cenotaph war memorial, where ‘his’ and ‘her’ were sprayed in very large lettering beneath the word ‘toilets’.2 The question is, how did the media handle this event, how did television compare with press reporting and what does this tell us, in general, about coverage at the margins of politics? As previous chapters have shown, it is appropriate to start with ‘how much’ questions and the level of attention the event attracted. So, how much would we expect? The protest did have features likely to stimulate extensive coverage – violence, for one. But on top of this, the behaviour of some protesters (particularly at the Cenotaph) was viewed by many commentators as juvenile at best and, for some, little short of depraved, and generated outbursts of righteous indignation that may have prolonged the coverage. Therefore, we could expect copious coverage, if the media are attracted by such ‘eyecatching’, ‘shocking’ and therefore newsworthy events. Were these expectations confirmed? Press and television reports from a week before until three weeks afterwards were surveyed.3 The press coverage was extensive, and featured a total of one hundred and twenty five stories (see Table 5.1), with a good deal more in the broadsheets than the tabloids, though both covered the event fairly extensively. Table 5.1 Number of press stories on the Trafalgar Square demonstration4 Apr 30– May 6 Independent Guardian Times Telegraph Express Mail Mirror Sun Total

14 8 11 15 9 8 6 10

May 7– May 13

May 14– May 21

3 4 7 8 3 5 5 2

0 0 1 1 2 1 1 0

Total 17 13 19 24 14 14 12 12 125

Word Count 12026 8635 12925 14698 8031 12127 5882 4498 78822

100 Press and Television in British Politics

The level, spread and timing were similar in both, with an initial spike on the days immediately after, followed by a gradual trailing off. Overall, the total amount of words written were about equivalent to a substantial book-length treatise. For the broadcasters, in contrast, the coverage was relatively modest – on the day, the flagship bulletins on both BBC and ITV gave the story one report apiece and the following evening each ran one quite substantial story. Thereafter the issue dropped off the agenda. The persistence of the coverage in the press was largely a function of the criminal and policing issues that emerge in the aftermath. But the broadcasters, in contrast, seem to have found these themes less appealing, and resisted the temptation to overemphasise the more titillating and crime-related aspects of subsequent developments. Insofar as this represents a reluctance to highlight the story’s more ‘tabloid’ subthemes, this is to be applauded. It suggests that a balance that might well have swung inappropriately towards a tabloid agenda, in the event did not. Television, in this instance, did not appear to pander to an audience keen to observe a violent spectacle, even if that audience was potentially quite large. Nevertheless, did the coverage on television (or, indeed, in the press) do justice to the issues involved and, in particular, was the ‘protest paradigm’ evident in the way reporters handled the event? To address these questions, each individual story was examined to determine whether or not the principal elements of the ‘protest paradigm’ were apparent in the text. These included violence and criminality, bystander disapproval, and mocking or sarcastic language. Stories were also coded for references to outsiders, to organised or premeditated trouble and to the ‘outlandish’ appearance of demonstrators. Allusions to ‘softly softly policing’ and the costs associated with the demonstration were also isolated. The results from the analysis of the press are reported in Tables 5.2. A few features are evident for the outset. Clearly, the liberal-centrist Independent was the least likely to exhibit the ‘protest paradigm’, while it was most obvious in the ring-wing Mail. If we look at the totality of coverage in the various sets of titles, almost all of the protest paradigm elements make an appearance at some point. However, some are very weakly or unevenly represented, and others were almost absent, like ‘bystander criticism’ and ‘outside agitation’. Still, it is equally clear that several of its more important dimensions were all too common in the coverage. Violence was the most obvious.5 But other aspects of the ‘protest paradigm’ appear with comparable frequency, chief amongst them crime, law breaking and legal punishments. In addition, the

Table 5.2 Breakdown of the ‘protest paradigm’ elements in coverage of the Trafalgar Square demonstration: Guardian, Telegraph, Times and Independent; The Express and Mail; and the Mirror and Sun Guardian 15 69 69 46 23

(2) (9) (9) (6) (3)

Times

21 92 63 63 50

32 95 84 74 47

(5) (22) (15) (15) (12)

(6) (18) (16) (14) (9)

Independent 35 94 70 53 24

(6) (16) (12) (9) (4)

Total 26 89 52 44 28

(19) (65) (71) (60) (38)

Express 14 57 50 64 50

(2) (8) (7) (9) (7)

Mail

Total

Mirror

21 93 79 86 50

18 75 64 75 50

17 92 50 58 25

(3) (13) (11) (12) (7)

(5) (21) (18) (21) (14)

(2) (11) (6) (7) (3)

Sun 8 83 67 58 8

(1) (10) (8) (7) (1)

Total 13 88 58 58 17

(3) (21) (14) (14) (4)

15 (2)

29 (7)

11 (2)

18 (3)

14 (19)

14 (2)

21 (3)

18 (5)

17 (2)

25 (3)

21 (5)

0 (0)

0 (0)

0 (0)

12 (2)

12 (16)

7 (1)

7 (1)

7 (2)

8 (1)

0 (0)

4 (1)

0 (0)

21 (5)

16 (3)

18 (3)

11 (15)

14 (2)

29 (4)

21 (6)

25 (3)

8 (1)

17 (4)

31 (4)

17 (4)

11 (2)

12 (2)

12 (16)

14 (2)

36 (5)

25 (7)

17 (2)

17 (2)

17 (4)

23 (3) 0 (0) 0 (0)

9 (2) 4 (1) 0 (0)

26 (5) 26 (5) 21 (4)

12 (2) 12 (2) 12 (2)

12 (16) 8 (11) 6 (8)

21 (3) 0 (0) 7 (1)

14 (2) 7 (1) 29 (4)

18 (5) 4 (1) 18 (5)

8 (1) 17 (2) 17 (2)

25 (3) 0 (0) 17 (2)

17 (4) 8 (2) 17 (4)

Note: Numbers in cells are the percentage of stories exhibiting a particular theme; the corresponding figure in parenthesis represents the count of such stories.

Anti-Globalisation Politics 101

Peaceful Violence Law breaking Norm violation Opinion invocation Appearance described Bystander criticism Mocking/ sarcastic Restrained policing Costs Outsiders Organised trouble

Telegraph

102 Press and Television in British Politics

supposed weight of public condemnation was referred to regularly, occasionally going hand in hand with a connection to criminality or a sarcastic reference to direct action (‘And Labour’s candidate Frank Dobson, said: “The scenes in Whitehall today will disgust every decent Londoner. This so-called direct action is nothing more than criminal hooliganism”’, Express 2/5/00). Finally, the language used to report the incidents at the Cenotaph and the Churchill statue also made clear in vivid fashion the extent to which the commentators considered it an affront of public morality. The terms most often used were ‘defile’, ‘desecrate’ and ‘violate’: The Metropolitan Police were facing mounting criticism last night of their handling of the London May Day riot, with claims that they should have moved earlier to prevent desecration of the Cenotaph and the defacing of Sir Winston Churchill’s statue. (Times, 3/5/00) Other damning terms were used: ‘This bestial behaviour is motivated by evil, not by nobler concerns’, screamed Simon Heffer in a characteristic pungent headline in the Mail (2/5/00). These expressions of disapproval were reinforced by the obvious negative connotation to the terms used to describe the way paint was applied to these memorials – ‘daub’, ‘smear’ and ‘disfigure’. So the press seem to be reproducing important elements of the protest paradigm, but did the broadcasters follow suite? Surprisingly, it seems to have been more conspicuous on television than in the press, and equally so for BBC and ITN. Table 5.3 shows how, over the course of only four news items, almost all of the ‘protest paradigm’ elements were present on one or other channel, the only exceptions ‘outside agitation’ and ‘appearance’.6 Violence and law-breaking were also obvious features of coverage on both channels (‘Riot police seal off Central London after demonstrators go on a wrecking spree. The big anti-capitalist rally descends into violence and dozens of arrests’, headline, BBC, 1/5/00), as were ‘ softly softly policing’ (‘The Government have totally supported the police. The big argument is, should they have been less restrained at the beginning’, ITN, 2/5/00) and ‘costs’ (‘Others have been counting the cost – around £3.5 million in damage, and extra payments for the police and emergency services’, BBC, 2/5/00). Terms like ‘deface’, ‘desecrate’ or ‘daub’ were used in three of the four stories. Most surprisingly of all, the BBC came as close as it dared to an explicitly mocking or sarcastic tone, when Nicholas Witchel described how, ‘Police had held back as people

Anti-Globalisation Politics 103 Table 5.3 The presence or absence of ‘protest paradigm’ elements in BBC and ITN flagship news coverage of the Trafalgar Square demonstration

Peaceful Violence Law breaking Pubic norms violation Public opinion invocation Appearance described Bystander criticism Mocking/sarcastic ‘Softly softly’ policing Costs Organised trouble Outsiders

BBC

ITN

* * * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * *

who want a greener world tore up the grass in Parliament Square and others who want to reclaim the streets held up the traffic’ (BBC, 1/5/00). This tone also figuring in the headline of the following day’s story (‘Outrage today at the violence and desecration in the name of protest’, headline, BBC, 02/05/00). Press and television also shared one further feature of the protest paradigm – the relative emphasis on violence and peaceful protest, though this is obscured in Tables 5.2 and 5.3. With a couple of exceptions, words and phrases denoting violence and aggression peppered the press commentary, while references to peaceful behaviour were few. This overall pattern was mirrored in the four television stories. Only one report on the BBC alluded to peaceful protest, while making six references to violence, destruction, battles and the injured. The other BBC story did not mention peaceful protest at all. The report which led ITN coverage on the day of the demonstration – a story only three hundred and fifty words in length – had only one brief reference to non-violent protest, but thirteen to violence (‘This was the moment when a peaceful protest turned violent in the heart of Whitehall, police in shirt sleeves driven back by a mob’, 1/5/00). The other made no reference at all. Finally, the protest paradigm was also evident in a feature of coverage that went beyond the relative weight given to violence. It was also apparent in the sort of voices accessed or heard in reports, these tending to favour the authorities over the protesters. Table 5.4 gives a sense of this. Leaving aside the rather disparate ‘others’ category, it is noticeable

Guard- Teleian graph Times Police Politician: Labour Conser. Lib. dems Others Mayoral candid. Other media Legal officials Bystanders A-G activists A-G organisation Demo participants: Matthews Other participants Others Total

Independent

Subtotal Express Mail Mirror Sun

Subtotal

SubBBC ITN total

Total

6

8

4

8

26

5

9

5

4

23

2

3

5

54

11 6 0 1 1 3 2 0 0 2

15 9 1 1 7 4 2 1 0 1

17 8 1 0 4 3 0 0 9 4

9 3 0 1 3 1 0 1 1 5

52 26 2 3 15 11 4 2 10 12

5 1 0 0 5 0 2 1 0 1

6 2 0 0 2 0 2 2 0 1

2 0 0 0 1 0 2 4 0 0

4 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0

17 3 0 0 8 0 6 8 0 2

2 2 0 0 4 0 0 0 0 0

2 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0

4 2 0 0 4 0 0 1 0 0

73 31 2 3 27 11 10 11 10 14

5 0 7 44

3 2 8 62

1 7 8 66

0 2 5 39

9 11 28 211

1 4 7 32

2 2 2 30

5 0 8 27

0 1 11 21

8 7 28 110

0 0 2 12

0 1 1 8

0 1 3 20

17 19 59 341

Note: The ‘others’ category above included a non-descript collection of individuals who could not be easily categorised, including the relatives of, and people associated with, the arrested protesters, a Danish ambassador, a stone restorer, a film maker, representatives from English Heritage, one academic and a single mother.

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Table 5.4 Quoted sources in broadsheet, tabloid and television coverage of the Trafalgar Square demonstration

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that in almost every category of newspaper title, elite voices outnumber anti-globalisation representatives, protest participants or general bystanders, and by a long way. The exception seems to be the Mirror, but even here almost half of the ‘non-elite’ voices in fact belonged to bystanders who were – without exception – either shocked by the demonstrators’ activities, hostile towards them or described attacks made upon them by protesters (‘Passer-by Jason Jarvis, 33, saw the raid on McDonalds by louts armed with bricks, hammers and batons. He said: “Within seconds it looked like a bomb had gone off”’, 2/5/00). And a similar structure was obvious in the protester interview on a flagship bulletin. ITN had a very brief question-and-answer exchange with a protester, but this only hinted at organised trouble on the part of demonstrators (‘Do you think these clashes were planned all along?’; ‘By the police?’; ‘No, by the protesters’; ‘A small minority, maybe’, ITN, 1/5/00). The imbalance was much more conspicuous on the BBC news, where none of the participants were sourced on either story. So, unlike the experience with the coverage of unemployment – outlined in Chapter 3 – it is clear there was no obvious ‘democratisation’ of sourcing on television, or indeed the press. All journalists seemed to have reported the voices of the elite disproportionately, notably those of politicians and the police.

Protester aims and motivations One further aspect of the ‘protest paradigm’ still needs exploration – the degree of attention given to motivations of the participants. Halloran et al. (1970) and McQuail (1992, p. 245) hold that a fixation with violence subordinates coverage of demonstrators’ aims. Tumber (1982) established that the media offered a range of explanations for the riots in the 1980s, but those actually involved in disturbances were almost wholly absent from the coverage, and consequently their aims and motivations were underexplored. If this were the case in the current context, it would represent a serious gap in coverage, especially for the broadcasters, whose public service remit includes reflecting all shades of opinion to the viewing public. How, then did the broadcasters perform? In fact, they were by far the worst at explaining aims and motivations of those involved. The quote from Nicholas Witchel in the previous section – a mockingly sarcastic comment about wanting ‘a greener world’ or to ‘reclaim the streets’ – was the sum total of the coverage of protester motivation on the flagship bulletins of BBC, and this single acerbic aside was the closest they got to explaining why the

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protesters did what they did or why they were there in the first place. There was nothing else on BBC, and nothing at all on ITN. This put them on a par with the tabloids, who were scarcely more forthcoming. The Sun only explored the motivations of a convicted protester Paul Dodson: ‘I went to the rally to protest about capitalism, the world arms trade and the Criminal Justice Bill’ (6/5/00). Quoted here is almost the sum total of what was offered by way of elucidation of the aims behind the protest. And the Mirror was not much better, confining to 41 words in two stories all its explanatory commentary and focussing only on the motivations of James Matthews, the man who targeted the Churchill statue. The mid-market newspapers were little better. The Express carried only two brief comments across 12 stories, one from a Reclaim the Streets activist (‘I don’t enjoy capitalism. It does nothing for most people – in this country they’re working longer and harder than ever before, but only a few see the rewards. And it does nothing for the Third World’, 30/4/00), the other from the man who spray-painted Churchill (‘I thought that on a day when people all over the world were gathering to express their right to freedom of speech, I would express a challenge to an icon of the British establishment’, 10/5/00). The Mail also had the briefest of references to the issues – Simon Heffer noting, ‘Some in Parliament Square yesterday may well have been deeply concerned about the future of our planet and the environmental damage they believe is being inflicted upon it’, but ‘… are as concerned for our future environmental safety as the average soccer hooligan’, following this up later with, ‘They claim to hate capitalism because it is destroying the world and enslaving people, …’ (2/5/00). The following day a reference in the Mail to a protest group’s Website alluded to motivation. And finally, during James Mathews’ trial it noted, ‘With a rambling, Dave Spartish diatribe – ‘the thuggery against miners in the general strike, the thuggery shown to thousands of ordinary people in Ireland and the thuggery meted out to suffragettes’ – a 25-year-old oaf, young for his age, was sent down for a month for defacing the Churchill statue during the May Day riots’ (11/5/00). This reproduces almost the sum total of Mail’s explanation of motivations. The broadsheets were only slightly more forthcoming. About a third of the coverage that did concern aims and explanations (550 words out of 1700 across all of the broadsheets) dealt with justification for the Cenotaph and Churchill statue incidents, mostly by Reclaim the Streets, John Jordan (a leading activists) or by James Matthews. The broadsheets had them defending their actions with what could only be described as

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the limpest of arguments. For instance, with regard to the Cenotaph, Reclaim the Streets were quoted as saying: We do not necessarily celebrate the generals and the ruling class that send people to their deaths in order to protect the privileges and control of the few. The abhorrence of sending millions of men to their deaths in the trenches dwarfs the stupidity of any possible slogan on any possible piece of stone. (3/5/00) The broader issues behind the demo were only touched upon briefly, and reminiscent of those outlined by Brooks at the beginning of this chapter – consumerism, global warming and its impact, corporate capital and its evasion of government regulation, the critique of GM foods, and the international movement’s advocacy of the minimum wage, the fight against poverty and land ownership inequalities. But these were often relayed in a fragmented fashion and scattered in isolated snippets. The most extended and sympathetic treatment of anti-globalisation issues came in a Guardian article on the day of the demonstration, in a total of 200 words out of 1200, alluding to the revenues of large corporations and small or poor countries, to the ‘powerful’, faceless, antidemocratic WTO subverting our institutions, the environmental costs of global corporate activity, alongside the immorality of huge disparities in wealth. The report also suggested free trade needed to go alongside labour protection, and flagged up consumerism, the enrichment of the few, and the risk to the environment and democratic institutions this posed. Finally, the Telegraph (15/5/00) allowed the The Ecologist magazine editor the space to look at anti-globalisation issues (WTO’s secrecy, its unresponsiveness to Third World interests and its dominance by large corporations intent on plundering the world’s economies unhindered, alongside the need to raise environmental awareness), though the author did in fact critique the protesters. All-in-all the coverage of protesters’ aims and motivations issues was at best meagre, uninspiring and not very illuminating. The broadcasters seriously under-reported the aims and motivations of the protesters, and so too did the broadsheets. In this sense there was little by way of an attempt to rectify any real or supposed ‘bias against understanding’ and little that would have informed us about the protesters or their motivations. There were, then, important and persistent gaps in the coverage across the board. The obvious question is, why? Were the media solely responsible, and were they, therefore, to blame for

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the structure of the coverage? Or were factors extrinsic to the journalistic process involved?

Effective image management and the ‘protest dynamic’ A case can be made that the ‘bad press’ the Trafalgar Square antiglobalisation protesters received was a product of a range of ‘extramedia’ considerations, and that a full and fair treatment by the media is highly contingent on the interplay of a range of factors, few of which are in the control of press or television journalists. These include the structure and discipline of the organisations involved, their orientation toward the media and level of public relations competence, and their concerted focus on winnable battles. But it also includes the nature of the relationship between the array of political actors involved, all of whom may be more or less media savvy. This conjunction is manifest in what we might term the ‘protest dynamic’ – a direct counterpart to the ‘protest paradigm’. The extent to which the media is able to contribute to a vibrant debate within the public sphere is, we will argue, contingent on the circumstances at hand and on the balance that organisations strike between dramatic and organised direct action on the one hand, and on the other, the less exciting but no less important attention given to organisational coherence, public relations professionalism, argument, evidence and research. The example of two anti-globalisation mobilisations are important in illustrating this case: the Seattle protesters of 1999 and ‘Attac’ in France.7 They show how the very nature of the protest ‘as events’ may make the issues difficult to cover, delimit the range of voices heard and make it all but impossible for journalists to offer the public an approximation to a fully objective and fully rounded treatment. This follows from the conjunction and interplay of a range of situational, organisational and pubic relations factors, some of which are the direct result of strategic or tactical decision made by the protest organisations themselves or by the individuals involved. Evaluating the role of the media without an appreciation of these elements risks a serious misjudgement of television (and press) coverage. As Rojecki’s (2002) analysis of the coverage of the Seattle protest shows, anti-globalisation protesters are, in fact, fully capable of getting a good press, where the movement’s issues are given a reasonably fair and open hearing. What is more open to question is whether the antiglobalisation people at Seattle got a good press despite the direct action component of the protest rather than because of it. The sympathetic

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coverage was, in fact, the product of a conjunction of the factors alluded to above. Here it is particularly important to register the fact that the mainstream, non-violent protesters were reasonably well organised, disciplined, restrained and well behaved. They were also united in so far as they had an identifiable target for their protest (the WTO meeting) and had a set of associated and well-thought-through critiques. So there was unity of purpose and a direct focus for criticism. As a result, the peaceful protesters had the benefit of open support from prominent political figures like President Clinton and Ralph Nader. Significantly, the protesters were proficient and highly professional in their handling of the media (Wall, 2003) and were thus able to capitalise on the PR gifts handed to them – like WTO secrecy and PR ineptitude, alongside the violently heavy-handed and photogenic tactics of the local police.8 The resultant coverage was indeed good and markedly different from the treatment of Trafalgar Square protesters. Yet from the perspective of the ‘protest dynamic’ it was not direct action that brought increased exposure and positive coverage, but a convergence of factors that included the discipline of the non-violent protesters, their strong public relations management skills, a clear institutional target for their criticism (the WTO) and a reasoned and plausible case. This was a winning combination but only when other situational elements were in place, namely considerable incompetence and disorganisation on the part of ‘the opposition’, in this case the WTO and the police. Events could well have unfolded quite differently in an alternative situational context. For instance, if the demonstrations had taken place in Washington, and (rather than Starbucks) the object of direct action had been the Memorial to Vietnam Veterans or the Lincoln Memorial (symbolic locations on a par with the Cenotaph and the Churchill statue in London). One wonders whether the coverage would have been quite as sympathetic. Would prominent politicians have offered their support, and would the anti-WTO message have got across as well as it did amidst what would almost certainly have been a negative media backlash? A case could be made, then, that the militant direct action arm of antiglobalisation protest in Seattle were just fortunate that the mainstream protest panned out the way it did. The contrast between the way Trafalgar Square and Seattle actually unfolded could not have been more stark, and this illustrates how there is an additive dimension to way the ‘protest dynamic’ manifests itself, but in a malign manner. Unlike Seattle, the protesters at Trafalgar Square had a particularly dispersed and flattened organisational structure (where there was any organisational structure at all), with all the

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attendant diffusion of responsibility this brings in matters of discipline and direction.9 There was poor management of the press and, indeed, a guarded and sometimes hostile attitude towards the media (Becket, 2002). A combination of organisational diversity and limited public relations professionalism hampered the ability of the protesters to articulate a clear set of unified aims – a recurrent problem for the movement in general (Lloyd, 2001). This was particularly important in a situation where, unlike Seattle, there was no specific focus for the event. The Seattle protester had a clear target (the programme and rationale of the WTO organisation) and its meetings extended over a number of days allowing the activists time to marshal their arguments and focus their efforts. Trafalgar Square, on the other hand, unfolded in a much shorter time frame and had a more nebulous and symbolic focus in ‘May Day’. In such circumstances it would have been problematic enough for the British protesters to get their case across to the media, even if they had been guided by a disciplined, unified and media-savvy organisation. But Trafalgar Square took place in a context where the protesters faced a police force that recognised the need for effective public relations management and had a long history of proactive engagement with the media (Tumber, 1982; Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994). The protesters faced a police force that was geared up to handle the media effectively, and that also appreciated the need to appear restrained and proportionate in its behaviour. This helps explain why the actions at the Churchill statue, the Cenotaph and McDonalds stood out so starkly, and why they received so much attention from the media, and such withering criticism. Those involved in Trafalgar Square were in a different league from their counterparts in Seattle, but can also be contrasted with the antiglobalisation activists in ‘Attac’. This French-based group’s political strategy acknowledges that spontaneous or orchestrated direct action can all too readily be unfocussed and undisciplined, and where it is effective, may have ephemeral or counterproductive results. It is based, instead, on a concerted attempt to change the intellectual environment, and Waters (2004) points to the significance of Attac’s emphasis on the battle of ideas: ‘Where other [anti-globalisation] movements may take to the streets in protest, organise demonstrations or symbolic actions or even resort to violence to make themselves heard, Attac attaches value to argument and debate as a critical tool of social contestation’ (p. 862). This approach places emphasis on the value of argument, and engagement in rational debate within the public sphere. Furthermore, the radicals of Attac are embedded in an organisation which is highly

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coordinated, hierarchically structured, ideas-led and strictly adheres to a set of demanding intellectual standards which, in turn, help it to maintain its credibility in the eyes of the mainstream media (Ancelovici, 2002; Cassen, 2003; Wimmer, 2005). Consequently, Attac is almost the antithesis of organisations like Reclaim the Streets in Britain. What Attac do is, in an important sense, attempt to influence or recast what in Chapter 3 was termed the ‘spectrum of plausibility’. This spectrum represents the range of assumptions, rational precepts, facts, positions, evidential propositions and competing explanations which at any one time are acceptable (or at least plausible) within the boundaries of a rigorously demanding, rationally focussed and intellectual sustainable analysis. For Attac, the accent is on pushing its aims, assumptions and guiding principles to the centre of that spectrum, through intellectually rigorous argument based on the fruit of solid, interdisciplinary research from respected scholars, well articulated to a clearly defined set of goals, and disseminated effectively through the media (Cassen, 2005). The contrast with the Trafalgar Square protesters (and Reclaim the Streets in particular) could not be more stark. This argues for a different, more mature and more peaceful form of political praxis on the part of anti-globalisation protesters, an important point when some commentators actually argue that violence can be used quite consciously in order to get and hold media attention (Scheer, 1999; DeLuca and Peeples, 2003). But it also suggests that a judgement on the coverage of Trafalgar Square should not be based solely on the raw reports themselves. When judging media performance in general, and television in particular, we need a fuller appreciation of the way the ‘protest dynamic’ works its way through to produce the reports the public watch and read. When this is acknowledged, the coverage of Trafalgar Square, although definitely flawed and perhaps imbalanced, cannot be cast in an unambiguously negative light.

Objectivity in broadcast news The ‘protest dynamic’ also has a bearing on the degree of objectivity that we can expect from the media in general and television in particular. What were the journalist to do when covering an event where there were a wide variety of disparate groups involved (some of which were openly hostile towards the press), where there were a welter of conflicting and disputed aims and objectives and where, as a result, there was no single story to be told about the motivations of participants? Simply assembling a range of eye-witness reports is a problematic route to a full,

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fair and objective account, especially in the context of pressing time constraints. For example, the current author was a casual observer at Trafalgar Square and witnessed a seemingly peaceful event accompanied by the usual milling around and noise. Yet aspects of demonstrator behaviour were worrying even for a person who was reasonably sympathetic to the general ethos of the protest – these included some ugly toeto-toe encounters between stationary, restrained and patient policemen, and violently confrontational demonstrators. But, of course, this was the view from one particular perspective (the north side of Trafalgar Square), and one quite distant physically from Whitehall where the more violent disturbances occurred. Eyewitnesses in other positions tell a different story and offer observations that paint a different picture.10 But even if journalists were able to cobble together a range of first person narratives, just how reliable and consistent would they be? More importantly, how representative can or should they be? This is a question that is particularly problematic where a wide range of disparate groups and individuals are engaged. And this also helps explain the predominance of elite sources accessed in reports, even if it does not condone it. The problem here is exemplified in the contrast between our description of Trafalgar Square and the work of Tumber (1982) and Murdock (1984) on coverage of political disturbances in the nineteen eighties. As active researchers, they had more time than is usually afforded the average journalists to check the background to the events. Thus they were able to point out that those involved (when they rather hesitantly and reluctantly came forward) agreed that one particular factor – police harassment – explained the outbreak of the protests, though this theme and the people most affected, were almost wholly absent from the coverage. But at Trafalgar Square, television journalists who resisted the ‘tabloidizing’ urge to pursue the story over a large number of bulletins, did not have the luxury of unlimited time to pursue shy, reluctant, hostile or criminally responsible participants to solicit their perspectives. Nor was there a single theme that unified the groups or individuals involved, or that explained their actions and motivations. Who, then, should broadcasters try to interview? With so many groups, organisations and individuals involved, how were they to gauge which voices truly represent the protesters (obviously a less difficult issue when dealing with senior politicians or policemen)? Which perspective on the event would suffice? There is no obvious way of assembling a dispersed set of protester voices and hoping that it will produce an approximation to ‘the full story’. Getting a faithful, objective and rounded picture of the event (or even of important episodes within it)

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or, indeed, conveying a clear sense of the disparate aims of multiple participants, was therefore intrinsically problematic in the context of this particular sort of protest. The coverage of the broadcasters in particular should only be judged in the light of these important contextualising factors.

Judging the broadcasters or the protesters? The conclusion that the broadcasters in particular failed in their public service duties may well, therefore, be premature, or at least a potentially misleading over-simplification. Imbalances were certainly evident, but a case can be made that some of these may have been justified under the circumstances. The protest got a lot of negative coverage but instead of damning this as insubstantial or partial, a case can be made that the coverage actually served an alternative and useful function in defining the outer limits of acceptable political activity. Blanket media condemnation of vandalism at McDonalds, the Churchill statue and the Cenotaph does, in this view, play an important and entirely proper role in undermining militant or anomic political mobilisation. In focussing on and criticising this behaviour (either directly or obliquely), the media rejects a form of political activism which constitutes a potentially damaging threat to the body politic. The broadcasters may have an obligation to explore all forms of political actions, but a case can be made that, alongside other civic and community institutions, the press and television have an important role in patrolling the boundaries of appropriate or acceptable political action. Where, though, are those boundaries set? What is to be considered acceptable and unacceptable? To search for a general or abstract definition is probably futile, but there is a useful parallel with the notion of ‘newsworthiness’ (Hetherington, 1985; Palmer, 1998). This is also inordinately difficult to define in the abstract, but journalists undoubtedly know it when they see it. Likewise, reporters are citizens as well as professional news gatherers and are as likely as anyone else to sense when civic or behavioural norms are violated wantonly. Where issues are genuinely disputed or behaviour is on the cusp of acceptability, this may well be problematic and contested. But it is more than likely this will be reflected in media commentary. On the other hand, there is far less ambiguity where the violation is gross and the actions at the Cenotaph are a case in point. The fact that these were almost universally condemned is of particular relevance here. The right wing press were as critical as one might expect, but so too were liberal, centre-left publications.11 All the main

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political parties and London mayoral candidates voiced their disapproval, as did a wide range of individuals and organisations from within the anti-globalisation and environmental movements.12 Even anti-globalisation ‘foot soldiers’ were decidedly uncomfortable,13 and indeed the two prosecuted for their part in criminal acts (Dobson and Matthews) distanced themselves emphatically from the actions at the Cenotaph. In this context we can argue that the media were in an important way reflecting a sense of public moral opprobrium that was widely and genuinely felt – they did not artificially create it. However, critics of the notion that the media has a role in setting the limits of acceptable behaviour could, with some justification, argue that this sets a dangerous precedent and has quite pernicious consequences if taken to its logical conclusion, especially so with regard to public service broadcasting. The result would be a debate that was unjustifiably narrow and the broadcasters, in the process, would abdicate their responsibility to inform the public about important issues. Democratic debate, and democracy with it, would be impoverished as a result. There are two important strands to this argument. The first is that moral condemnation by the media is a poor substitute for sober and restrained reporting, and the second, that self-righteous posturing only displaces rational reflection on issues that demand public consideration. The media’s focus on ‘unacceptable’ behaviour only freezes out those aspects of a protest that are peaceful, legitimate and wholly acceptable (or at least pardonable). At best, their exploration will only be superficial. And there is, indeed, some substance to this claim. But in addition there is also the suspicion that an over-emphasis on the disruptive, violent or notionally unacceptable dimensions of protest actually brackets out radical or left-leaning protest – a feature that is quite convenient for the political elite. Here the media define ‘unacceptable’, but only at the expense of a fuller treatment of an important social issue – in this instance, anti-globalisation. Failure to engage with the issues involved only serves to marginalise what constitutes a penetrating critique of existing political and economic power structures. An emphasis on the ‘rogue’ elements of the anti-globalisation movement is, then, simply a convenient way of forcing radical issues off the political agenda. The fact that those most roundly criticised are predominately from the Left, critical or anarchist arms of politics is, in this view, no accident. In this sort of context, public service broadcasting norms would be distorted beyond acceptable limits, if not violated comprehensively. But this latter critique only has force if the protest paradigm is a function of the politics of the protagonists, rather than a consequence of the

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nature of the event or the circumstances surrounding it. The research on protest coverage deals almost exclusively with left-leaning or antiestablishment demonstrations, or what looked at the time like systemthreatening activities.14 A focus on the left-leaning politics of some of the protagonists was understandable given the nature of the disturbances. But it might be a mistake to think that the attendant coverage focussed on violence, ignored peaceful protest or excluded the protesters and their aims because the participants were radical. This is perhaps only convincing in the absence of any counter-examples, i.e. cases where the ‘protest paradigm’ is conspicuous, but where the protest has no radical component. The rally which took place in Parliament Square outside Westminster in September 2004 and which sought to challenge a legislative ban on fox hunting is just such a case. The issue in dispute was not explicitly ‘economic’, although the legislation had profound economic implications for those effected. The protest saw vicious and violent clashes between police and demonstrators, which figured prominently in coverage. The important point here is that the protest was spearheaded by organisations which were not in any conventional sense ‘anti-establishment’, still less radical or leftist. Indeed many protesters hailed from a fox-hunting fraternity which contained more than its fair share of land-owners, country gentlefolk, Lords, dukes and duchesses. When we look at the press reporting in particular, what is striking is not the degree of difference in coverage of Parliament Square and Trafalgar Square, but the obvious similarities.15 Some of the classic ‘protest paradigm’ elements were strongly in evidence in the coverage,16 and there is more than a little irony in the Telegraph’s comment that, ‘They were scenes more associated with the clash of police and shavenheaded football hooligans or dreadlocked anti-capitalist demonstrators rather than men in flat caps and women in quilted waistcoats.’ (16/09/04). Support for the protesters and condemnation of the police was much more obvious than it was in coverage of the Trafalgar Square, but many reports were, in fact, highly critical of the demonstrators and supportive of the police.17 Violence was given much more attention than peaceful demonstration, and while many more fox-hunters were sourced or quoted than their anti-globalisation counterparts, the coverage tended to focus on their direct experiences of the rally and of police action. Consequently, their motivations for demonstrating or their political aims figured as rarely as it did in Trafalgar Square reports. To be sure, we can point to extensive coverage of the pros and cons of the foxhunting ban, or to stories focussing on the impact of the ban or how the

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legislation emerged. But this tended to come through in reports that that did not have the demonstration and its associated violence as its main or even its subsidiary focus.18 The evidence presented here may not be conclusive, but it may be indicative. It suggests that the media’s critical handling of protest events is not just a function of the political complexion of those typically involved, who happen to be disproportionably from ‘the left’. Rather it is conditioned by the very nature the events, especially where violence is a feature of a protest. This may hold true even if one does not accept that the press, or more particularly the broadcasters, have a legitimate role in policing the boundaries of acceptable political behaviour.

Bad news in perspective What can we conclude from the preceding analysis of portrayals of antiglobalisation politics? The broadcasters seemed to avoid the temptation to gallop down the same road as the press. They did not give the titillating aspects of the event the attention they might have done had the headlong pursuit of audiences been the primary consideration. That said, we can scarcely conclude that either BBC or ITN covered themselves in glory. Unlike the coverage of unemployment reviewed in Chapter 3, there was little by way of explanatory commentary (certainly with respect to the aims and motivations of the protesters). On top of this, a narrow range of sources were accessed, there was disproportionate attention to the violence and criminality, and some pejorative terms were used to describe protester behaviour. Both BBC and ITN seemed equally culpable in this respect. So there was no sense in which the example of the principal public provider (the BBC) created a virtuous cycle of good practice for other broadcasters (Padovani and Tracy, 2003) and few signs that they kept their main commercial competitor (ITN) ‘honest’, to use Andrew Marr’s term (Marr, 2004). The coverage from both displayed comparable flaws and foibles. But perhaps most important of all, at one or two points a judgemental element crept into the commentary in the BBC coverage, a feature that is definitely at odds with the station’s public service obligations. Almost all the features of the ‘protest paradigm’ manifest themselves in the course of only four reports. The findings suggest that the viewers would not have been terribly well informed or educated by the commentary, nor for that matter entertained. And if there is, indeed, a ‘bias against understanding’ with respect to marginal politics, the broadcast coverage of Trafalgar Square would not in any respect have

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challenged it. Consequently, in this particular case television would not have filled the gap in objective, informative and balanced coverage, left by a stridently partisan press. This is in sharp contrast to the way television handles conventional, domestic economic news and, as we will see in the next chapter, commentary on Europe. The press coverage, for its part, also featured the primary elements of the ‘protest paradigm’, though less consistently than might have been anticipated. Some of the broadsheets set aside the space to explore in a bit of detail what was behind the protests, and the sort of motivations that animated those involved. This was possible given that a large number of stories were filed. There is an obvious contrast here with the broadcasters who spent much less time on the protest. This points towards a recurrent dilemma for television journalists. There was perhaps a danger that in only covering the protest in a few items (and thus avoiding over-attention to the crime angle of what had been a gripping drama of violent protest), almost inevitably, something was being lost – the space to do justice to a complex events. Given the persistent time constraints facing broadcasting journalists, this is likely to be a recurrent problem, and one that may well afflict coverage of comparable protest events. However, this would not explain the evaluative tinge that entered into the BBC commentary. Are we entitled to conclude that the coverage was irremediably flawed, and that the broadcasters (and perhaps to a lesser extent the newspapers) were directly and entirely to blame? The comparison of Trafalgar Square with more successful anti-globalisation mobilisations, suggests that a range of contextual and organisational factors were at play. Ineffective public relations were also an important consideration, a point that we will return to in the next chapter. The interaction of all these factors (the ‘protest dynamic’) almost inevitably condemned the Trafalgar Square protesters to a bad press. Moreover, a further comparison of the Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square demonstrations suggested that the structure of press coverage at least, is as much a function of the nature of the event as it is of the politics of the protesters. There may well have been a predictable hostility to anti-globalisation some quarters, but there was no blanket, intrinsic or structural bias against the left-leaning, anti-globalisation protesters – a feature that may be as relevant to broadcast news as it is to newspaper coverage. Demonstrations, then, may well just simply be impossibly hard to cover effectively. Even in the most favourable circumstances (where peaceful protesters with a good case have an organisational structure that is sufficiently unified and appropriately streamlined to facilitates the articulation of an agreed message)

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protesters can have a hard time getting their message across. Clearly the circumstances at Trafalgar Square were not like that, and as a consequence not only were the protesters in trouble, so too were the journalists. Trafalgar Square highlights the intrinsic limitations of journalism in a context where the objective is to cover the reality of a complex, contested and potentially violent event. Given the nature of Trafalgar Square and the circumstances surrounding it, the journalists cannot be held solely responsible for the limitations of the coverage. Critics can bemoan apparent imbalances and lack of objectivity, but to invite the media to tell the unvarnished and objective truth is perhaps to counsel the impossible. Finally, the cases highlighted in this chapter illustrate the intrinsic limitations of the concept of the ‘spectrum of plausibility’ outlined in Chapter 3. The argument here is that criteria for the assessment of the objectivity and balance in coverage can be derived from a reference literature which is even handed, broad-ranging and detached. But this approach is only viable where such a literature actually exists. Seattle in 1999 was quite exceptional in this respect. Cockburn and St Clair’s ‘Five Days that Shook the World’, the work of Yuen et al. (2002) and Danaher and Burbach (2000) offer a platform for assessing the objectivity and balance of the coverage.19 They would allow a judgement on whether journalists were justified in including some themes, voices and explanations, while excluding others. But there was no comparable body of literature dealing with Trafalgar Square as an event – certainly none that would could act as a guide to the assessment of media commentary. And where there is none, no comparable assessment can be made. Perhaps, in such circumstances, we just need to be more guarded in what we can claim to know about the media’s objectivity, and more modest in what we can say with any certainty about media biases and imbalances, or truth content.

Part III The Politics of European News

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6 Europe and the Euro in the News

The importance of European coverage The chapters so far have dealt almost exclusively with domestic British considerations. However, Europe in all its manifestations is increasingly important for Britain and its economy, the British legal system and, consequently, for British politics. We are seeing the increased ‘Europeanisation’ of the British polity (Kevin, 2003). This brings into the frame the importance of coverage of Europe and European issues. The way television handles them can be as significant as the way it reports domestic considerations, and therefore some of the same questions arise. Is there a sufficient coverage in the British media to support informed political debate about Europe (an issue assessed in Chapter 2)? The question is an important one given that, as yet, there is nothing approaching a pan-European public sphere (Schlesinger, 1997 and 1999; Meyer, 2005). And a range of issues explored in previous chapters are also significant. For instance, how balanced and objective is televisual treatment of Europe, and what would this look like anyway? Is the right balance struck between informative stories and coverage which engages and entertains more than it educates? Who gets to speak on European news and what do they say? Does the news give us enough explanatory background to allow citizens to develop an informed sense of how Europe impinges on their own interests? Does the tenor of the coverage give us confidence that it will contribute to reasoned public debate? And will television counterbalance what many see as the worst excesses of press coverage of Europe? This is a particularly important question in a context where, as we will see, the strident polemic of press coverage can threaten to undermine enlightened engagement with the issues.

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The research undertaken to date on media coverage of Europe is growing, but has some important limitations. It can give rather general, broadbrush sketches (Bale, 2005), occasionally spanning many decades (Wilkes and Wring, 1998). Others focus exclusively on the press (Hardt-Mautner, 1995; Anderson and Weymouth, 1999), in some instances looking only at one or two titles1 and, in any event, are dealing with a medium that is not the public’s main source of news.2 A number of British and nonBritish studies focus on small, snapshot samples of media content (HardtMautner, 1995; Brookes, 1999; Anderson and Weymouth, 1999; De Vreese et al., 2001; Kevin, 2003; Triandafyllidou, 2003), although the limitations of this approach are outlined in Chapter 2. Only a few look at television (Peter, Semetko and de Vreese, 2003), fewer still use an unbroken corpus of television news (Gavin, 2000). Finally, some studies of British coverage are embedded in cross-national comparisons. Here, in the heroic attempt to look at a wide a range of countries, only the broadest contours and most basic thematic structures of the coverage are assessed (Law, Middleton and Palmer, 2000; Kevin, 2003; Trenz, 2004; and Peter and de Vreese, 2004). This is doubly problematic where there is a ‘meta-analysis’ of such studies (Machill, Beiler and Fischer, 2006). Nevertheless, we still need a clear sense of how television handles European issues, since the British public are effectively observers of developments ‘abroad’ and, as such, are in important ways dependent on the mass media for a sense of what they mean for the eurozone and for Britain (Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur, 1976; Ball-Rokeach, 1985; Gavin, 1997; Norris, 2000).

A discourse on Europe and the euro Television may cover Europe and European affairs across a range of bulletins, but the raw frequency of stories does not tell us much about the substantive characteristics of those stories. Large scale, cross-national comparisons can give us a sense of the general contours of the coverage, for instance, De Vreese et al. (2001) suggest that ‘economic consequences’ and ‘conflict’ frames are prominent in reports, the former highlights impact of European (in)action, alongside financial gains and losses, the latter emphasises disagreements and divergences between individuals, institutions, countries and conflicting parties. However, the obvious question is, ‘conflict’ between which parties and over what, and which economic consequences for whom? Answers to these questions require an appreciation of the details of the discourse embodied in the news reports, alongside a sense of the themes explored and the connections made between different story elements.

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This detail is largely (but understandably) absent from large-scale, cross-national comparisons of news content, but is discernable from the analysis of press coverage. The story told here is rather dismal, though. Caricatures and sub-racist stereotypes abound, particularly but not exclusively in the tabloid newspapers (Hardt-Mautner, 1995; Williams, 1998; Maguire, Poulton and Possamai, 1999). Distortion and infantile name-calling are commonplace. European institutions figure prominently and are portrayed as a corrupt and inefficient gravy trains (Morgan, 1999). The tabloids claim that EU officials are faceless, but dangerous and stupid ‘Euro-dreamers’, out of touch and, what is more, out to ditch our cherished pound (Hardt-Mautner, 1995). Maastricht has been given the same jaundiced treatment, Hardt-Mautner noting how the Sun in particular embellished its commentary to imply that the treaty imposed a draconian European-wide taxation regime. The press also suggested that during the beef crisis, continental Europeans have dishonestly disregarded BSE outbreaks on their own turf, while acting unilaterally to ban British livestock (Brookes, 1999), action taken, reports claimed, with the intention of protecting European markets and national commercial interests, but at the expense of British farmers. Even the British pro-European press are, according to one study, ambivalent or hesitant, often carrying stories reflecting the same themes as anti-European titles, like the limitations of the CAP, fraud within the EU and diplomatic fudges over Maastricht criteria fulfilment or the choice of European Central Bank (ECB) president (Anderson and Weymouth, 1999). EMU, the press suggests, threatens British sovereignty and our control of our economic destiny, and the Social Chapter is portrayed as a threat to British business. What is missing from the coverage is significant too. The real benefits to be derived from the 48 Hour Working Time Directive are either underplayed or wholly absent, and importantly, ‘Almost without exception an overarching discourse which transcends the nation-state and places the integration question within a wider context of the post-war European “grand vision”, of peace, prosperity and democracy, is missing’ (Anderson and Weymouth, 1999, p. 91). So some particularly important facets of the integrationist thesis are underplayed or absent from press portrayals. The implications that follow are fairly serious. Press coverage, in this view, is perhaps the antithesis of the idealised notion of the public sphere, premised on a rational, dispassionate and balanced treatment of political issues. The discourse in the tabloid press in particular is not a glowing example of discursive rationality (Gavin, 2001b). Perhaps more worryingly, it is often one of criticism, blame, clashes and external imposition,

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with British interests and businesses undermined or compromised in the process. There is an emphasis on division, with exclusion accentuated at the expense of inclusionary and encompassing frames of reference. There are serious implications here not only for public perceptions of Europe, but for European identity formation. Britain is, if you like, represented in the press as symbolically at odds with its neighbours in the EU, rather than sharing economic and political space in a solidaristic community. This state of affairs makes the contribution to debate of public service television all the more important. What, then, are the principle features of the discourse on European affairs represented to the public via television? They are illuminated by a survey of a segment of the television corpus that figured in Chapter 2, and running from December 1998 to January 2001. This period was not intended to be representative of television coverage before or since, but was closest – temporally – to the analyses of press discourse outlined above, and therefore the most appropriate for formal comparison. The contours were clearly evident. Conflict, as De Vreese et al. (2001) rightly suggest, was undeniably a salient feature. Undoubtedly, viewers would have been aware of the position of the main political parties, the Conservatives still deeply divided, New Labour staying scrupulously ‘on message’ (Gavin, 2001a). However, this is less important and interesting than the tensions that were patently evident between the Labour administration and its continental counterparts. Here by far the most salient area of conflict was tax harmonisation. BBC news touched on the German and French calls for harmonisation within Europe in early December 1998, with one headline stating, ‘The threat to Britain’s right to set it’s own taxes. Germany’s finance minister [Oscar Lafontaine] says Europe’s taxes should be decided by the majority in Brussels’ (1/12/98). On the same day ITN’s political correspondent closed his report with, Well what I think it points out is that there are plenty of people on the continent, and Mr Lafontaine and the French finance minister are among them, who believe that a single currency leads on to political union and political union in the end does require harmonisation of taxes. And so, if you like, it is a warning that there is a battle ahead, there are definitely moves among people on the continent who would like to see taxes harmonised. But Britain is always going to veto that. (reporter, ITN, 1/12/98)

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Reports on both BBC and ITN suggested Lafontaine’s statement prompted Blair and Brown to play down Germany and France’s stance, and that Labour was set to deploy a veto on any such proposal. Furthermore, on the first day of trading in the euro, one reporter noted that, ‘At Germany’s stock exchange, a reminder to Britain – the single currency is here, tax harmonisation is next’, with Yves-Thibault de Silguy, the European Commissioner immediately following with the blunt statement to camera, ‘It’s just a step. The next step will concern other matters, for instance we have to progress in terms of the tax system’ (ITN, 04/01/99). The theme would resurface in late January 1999 (BBC, 11/01/99) and again on the first anniversary of euro trading.3 Finally, while covering a story on the euro’s slide in value, the BBC would also report that, ‘The German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has accused Britain of intransigence over its opposition to a Europe-wide tax on savings income. He claims Britain’s resistance is damaging the European Union…’ (anchor, BBC, 03/12/99). The high visibility of this issue is politically and discursively important for various reasons. First, the language links the euro with what looks like the enforced and, therefore, deeply worrying integration of taxation systems. The loss of control of taxation is one of the principal Eurosceptic and anti-euro themes (Forster, 2002a and 2002b), and the notion of a dangerous threat to our government’s remaining control over fiscal affairs is a discourse they would happily piggyback. But tax harmonisation stories had another, perhaps more important feature, since our European neighbours were cast in the role of antagonists. Television reports show them ‘threaten’, ‘warn’, ‘push’ and ‘accuse’, with the British, in turn, embattled and offering ‘resistance’. The language is regularly of ‘us’ (the British) pitted against ‘them’ (Europeans), discursively the antithesis of shared belonging in a political or economic community. This would be corrosive enough itself, even if confined to tax harmonisation issues, but earlier research suggests that this sort of friction is not altogether uncommon in television reporting of Europe (Gavin, 2000). This language, it was argued, has the potential to undermine communal solidarity and the collaborative engagement needed to underpin the EU integration process. But certainly from a Europhile perspective, there is a danger that this sort of rhetorical positioning will delegitimise the EU in the eyes of the public, undermining the fragile development of any form of nascent European political identity. The development by the public of a positive orientation towards the euro or, indeed, towards ‘Europe’ more generally, seems unlikely where

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television highlights such internal division and tensions over tax and sovereignty issues.

The plummeting euro But if tax harmonisation was an important subplot in euro story in 1999, its most commanding feature was its sharp decline in value after an upbeat launch. Given the euro’s symbolic significance, its depreciation was a potentially damaging threat to the legitimacy and viability of Europe’s economic and political integration process. Its slide came through quite clearly on both channels. But the explanations offered concerning why it depreciated were more politically significant than coverage of the decline. Explanatory commentary is important because without it the public’s grasp of events would be, at best, partial and superficial, and a sense of cause-and-effect also helps direct and focus public blame, as well as demarcating the sort of remedial actions that are available or appropriate (Peffley, 1984; Abramowitz et al., 1988; Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). Commentary bearing on the causes of the euro’s plummeting value were isolated, and a number of themes emerged. The least controversial and most commonly reported revolved around the relative economic vitality of countries inside and outside the eurozone. Potentially more damaging to the image of the EU were explanations which emphasised the action and statements of European governments, statesmen and Commission officials. The latter, it seemed, could provoke a marked slide in the value of the currency: ‘The euro dropped again after he [Romano Prodi] warned Italy might have to leave the currency if it can’t get inflation under control’, BBC, 21/06/99). German and French governments were also amongst those responsible. Their calls for interest rate cuts to boost their own ailing economies undermined the credibility of the euro, suggesting a form of political interference which brought them into conflict with the ECB (BBC, 04/03/99 and 11/03/99). Chancellor Schroeder’s criticism of Vodaphone’s hostile bid for Mannesmann also spooked the ECB and the money markets (BBC, 03/12/99) and his attempts to artificially, but unsuccessfully, boost the economy, negatively affected the euro’s value (BBC, 01/06/99 and 02/12/99). The statements were again couched in a language that tended to highlight political and economic tensions within the eurozone, and stories illustrated how the damaging pursuit of narrow national interests could rebound on the value of the single currency. They also illustrate the fragility of the euro in the context where important political actors were injudiciously candid in their comments

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and criticisms, or where governments were economically ‘irresponsible’ or, rather, interventionist. The finer detail of the explanations outlined here might well have been lost on the casual viewer, but they become more important when looking at what the news commentary said about the subsequent impact of the euro’s value on the UK economy. In Britain, the initial buoyancy of the euro when it first started trading could, it was suggested, bring problems in its wake, in the form of inflation (BBC, 06/01/99). When, in turn, the euro fell in value there was obviously much that could be said on both sides of the equation, as is evident from one ITN bulletin – a weak euro would be tough on British exporters and could induce hostile take overs, but could also mean cheaper holidays and lower interest rates (ITN, 03/12/99). Evenly balanced accounts could be found on both channels (BBC, 08/04/99), but taken as a whole, the BBC coverage tended to offer more commentary on the negative implications for the UK of a falling euro (‘It [the euro’s decline] is embarrassing for Europe’s leaders and a real threat to British industry’, BBC, 27/04/99). The depreciating euro could even be a problem for continental businesses in the eurozone, with one report noting that it would cause a rise in raw material prices for German steel manufacturers (BBC, 13/07/99). For a number of reasons the discursive contours of coverage illuminated here are highly significant. While they are entirely devoid of the polemical tone and tenor of editorialised press commentary, there are clear parallels in the themes addressed in press and TV reportage. With respect to both tax harmonisation and euro depreciation a language of intra-European division and friction is evident, illustrating tensions at the EU’s heart. Commentary can reproduce an exclusionary tone sharply at odds, symbolically, with the idea of solidaristic community. Coverage often casts the EU and Europeans in antagonistic roles, with our neighbours presented as threats and not as partners – they impose Europe-wide policies or, alternatively, through their actions and statements are responsible for the euro’s drop in value, something which in turn has an adverse effect on the British economy. For Europhiles, the worrying dimension of this discursive mix lies in its structural similarity to press reports, doubly so because in the sharing of themes we approach a degree of ‘consonance’ – a similarity in coverage across a range of media that cuts down the opportunities for audience selective exposure – that makes change in public attitudes more likely (NoelleNeumann, 1981; Noelle-Neumann and Mathes, 1987; Severin, 1988; Peter, 2003b). In this view, the ‘discourse-overlap’ is capable of inducing a negative appreciation of Europe and of Europeans generally, and has

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the capacity to erode the legitimacy of EU and undermine any notion of shared or inclusive European identity. Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of this picture is for those who hope that perceptions of increased prosperity within the EU would bring a positive orientation towards it. As Wallace and Smith note, … the idealists who staffed the ECSC High Authority and later the Commission, hoped their successful fostering of faster growth and greater welfare throughout the communities would lead to a progressive shift in perceived interests, and then in loyalties, to this new level of administrative government. (Wallace and Smith, 1995, p. 134) Nevertheless, citizens need to be made aware of any link between the EU and prosperity, and the media obviously has some role to play here. However, given the discursive pattern observed here, the obverse is equally likely to be the case – media emphasis on the damaging economic impact of euro developments could undermine citizens’ respect for or identification with Europe. The discourse sketched here does, however, need to be placed in perspective. That the euro’s plunge in value should have been a salient feature of television reports is neither surprising nor particularly controversial – after all, the euro lost something like 12 per cent of its value against the pound, and a full 15 per cent against the dollar, changes that were both dramatic, and economically and politically significant. So the story was eminently newsworthy, and reports about the euro had, in a sense, to be both prominent and rather bleak. But we should not conclude from this that television coverage simply reflects and amplifies the strident and pronounced anti-euro biases of the press – that television news was imbalanced and lacked objectivity. This would be a mistake. The issue turns on how accurately television reflected the intentions and statements of prominent EU actors. If it was, indeed, the case that a strong tax harmonisation strand within euro-debate was plainly and transparently a figment of the fertile and jaundiced Eurosceptic imagination, the accusation that television misrepresented or distorted the issue might well carry more weight. But the broadcasters took their cue from the intrinsically newsworthy statements of some of the principal domestic and foreign political actors, from remarks of prominent EU officials or from other interested parties, all of whom flagged the issue quite unambiguously. For largely the same reasons the issue continued to haunt the agenda throughout 2002, even in the notionally pro-European

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press.4 So it is crucially important to remind ourselves at this juncture that the press and television did not in any sense ‘make up’, fabricate or invent this discourse, nor did they misleadingly introduce an adversarial tone. Television may have handled it differently and without the dismissive and hostile tone of the press, but some of the principal discursive themes did coincide. Finally, the overlap in television and press discourses also has a bearing on how we explain the latter. Some maintain that hostile press coverage is, in an important way, the result of direct intervention by hostile and prejudiced Eurosceptic proprietors (Anderson and Weymouth, 1999 p. 58). But since television is not subject to this form of direct pressure, yet shares some of the discursive characteristics of press reporting, clearly we need to look beyond proprietorial influence to explain the similarities – a point returned to later in this chapter.

The euro and its introduction While the discursive contours of coverage in the late nineteen nineties were important, the single most significant recent development in Europe was the advent of the euro in early 2002. At this critical juncture, how did television cover the story? Were the best traditions of public of public service broadcasting upheld, and could the coverage be considered comprehensive, balanced and objective? Again some clear contours are apparent. Despite a decline in the numbers of stories broadcast in the run-up, viewers would still have had little doubt that the event was momentous. It was an ‘... historic step …’ (headline BBC 31/12/01), an ‘… unprecedented project to replace a dozen currencies in one go’ (ITN reporter, 31/12/01) and ‘… the biggest currency swap in history …’ (ITN reporter 1/1/02). Moreover, with all but a few hiccups, this large scale logistical exercise had been carried off without incident, ‘You know, this has been largely a successful launch’ (BBC reporter 1/1/02). Viewers would also have got a sense that this was part of a wider and bolder European project, ‘The ambition is that the euro rivals the dollar as a world wide player. It’s not there yet, but it’s made a start’ (BBC journalist, 1/1/02), a theme emerging again the following day in ITN’s reference to Romano Prodi’s comment that, ‘The euro is the beginning of a strong European Union; we shall be the best in the world …’ (ITN, 1/1/02). The launch was portrayed as positive and initial celebrations caught ‘… the mood of Europe which was one of genuine optimism and pride’ (BBC reporter, 31/12/01). In Paris they were, ‘Ditching the Franc, embracing the euro with hardly a tear’ (ITN reporter, 1/1/31).

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This form of commentary is not really surprising since it must have been difficult to frame a pessimistic story in a context where the available visuals featured exuberant celebrations and firework displays. However, the television reports also noted some ambivalence amongst the populations of the countries involved, and in at least four other stories the commentary featured scepticism about the euro and a sense of loss. There was the sense that, ‘The euro is accepted, but not yet fully embraced’ (BBC journalist, 2/1/02). So television seemed to offer a balanced, if necessarily somewhat simplified, picture of the way European citizens actually felt about the event. This reinforces a finding from Chapter 3, and also illustrated in Table 6.1. The broadcasters clearly make reference to a numerous range of ‘voices’, with vox pop figuring prominently. These voices from Europe made an important contribution to coverage, and were indeed on a par with the combined total of UK actors. But perhaps the most significant themes in the coverage related to peace, unity and cooperation. The new dawn was portrayed as a harbinger of a burgeoning symbolic European identity, with one journalist noting ‘… what is happening now is that national currencies, national symbols are being put aside and a European symbol is being substituted for them. That is why this is such a huge event for everyone taking part’ (BBC, 31/12/01). The theme was amplified later in the story by a comment from Romano Prodi: ‘If you look to the future, this will bring a sense of identity that will change all the European environment’. But importantly these reports also conveyed the sense that this was a step towards a positive identity embracing unity, cooperation and peace. The

Table 6.1 Sources in BBC and ITN coverage of the euro at notes and coins introduction (15 December 2001–15 January 2002)

‘Vox Pop’ Experts Economic Actors Politicians Others EU Officials

UK EU UK EU UK EU UK EU UK EU

BBC

ITN

Total

1 18 1 1 9 7 5 4 0 1 3

5 7 0 0 1 1 2 0 2 0 1

6 25 1 1 10 8 7 4 2 1 4

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BBC reported that ‘Hans Sichel [German Finance Minister] says it’s also about uniting Europe politically’ (7/12/02). The BBC recorded the reaction of the Vatican that ‘… the euro was a force for unity, peace and prosperity’ (01/01/02) and ITN noted the comment from Wim Duisenberg, then the ECB President, that with the euro, ‘… we will move towards greater openness and cooperation between our 12 nations’ (31/12/01).5 The prominence of the themes of cooperation, peace and unity is particularly significant since, according to Anderson and Weymouth (1999), they are conspicuous by their almost total absence from newspaper reports. So their presence is an important counterpoint to the almost relentless negativity of the press. That these aspects of the European ‘grand vision’ can figure in television reports, serves to contradict the notion that there is an intrinsic bias against their representation, or that their submersion is either systemic or inevitable. Rather, their emergence is contingent, in part, on the medium concerned. Television, in this view, represents a useful and important counter-weight to the press. But importantly, this is contingent on the context – where there are obvious and unchallengeable ‘good news’ stories, the media (or at least television) can and did reflect them. However, debate over whether Britain should or should not join the euro was muted in the television coverage. The TUC called for the Government to get off the fence and the CBI thought procrastination could cause problems (BBC, 28/12/01). British politicians also clashed over the inevitability or otherwise of Britain’s eventual inclusion in the eurozone (BBC, 1/1/02), while pro- and anti-euro campaigners made brief appearances on ITN (1/1/02). But these were fleeting interludes and there was not much formalised advocacy or criticism of the euro. However, elements of the debate were evident throughout the monthlong period around the launch. They just did not figure in a formalized manner. How, then, did they register? A survey was undertaken to identify and isolate the major strands in the debate. As in Chapter 3, the object was to assess the commentary against a literature on the euro, in order to identify the range of themes and subthemes considered plausible (or that were at least ‘canvassable’) in the context of scholarly debate. Arguments about the euro can be embedded in a broader set of debates about Britain’s connection with the EU (Forster, 2002a and 2002b) or in histories of UK engagement with the ERM (Stephens, 1997). There is also a literature of committed advocacy ( Johnson, 1996). However, a more detached and reliable survey is available in a number of works. The focus here is not upon explanations for the development

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of monetary union (George and Bache, 2001), nor on those abstract and ephemeral aspects of euro that would be less interesting to and have less resonance with the public. Rather, it is on arguments about the advantages and disadvantages for Britain and the consequences for the British economy. This is on the assumption that these hard-nosed, bread-andbutter issues carry more weight with a generally disinterested public (Temperton, 2001; Dinan, 2005). The themes identified are also a close analogue to the ‘economic consequences’ frame that De Vreese et al. (2001) consider to be common in British coverage of Europe. The approach looked at the main economic advantages and disadvantages canvassed around the euro’s launch. However, it was considered important to view this in the context of the broader sweep of coverage. With this in mind, the survey encompassed not only the euro launch, but included a substantial period before this – December 1998 to January 2000 – a year in which the euro first began trading in the currency markets. On the ‘pro’ side the themes isolated encompassed the end of currency conversion costs, stability of exchange rates, greater price transparency, a more effective single market, greater efficiency in the financial markets generally and the encouraging prospects for inward investment (Temperton, 2001). Low interest rates were also a positive aspect of the single currency and would, in turn, lead to more affordable housing. On the ‘anti’ side, the euro is inextricably associated with a ‘one size fits all’ interest rate regime and inability to devalue one’s currency (an aspect of the sovereignty debate). Taxation to achieve fiscal balance is also considered a negative aspect of ‘euro-reality’, as is the need to harmonise tax regimes. Loss of control over monetary policy (the ‘sovereignty’ issue again), and the costs associated with a move from a local currency to the euro were also considerations, as was the danger of political interference in ECB business (Temperton, 2001; Forster, 2002b). Finally, the rounding up of prices (akin to fears expressed during decimalisation in Britain) and the confusion caused by a new currency are similarly problematic and were factored in on the ‘down side’, although these are really only germane to the phase in which notes and coins were introduced. What did the survey of ‘advantages’ and ‘disadvantages’ show? Firstly, references to the varying arguments were not particularly numerous, and were often quite fragmentary – a picture not too dissimilar to that reported in Chapter 3 where explanatory commentary, though present, was rarely a story mainstay. For instance, in one story on interest rates a BBC correspondent commented ‘But our interest rates at 6.25% are over double the level in the euro countries‘ (6/1/99), an oblique reference to

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low rates in Europe. On another occasion it was noted that one company hoped for a quick move to join since, ‘We want to see stability in the markets, we spend a lot of our time trading foreign currencies at the moment‘ (the MD of Sunseeker International, 23/2/99) – the issue being ‘conversion costs’. Intermittent references to various themes were also evident in the launch phase: a BBC reporter made reference to planned celebrations, then added ‘But people here think the euro will just give shops an excuse to raise prices, a sensitive issue in a country ruined by inflation in the 1920s’ (17/12/01), one of a number of allusions to the rounding up of prices. But this could also extend to some advantages of the euro, and ITN reported a Consumer Association representative: ‘Well, it’s going to be very much easier for people travelling in the 12 eurozone countries, they will only need change their money once’ (31/12/01), a reference categorised under ‘the end of conversion costs’. Some absences from the commentary are apparent but are easily explicable, for instance, the ‘rounding up of prices’ and ‘confusion over notes and coins’ in the 1998-2000 period, because these categories were only directly relevant to the launch phase. That aside, across the 19982000 phase, we can see from Tables 6.2 and 6.3 that few themes escape exploration, and that in any event these absences seemed to balance out. Amongst these, on the ‘pro’ side of the debate, is financial market improvement, and on the ‘anti’ side, the inability to devalue one’s currency. These omissions are explicable if we look at the complex, abstract, and esoteric nature of the issues involved in explaining efficiency gains in the financial markets, or the whys and wherefores of devaluation. Issues with precisely this sort of profile are the most difficult for journalists to get across, important though they may be, and help explain their absence. On house prices, the omission is also just Table 6.2 Frequency of pro-euro ‘arguments’ on BBC and ITN (December 1998–January 2000)

Exchange Rate Stability Conversion Costs End More Efficient Markets Price Transparency Low Interest Rates Lower House Prices Financial Market Improvement Inward investment Total

BBC

ITN

Combined

8 4 0 1 24 0 0 7 44

2 5 0 4 18 0 0 2 31

10 9 0 5 42 0 0 9 75

134 Press and Television in British Politics Table 6.3 Frequency of anti-euro ‘arguments’ on BBC and ITN (December 1998–January 2000)

One Size Fits All No Devaluation Tax Rise/Harmonise Economic Control/Sovereignty Changeover Costs Prices Rounded Up Confusion Over Notes/Coins Political Interference Total

BBC

ITN

Combined

4 0 21 12 11 0 0 5 53

2 0 15 11 8 0 0 0 36

6 0 36 23 19 0 0 5 89

about pardonable, since the dynamics of the issue mean that the impact of low interest rates on the housing market is mixed: a low base rate may boost the market and raise prices for those who are already homeowners, but resultant surges in costs affect quite negatively the firsttime buyer or people moving up the housing ladder. In this sense, the impact of the euro on the housing market is more neutral than an unalloyed bonus, a factor that may explain its low prominence in both phases of our survey. So overall, we can say that in the pre-launch phases both BBC and ITN had a fair degree of balance across the proand anti-euro arguments. But if we focus instead on the time around the euro launch a different picture emerges (see Tables 6.4 and 6.5). Here ITN, unlike its BBC counterpart, had a great many more references to the economic downsides of the euro – as, for instance, in their use of this anti-euro campaigner’s point about sovereignty and, more obliquely, ‘one size fits all’: ‘The key difference between Britain and the eurozone is, we can use the euro when it suits us, when we want to, but without giving up control of our economy, without locking into a monetary union with countries which have serious employment problems’ (1/1/02). The imbalance is especially worrying in the context of such an important event. And the picture was not any better when Channel 4 coverage was reviewed. There was still a conspicuous imbalance. Clearly there is an issue of concern here, especially for those of a Europhile disposition, who may well have been disappointed at the weight of argument the British pubic are exposed to. One prospective explanation for the imbalance may, however, be found in the relative size and frequency of stories on the respective channels. Those on BBC tended to be much longer than on ITN and perhaps more surprisingly, stories on Channel 4 also tended to be rather

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short. Certainly ITN stories were less numerous than those on the BBC. ITN reports were also less in evidence than in the 1998–2000 period, where there was evidently greater balance. Looked at from this perspective, story length and number look like key factors in explaining the imbalance. When there is limited space in a story, the detail, background and perhaps balance are compromised, and when there are fewer stories overall, important elements can drop out. Yet, while this might explain levels of imbalance, it does not diminish what this means for the provision of elevating, balanced and impartial commentary. This has to be seen in the context where in the longer term we are seeing a shortening in the duration of euro reports, and where there is discernable if slow decline in number of stories on both channels, as we saw in Chapter 2. If the reduced number and length of reports is a significant feature of continuing euro coverage, a recurrence of the sort of imbalance outlined in Table 6.4 and 6.5 seems likely and eventually may not be confined to ITN coverage. Table 6.4 Frequency of pro-euro ‘arguments’ on BBC, ITN and CH4 (15 December 2001–15 January 2002)

Exchange Rate Stability Conversion Costs End More Efficient Markets Price Transparency Low Interest Rates Lower House Prices Financial Market Improvement Inward Investment Total

BBC

ITN

1 4 1 6 0 0 0 1 13

0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1

COMBINED 1 5 1 6 0 0 0 1 14

CH4 0 3 0 1 0 0 0 0 4

Table 6.5 Frequency of anti-euro ‘arguments’ on BBC, ITN and CH4 (15 December 2001–15 January 2002)

One Size Fits All No Devaluation Taxes To Rise/Harmonise Economic Control/Sovereignty Changeover Costs Prices Rounded Up Confusion Over Notes/Coins Political Interference Total

BBC

ITN

2 0 1 2 3 2 4 0 14

1 0 0 2 0 2 5 0 10

COMBINED 3 0 1 4 3 4 9 0 24

CH4 3 0 0 1 0 2 5 0 11

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But there is still a question mark over whether it is only the broadcasters who are responsible for the fact that ‘good news’ stories often fail to make it onto our screens. And are they to blame for the fact that European issues often do not make it onto the televisual agenda at all? Domestic political factors obviously have a role to play here, though we can see that both Labour and the Conservatives would have good reason not to flag up the issue – the former because it might antagonise prominent media supporters like Rupert Murdoch, the latter due to the fratricidal conflict it had caused in the past. But forcing issues onto the agenda (and making sure the resultant coverage is positive) is not just the prerogative of domestic politicians. This is the province of the political marketing specialist, and the issue here is the effectiveness of the EU in this department. Was the EU operating as effectively as it might or can it shoulder some of the responsibility for the ‘bad press’ the EU can occasionally get from the media?

Europe’s communications capacities In judging EU communication capacities we first need a sense of what constitutes good practice, i.e. what does effective political communication look like? Fortunately, the political marketing literature gives us a clear sense of the ‘operational’, ‘structural’ and ‘contextual’ preconditions for effective political promotion (Scammell, 1995; Kavanagh, 1995; Lees-Marshment, 2001, 2004a and 2004b). Players need to have a clear and simple message, ideally conveyed in a language the public can understand and which is closely related to audience needs and aspirations, revealed through extensive research. PR should be proactive, relentlessly and repetitively battering home a message via journalists whose trust has been gained – all the while monitoring the resultant coverage and the public’s reaction. But institutions must actually acknowledge that good PR is a priority, reflected in the position of professionals at the apex of an organisation which is committed to organised, centralised and disciplined communication. It also helps if the ‘opposition’ are disorganised, dislocated or inept, and are ‘selling’ a stale, uninteresting and implausible message. How does the EU shape up in terms of these imperatives? Can we ascribe the limited and often poor coverage of EU affairs to deficiencies in image management? An analysis of EU performance in this field suggest that the answer is yes. Historically, the story has been one of neglect and mismanagement (Tumber, 1995; Smith, 2004). The words of one author encapsulates the EU’s orientation to PR: ‘Before the Maastricht crisis, the

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attitude of the Commission’s top echelons towards public communication varied between half-hearted reform attempts, political neglect and outright hostility‘ (Meyer, 2000, p. 200). And a report which sought to frame a PR strategy was rejected dismissively by the Commission as ‘a tin-eared ad-man’s fantasy’ (Tumber, 1995, p. 517). Instead, what the EU opted for was, effectively, an information dissemination strategy, though even this initiative had its problems.6 Bruggemann’s (2005) later study showed how symbolic trappings of nationhood (like flags, anthems and logos etc) have been used to foster a sense of European belonging, and he charts the creation of a network of spokespersons (‘Team Europe’).7 However it ends with a description of the return to the bad old days where journalists have difficulty accessing EU documents dealing with the more sensitive deliberations of the Council. On top of this, the obvious (but largely unacknowledged) defects of the ‘P.R.I.N.C.E.’ programme – an information campaign dealing with the practicalities of the introduction of the euro notes and coins – alongside the inept handling of the Cresson scandal, are further testimony to the EU Commission’s limited competence in PR (European Commission, 2003; Meyer, 2000). The problems exemplified here are not just confined to the Commission, but extend to the European Parliament (EP), and to the Representations of both Parliament and Commission. Anderson and McLeod (2004) note that not only do senior EP officials lack professional expertise when it comes to handling the media, the various Directorate’s General did not understand the relevance of PR advice or appreciate why it should concern them (pp. 909–1000). But there is also an apparent unwillingness among MEPs to confront the EP’s institutional deficiencies, and MEPs saw themselves as the Parliament’s primary communicators – a serious problem for disciplined communication, given limited agreement between them on a wide range of issues. There was also a lack of coordination between the different EP Directorates General, and between the EP and its national and regional offices, with resourcing a serious and persistent problem. Money was often diverted to visitors’ programmes rather than effective PR, and the resultant constraints impacted upon the effectiveness of the Rapid Response and Audio-Visual Units, which are under-staffed and incapable of performing their allotted functions in a euro-wide context.8 The picture painted here is a rather dismal one. The problems in effective political communication seem deep-seated, pervasive and extend to almost every arm of the EU. The EU has certainly had what we could call a ‘promotion deficit’, perhaps more damaging and potentially dangerous than the supposed ‘communication deficit’ alluded to in Chapter 2. The

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EU appears to violate almost every canon of good practice in public relations. Both operationally and structurally, the EU as a whole, as well as its constituent institutions, seem ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of modern political communication. The EU is also unfortunate in that a range of contextual factors which would have made life difficult for the best organised political communication outfit, are also at play. In Britain, Eurosceptics, as well as those who are just sceptical about Europe, are well organised, vocal and media-savvy, not only in the country at large, but also in Parliament (George, 1994; Geddes, 2004; Riddell, 2005). The broader context has been equally problematic. One of the periods in which our survey of coverage fell, saw tensions between European national governments over the trajectory of euro policy which not infrequently spilled over into the sort of undisciplined sniping that has intrinsic news worthiness, and which journalists could not resist. In the same period there was economic fallout from the decline in the euro value which would have been difficult to ignore for reporters with a ‘bad news is good news’ cast of mind. More recently, the EU has faced significant problems in maintaining the integrity of its stability and growth pact (McNamara, 2006, pp. 181–2), prompting even the ‘euro-friendly’ Financial Times to print headlines like ‘EU sanctions deal leaves euro pact in tatters’ (25/11/03), ‘Germany and ECB argue over pact’s collapse’ (1/12/03) and ‘[Commissioner] Monti hits at ‘selfish’ Paris and Berlin’ (2/12/03). To promote the euro as a ‘product’ in such circumstances would have been particularly difficult, even for a well-organised and slickly functioning communications apparatus. But the EU’s inability to arrange effective communication at Brussels or at nation-state level will not have helped diminish the impact of such ‘bad news’, nor will it have facilitated the promotion of counterbalancing ‘good news’ stories. The negative dimensions of broadcast coverage look a little less damning in this sort of context. In the absence of this kind of input, not only will the journalists have difficulty in doing their job, the institutions themselves are more than likely to be on the receiving end of damaging coverage, especially if a range of competing institutions or organisations are active and effective. This is particularly dangerous for the European Union.

Europe in the public sphere The euro has a significant place in the trajectory of European economic and political integration, one that goes beyond the more ephemeral aspects of our shared European reality (like the ‘Ode to Joy’ anthem or

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the emblematic blue-starred flag). It connects out to a set of important bread-and-butter issues, like foreign travel, interest rates and the pricing of goods, and is moreover, a tangible symbol of unity within the European Union. This makes the coverage of the theme politically and socially important. Our evaluation of the way television handled the issues involved has some negative as well as some positive dimensions. On the down side, it is clear that stories often had a negative edge, a feature of television coverage of the EU that has been observed before (Gavin, 2000). The discourse can be one of division, threat and economic dislocation. Disconcertingly, this shared many of the features of the way a hostile press handles European issues. This is important for a number of reasons. First, it represents a degree of ‘consonance’ in the coverage that straddles the main press and televisual media, and this makes its impact on the public more likely. Following on from this, is a second and equally significant aspect of our findings. The consonant discourse is firmly at odds with the notion of shared political space and commonality in the European enterprise, and as a consequence the legitimacy of the political and economic structures of which the euro is a part, may be tarnished (a point we will return to in the following chapter). Yet the emphasis on dispute and controversy should not be interpreted as the product of conscious hostility on the part of the broadcasters nor as unnecessarily inflected, and therefore a contribution to a degraded or one-sided debate. They were, at least in part, the result of factors intrinsic to the stories themselves, the product of some very real divisions within European politics. These clashes were not in any sense ‘made up’ by the journalist, but were the product of tensions within the eurozone or between Britain and its continental neighbours. So perhaps we should not be too quick to jump to the conclusion that in some sense television is to blame for the sort of coverage the euro received, or that the broadcasters are abdicating their responsibilities with respect to public service. Nevertheless there are still some concerns about the style and content or reports. We can say that the significance and newsworthiness of some of the negative developments in European affairs almost dictates that the media coverage will be less than wholly affirmative (especially those revolving around statements by politicians, actions by governments or the dramatic nature of some of the developments). However, their prominence is another symptom of what could be interpreted as an over-emphasis on the sort of bad news that is gripping and dramatic, a feature of new also observed in Chapter 3 with respect to the distinctively negative inflection often found in news about jobs and employment.

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Now perhaps this simply confirms the old, but not necessarily invalid, cliché that ‘bad news is good news’ – as much for the euro as for domestic unemployment. And the coverage of the euro may simply be the result of the known tendency for journalists to favour stories that can be personalised and give a human face to complex or abstract issues. The very public spats between Lafontaine and Tony Blair, between the French/German government and the ECB, and the Commission President and Italian government, in this view, seem almost destined to give the coverage a negative and conflict-laden edge. But this again highlights the problem that public service providers face in balancing copy that is exiting, newsworthy and eye-catching against story elements that are more analytically dense and penetrating, but at the same time potentially quite dull, and possibly off-putting for the audience. There is a temptation to conclude that this represents a general tendency to err on the side of what is newsworthy, at the expense of stories that are less ‘audience-centred’. But we need to bear in mind that the situation was not helped by the actions of prominent EU actors and institutions. Their snipping was just another re-expression of an indiscipline which highlights the EU’s more general inability to handle its PR effectively. And if the EU is incapable of modifying the ‘train crash’ that has been its political communication practice, then perhaps the broadcasters and, indeed, the press, might be forgiven for highlighting the resultant debris. Moreover, in reviewing the less successful dimensions of television coverage, we should not lose sight of the positive ones. When enough time and space is devoted to the issues, the broadcasters are clearly able to give a rounded and balanced account of developments, certainly one that incorporates a range of positions, arguments and voices that are often absent from press coverage. A plurality of ‘messages’ were conveyed, a finding that that is consistent with research undertaken in other European countries and which highlights the potential for upbeat commentary on the euro and Europe (Triandafyllidou, 2003). The broadcasters were, therefore, fully capable of detecting and conveying a sense of accomplishment and success where this was appropriate, i.e. where the goals were clear (in the case of the euro, the successful implementation plans to launch the currency), where the results were relatively unambiguous (a relatively trouble-free transition), and where the political implications were reasonably positive. This was also apparent in respect to the commentary on the advantages and disadvantages of British involvement in the euro. Broadcast news does, therefore, act as an important counterpoint to the relentless hostility of the Eurosceptic

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press and the hesitant ambivalence of the Europhile newspapers (Anderson and Weymouth, 1999). This was most notably in respect to coverage of the euro’s potential contribution to cooperation, unity and peace. It represents public service at its best, and is testimony to the fact that there is no intrinsic bias against ‘good news’. The picture, then, is not uniformly bleak, and the circumstances argue for a more sensitive and positive appreciation of the contribution of the broadcast media to debate and to rational engagement with issues. Nevertheless, the continuation of this positive contribution seems to be contingent on there being sufficient space allotted to the issue across a range of bulletins and stories. Given recurrent time and space constraints, few broadcast journalists could hope to explore a topic fully in the course of an isolated report, or even a few day’s or week’s worth of coverage. Instead they could reasonably hope to achieve the more realistic goal of covering the various angles of a complex topic over the course of a large number of bulletins, thereby giving, as one BBC journalist put it ‘… a general picture painted over time‘ (Davis, 1998, p. 158). But there is a serious danger that if stories are shortened or are less numerous generally (as they seem to be on ITN), there will be unpalatable consequences for the balance and comprehensiveness of coverage, and for the integrity of public service provision.

7 The British Public and European News

The euro and pubic opinion The previous chapter looked at the way the media cover the euro and at the problems the Commission and other EU institutions have had in promoting Europe. The question is whether less-than-optimal political communication, combined with negative or mixed signals for the media have an impact on public attitudes. Will the coverage actually inform public perceptions? And if it does, should we be concerned that the press has an impact where broadcast coverage does not? Can the media direct the gaze of the public to this important issue? And if not, are the broadcasters in a position to address viewer indifference? The subsequent analysis will explore these issues, and consider their significance for the quality of mediated European democracy. But a prior concern is what actually constitutes British public opinion on the euro and Europe. This should help us judge the relevance of the coverage outlined in the previous chapter. A generic problem here is the reliance on surveys and polls, as these can be quite sensitive to the sort of question asked (De Vaus, 1991). For instance, when the public were encouraged to consider the euro with regard to their cherished pound (‘In a referendum, would you vote for or against Britain replacing the pound sterling with the single European currency?’), only 22 per cent were ‘for’, a whacking 70 per cent were ‘against’ and the rest were ‘don’t know’.1 And yet, if the question is unembellished (‘If there were a referendum now on whether Britain should be part of a Single European Currency, how would you vote?’), 25 per cent are ‘in favour’, with 61 per cent ‘against’.2 A direct comparison of responses based on the government’s stance on the euro is expressed in Figure 7.1, showing how the introduction of contingencies can influence responses quite dramatically 142

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and consistently. Finally, and more importantly, if we look at Table 7.1 we see that when people are asked a question that reflects economic concerns, a more complex and less hostile set of opinions seems to emerge. Consequently it could be conjectured that if the economic concerns highlighted in the previous chapter are prominent in the minds of the public, their perceptions of Europe may well be less jaundiced than they seem to be at present.

Figure 7.1 The balance of opinion on EMU entry (1991–September 2002).

Table 7.1 Responses to a MORI survey on the euro: June 2000 Responses Strongly support British participation Generally in favour of British participation, but could be persuaded against it if I thought it would be bad for the British economy Generally opposed to British participation, but could be persuaded in favour of it if I thought it would be good for the British economy Strongly oppose British participation Don’t know Source: www.mori.com/polls/2000/t000627.shtml

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What, then, can we say about public opinion on the euro? First, it is clear, if not particularly surprising, that the public know little about the details of euro politics. For instance, one poll asked a straight question on whether respondents could name any of the Chancellor Brown’s five criteria for determining whether Britain was ready to join. A vanishing small proportion could name any of them.3 This lack of detailed grasp is confirmed not only by a qualitative study undertaken by the BBC (2004) which looked at citizens’ reaction to news about Europe, but by numerous Eurobarometer (2004) polls. And when the public does turn its mind to the euro, it seems that economic considerations (like ease of changing money) predominate over political ones (such as the idea that the euro should be resisted because the pound is part of Britain’s heritage).4 Both these considerations place a premium on the ability of the media (and particularly the broadcasters) to inform the public about European developments. And the calibre of that information is, therefore crucially important for citizens’ active engagement with the issues. Finally, we can identify some of the long-term trends in opinion on the euro from a unique survey series which asked consistently worded questions on a monthly basis. The numerous ‘ups and down’ in support for the euro are apparent from the series of observations represented in Figure 7.2. 1999

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Figure 7.2 Balance of opinion for and against the euro ( January 1999–March 2004).

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The trend is downward in the late 1990s and the early part of the new century, although there is an upward shift as the introduction of euro notes and coins approached, with a spike around January 2002. However, it is equally clear from Figure 7.2 that there is a long-term downward trend in support for the currency, as we can see from the fitted line representing a summary of the accumulated data.5 This evidence suggests an increasingly negative orientation towards the issue, one that will sadden and perhaps dishearten those who see British involvement with the euro as part of broader move towards integration within the EU. Likewise, from Figure 7.3 we get a clear sense of the diminishing salience of the EU as an issue, in contrast to a continued and sustained interest in the NHS. Both these features of public opinion are important. The new currency is seen as a symbolic talisman of a more united and politically unified Europe. Diminishing support will, in all likelihood, dash any hope of imminent British involvement, and it may put a referendum on entry firmly on the back burner for the foreseeable future. By the same token, the EU can hardly win support if it is not considered sufficiently salient to command the attention of the British media or public.

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Figure 7.3 The salience of NHS and European issues (March 1996–December 2004).

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Europe, the euro and the impact of coverage But can changing levels of support for the euro or the decline in the salience of Europe be ascribed to the sort of coverage examined in previous chapters? The literature on media effects is disappointingly silent in some respects. Although one recent study shows that domestic news has the power to influence how much the public know about politics (Norris and Sanders, 2003), there is no comparable work that deals with EU-related news. Moreover research has, on occasion, produced negative results, with one study suggesting that press coverage of Europe at the 1997 British general election signally failed to influence the salience of the issue (Norris et al., 1999). Nevertheless, a broader survey reveals a growing body of evidence that does link media content to changes in public opinion. This work can be categorised by the methodological approach adopted. Some use a classic experimental format where the coverage that respondents are exposed to is manipulated and an assessment then made of subsequent change in attitudes (Norris et al., 1999; Valkenburg et al., 1999; Bruter, 2003; De Vreese, 2004a). Others rely on responses from surveys, with a focus on the relationship between aggregate-level changes in opinion and the ebb and flow of coverage (Norris, 2000). Alternatively, analysts can make an assessment of individual-level exposure to coverage and look at any subsequent change in attitudes toward the EU (Peter, 2003a and 2003b; Semetko et al., 2003; Carey and Burton, 2004; De Vreese, 2004b). Finally, a completely different tack is taken by those who use qualitative rather than quantitative techniques (BBC, 2004; Bruter, 2004). The emphasis here is on in-depth, group interviews following exposure to carefully chosen segments of coverage. Despite the growing body of research, we need to be quite guarded and cautious in interpreting it. Of the studies cited here, some deal exclusively with non-British media (Valkenburg et al., 1999; Semetko et al., 2003; De Vreese, 2004a and 2004b), only a few deal directly with the impact of news about the euro (Norris et al., 1999; Norris, 2000; Carey and Burton, 2004), and only two relate to television (Norris et al., 1999; Peter, 2003b). On top of this, some longstanding methodological issues can cloud interpretation. For instance, studies focusing on survey-based categories of media exposure and their relationship with attitudes, can yield sets of associations that are extremely difficult to interpret (De Vreese, 2004b). Coupled with this, it is hard in some instances to untangle cause and effect, i.e. does exposure to news influence attitudes and political affiliations, or do people’s political inclinations or attitudes lead

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them to expose themselves to newspapers whose editorial line they agree with?6 These caveats aside, some important and consistent features begin to emerge from this body of work. The press at election time may not be able to set the public agenda, but other research tends to suggest that newspapers have a measurable and non-trivial effect on the way the public engage with Europe and the euro. For instance, it has been found that the way the press frame news about the euro influences the way readers think about the issue. News with a ‘conflict’, ‘human interest’ or ‘economic consequences’ frame elicits comparably inflected responses when people are probed about their thoughts on the EU (Valkenburg et al., 1999). Admittedly, this is based on research done in Holland, but it is consistent with the results from international studies on a range of topics, arguing that the press has the power to influence the thought processes of the public (among many others, Scheufele, 2000; Richardson, 2005). That the press can have a significant impact on readers’ attitudes is further reinforced by three British based studies. The first found evidence that the positive or negative tone of newspaper coverage on the European economy has a measurable influence on the public’s identification with the European system of governance (Bruter, 2003). The second notes that the tone of press coverage of the euro is associated with levels of support for the currency and for the EU generally (Norris, 2000). Finally, a recent study suggests that exposure to newspapers which are hostile to the EU (such as the Sun and the Mail) is correlated with a degree of unwillingness to consider Britain joining (Carey and Burton, 2004). The idea that European coverage has an impact is explicable even where there is strong suggestion that news has a limited effect on those exposed (Newton, 2006). The crucial issue here is the public’s degree of dependency on the media. Prior to January 2002, the British public were not direct participants in the euro experiment, but in an important sense were only observers. The new currency was therefore an abstract concept, or a commodity traded in a distant exchange market, rather than a tangible thing one could turn in the hand or spend while on continental holidays. The public could not ‘experience’ it in any meaningful way, unless through the refracting prism of the mass media. From this perspective, they were more dependent on the mass media for information and input than they would be for a purely domestic issue, like the NHS, where people might well have direct or vicarious experience. The significance of this kind of dependency is that it is said to render those exposed vulnerable to influence (Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur, 1976; Ball-Rokeach, 1985; Gavin 1997), something acknowledged even

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in ‘limited media effects’ literature (Klapper, 1968). Consequently, the idea that European news has a fairly direct influence on public attitudes looks more convincing when the dynamics of dependency are taken into consideration. The evidence, then, seems to suggest that the press has some role in cuing public perceptions on Europe, European identity and the euro. The analysis of media impact is, however, rarely straightforward, and the assessment of the power of European coverage is no exception. From the evidence in the previous chapter it is clear that the tenor of press and television coverage can overlap, and there can be a similarity in the discourse embedded in reports. This presents a problem for untangling the independent effect of exposure to any one medium, especially where there is a strong likelihood that people read and view both sets of messages. We can suspect from experimental analysis that television coverage of Europe has the power to raise the salience of the issue of EMU during elections (Norris et al., 1999). This is confirmed by the results from an analysis of the bulletins that were the basis for the survey of coverage undertaken in the last chapter.7 Two multiple regression models were run – one examining the connection between the number of television stories broadcast and the salience of Europe as an issue, the other examining the same relationship, but focussing on the word length of the stories. The results are presented in Table 7.2 and they reinforce the notion that television coverage of the euro and the European economy can direct the public gaze between elections, not just during campaigns.8 However, a further study of the agenda-setting role of television suggests that its power may only be exercised where there is elite dissensus on the issues involved (Peter, 2003b). This notion of contingent influence Table 7.2 OLS regression of the salience of Europe against the number of stories or their word length Europe Salience  1

Eurimp (t ) Eurstory Petrol crisis ‘00 Kosovo Constant R2

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Europe Salience

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0.14 0.00 3.32 1.71 1.27

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is supported by an important recent study which is one of the few that combines an analysis of the impact of press and television. It strongly indicates that the power to influence public perception of Europe depends upon there being ‘consonant’ coverage, i.e. a situation where news across a range of media is similar in presentation and content (Peter, 2003b). This finding is entirely consistent with previous studies suggesting that consonance is an important intervening variable in the power of content to influence public attitudes (Noelle-Neumann, 1981; Noelle-Neumann and Mathes, 1987; Gavin, 1997). This ‘impact’ evidence places the coverage surveyed in Chapter 6 in sharper perspective. Our survey of news in this chapter revealed a degree of consonance in the discursive themes carried in press and television coverage, alongside a degree of negative commentary on the consequences of the euro for ‘Britain Plc’. Moreover, this consonance of coverage is not exactly unknown. Norris (2000), commenting on coverage in the early 1990s, suggested that The available evidence for the directional bias of TV news in six countries suggests that, contrary to expectations, in fact the tone of television news proved consistently more negative towards Europe than did that of the press. As shown in Figure 9.8, the most highly critical news about the EU was shown on the BBC, especially in midsummer 1995, with stories that reflect the eurosceptic position of leading spokespersons within the governing Conservative party. (pp. 198) The coverage was, in this instance, also negative in tone, consistent across press and television, and reflected a degree of elite dissensus – all of the conditions thought to be necessary for significant impact.

The impact of EU coverage and conceptions of mediated democracy Although some clear and firmly grounded conclusions can be drawn from the preceding analysis, others are – of necessity – more speculative and provisional. In the latter category is the notion that the coverage of the euro has a strong or determinant influence on the way the public think. The impact may actually be relatively weak (Bruter, 2003) or, as we have seen, conditional on the ‘consonance’ of coverage and audience ‘dependency’ upon it. But while the coverage may not have a profound impact, nevertheless the research consistently shows that it has a

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measurable and non-trivial effect on the way the public engage with, identify with, and orient themselves toward the EU and the euro. This impact on the public’s confidence in and identification with EU is more damaging than it would be for domestic or national-level institutions. After all, democracy in the nation state is underpinned by a shared sense of solidarity and a degree of identification with domestic political structures. But in Britain there is no deep reservoir of warmth for European institutions. Support for and trust in the EU is limited and in slow but appreciable decline (Eurobarometers 49–63).9 Europe in this view lacks the sort of solid grounding in the history, culture and symbolism that national systems can draw upon (Shore, 1993). The negative and consonant coverage observed in the previous chapter is particularly significant in this respect and puts beyond speculation the need for an effective communication strategy on the part of the EU. The effects research suggests that the ‘product’ that is the EU needs to be sold to the public as effectively as possible, lest interest in European affairs wane or citizen support diminish. The coverage is highly likely to have a direct bearing on the legitimacy of EU institutions, and this puts beyond doubt the idea that public relations competence at EU level is an urgent necessity rather than a luxury or a bolt-on. Surprisingly, this connection between ‘product, sale and customer satisfaction’ is woefully underacknowledged in the Europeanist literature. Inexplicably, the dynamic that connects the structure and public relations of the EU to the public via journalists and the copy they produce, is systematically undertheorised in this body of work. For instance, we noted in the last chapter that there is sensitivity to the notion that EU needs and may lack ‘output legitimacy’, and there is a realisation that the EU’s role in extending rights and entitlements to its citizens can underpin a shared sense of civic identity. However, the part played by the media is sometimes underacknowledged, and there is sometimes minimal exploration of the mediated mechanisms and processes through which the public are made aware of these performance or ‘output’ dimensions of EU activity (Delanty, 1995; Beetham and Lord, 1998). There is an even weaker emphasis on the communications dimension of the ‘democratic deficit’ or the dynamics of the ‘input’ mechanisms of European politics, although this is precisely where the contribution (or lack of contribution) to the publics’ diet of commentary on the EU is most important. Attempts have been made to reassess the democratic credentials of the EU and a rehabilitation is underway that stresses the underlying legitimacy of existing structures. Yet this line of argument

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also tends to lack a consideration of the media, and the respective roles of the press and of public service broadcasting. The literature acknowledges the fact that there are no Europe-wide political parties, that the Council of Ministers involves only indirect representation and that the EP (despite recent reforms) is still relatively weak. Furthermore, some of the most important institutions (like the Commission, the European Court of Justice and the ECB) are shielded from any real form of direct accountability (Zweifel, 2002 and 2003). Nevertheless, a defence of current arrangements highlights the fact that the power invested in the EP and the Council of Ministers offers an avenue of accountability that is not in any sense trivial. Moreover, there is an argument that direct accountability is not the only criterion by which the democratic legitimacy of the EU should be judged. Direct democratic participation can actually drive politicians towards damaging short-termism and there is a need to counterbalance these potentially disruptive citizen inputs (Mény, 2003). The checks and balances intrinsic to EU structures are therefore important and, in addition, drive an imperative to consult widely, frame workable coalitions and find consensus. These positive features of European reality have much to commend them and they are said to enhance the legitimacy of the EU in ways that are underappreciated (Héritier, 2003; Lord and Magnette, 2004). This argument is bolstered by those who point to the fact that not only does the EU have the protection of fundamental rights as a central principle, but there is a high degree of technical and scientific input in decision making which lends a degree of rationality to the policy output from institutions like the Commission, ECJ and ECB (Héritier, 2003; Schmidt, 2004; Lord and Magnette, 2004). And in any case, so the argument goes, institutions comparable to the ECJ and the ECB are active at the nationstate level and these too are effectively – though quite rightly – shielded from direct accountability (Moravcsik, 2002; Mény, 2003; Schmidt, 2004). A case, then, is made that the EU is more legitimate than is commonly supposed. But this line of reasoning almost wholly fails to factor in the mass media as any kind of serious consideration – either with respect to the division between types of media (press or broadcasting), their likely output or their respective or conjoined impact. Consequently the rehabilitation is only superficially convincing. This is an important weakness, substantively, but also has implications for how we conceptualise democracy and democratic accountability in Europe. For instance, the mechanics of the voting act does, indeed, connect the public directly to the EU via the EP, and indirectly via national governments

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and the Council of Minsters. But this is a procedural rather than a substantive consideration. And if informed citizenship is to be meaningful, the connection between voter and MEP, or between citizen, national parliament, Council of Minsters and the EU, needs to be interpreted, debated, supervised and surveyed. And this is only meaningful in the context of a mediated connection. But this is not just about ‘mediated engagement’ per se – it is about meaningful engagement, which requires the fullest, most objective and most balanced commentary that can be afforded the citizen. Likewise, checks and balances can give loose coalitions within the EU the flexibility necessary to reach consensus and broker workable compromises, and this too sounds appealing and is perhaps something we should weigh against direct accountability. Nonetheless, the public need to be in a position to judge whether the right thing is being done in their name within these coalitions, and should also be in a position to assess whether the resultant compromise deals are acceptable or unacceptable, either as a whole or in part. Yet how are the public to judge these process or the policies they produced, if not with the aid of the media? A similar line of argument can be deployed in relation to the role of experts, the protection of rights or the insulation of some EU institutions from anything approximating direct accountability. The input from technocrats may indeed lend a degree of rationality to policy, and a case is made that we ought to evaluate the legitimacy of the EU in this light. And perhaps we should also acknowledge that EU institutions enshrine and protect important and fundamental political and economic rights. But the significance of these rights is limited where citizens are unaware of them or where there is limited engagement with debate on which rights are protected, and how. And again the media have an important role to play here (Gavin, 2000). Likewise, the media surely ought to have an important role in giving citizens the opportunity to assess whether technocratic rationalism is, indeed, harnessed in their interest, and the public should be in a position to determine whether there is the appropriate level of input into the process from well organised but unelected pressure groups. Finally, there is much to be said for the insulation of courts and central banks from direct democratic input, and this may work for the ECB in much the same way it does for the Bank of England. But how efficient are these institutions and are they properly constituted? Are they considering the most appropriate economic indicators when determining how to intervene on interest rates? Perhaps citizens should not have a direct or even an indirect input into decisions, but they can and should be encouraged to

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have a position on these non-trivial constitutive issues, lest institutions like the ECB be over-insulated and, as a consequence, fail to serve ‘the common weal’. That the media has an important and perhaps pivotal role in all of these areas seems obvious and uncontroversial to students of political communication, but it is sometimes wholly unacknowledged by those exploring the politics of the democratic deficit (Lord, 2001; Moravcsik, 2002; Zweifel, 2002, Mény, 2003), the institutional dynamics of democratic accountability (Peterson and Shacklton, 2006) or the politics of decision making (Wallace and Wallace, 2000). For others, the media dimension is touched upon only fleetingly or is skirted with only a passing reference to the ‘public sphere’ of free and open debate (Eriksen and Fossum, 2004; Schmidt, 2004) – a public sphere that does not and perhaps never will exist.10 This is a symptom of the fact that much of the debate on the democratic legitimacy of the EU and the democratic deficit is idealized and abstracted and focusses more on procedures and structures than on processes. But these ground-level processes intimately involve the mass media, its coverage and its subsequent impact on opinion or behaviour. Any theoretical, institutional or normative exploration must therefore fully engage with these mediated realities. Without this, there will be a failure to fully comprehend Britain’s position in Europe, the limits of accountability within the EU, or the future trajectory of Europe itself.

Judging the broadcasters? The realities of mediated European politics that feature in the preceding analysis might matter less than they do if Europe was an uncontentious issue, if EU institutions had a limited impact on Britain and British citizens, if ambitions for the EU were uniformly modest, if the political problems that confront the EU were tractable or easily managed, and if the British public were well disposed to ‘Europe’. However, the position is otherwise. Current circumstances, therefore, put the mass media and their coverage firmly in the spotlight with regard to the debate over legitimacy, democracy, accountability and identity formation. The problem is that we want a lot from our media, especially the public service broadcasters – we want their coverage to be balanced, informative, comprehensive, interesting, thought-provoking and impartial. But the coverage can only be what we want of it, if it is actually broadcast. So we also want stories to be sufficiently numerous, otherwise citizens will be unable to make informed judgements about important developments.

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This puts the decline in euro coverage highlighted in Chapter 2 into perspective, and likewise the EU’s efforts at image management. The question is, how much is enough, and if there is a continued decline, will the remaining coverage be sufficient to satisfy the need for mature and informed debate on European political realities? Norris (2000) is almost certainly right when she affirms that there is no objective criterion for judging how much coverage is enough: … there is no simple and universally agreed yard-stick to evaluate adequacy, because judgements depend on political priorities and news values. There can be endless unresolved debate of the ‘halfempty, half-full’ variety. (pp. 187) But asking whether the level of coverage is sufficient is like asking how long a piece of string should be. There may, indeed, be no answer to this, but this is true in an abstract sense only. To follow through with this analogy, we can still say that the shorter the string, the less useful it will be. The reality is that limited or truncated coverage will seriously inhibit the accountability of EU institutions and undermine the processes that determine their legitimacy. The analysis in Chapter 2 showed that the number of stories featuring the euro or the European economy are in steady decline, and the agenda-setting work reported earlier in this chapter shows that this is implicated in the declining salience of Europe as an issue. Clearly there is a problem here for meaningful accountability and democracy at EU level. But who is to blame? Are the broadcasters responsible? Should they be blamed if there is a failure to deliver the sort of coverage the public need? An answer here requires an appreciation of processes that are at work and their impact on the level and nature of coverage. In fact many of the processes involve a variety of pressures and constraints over which the broadcasters have little or no control. The need to maintain audience share is among the most pressing of these (McNair, 2000). Journalists are therefore strongly motivated to find stories that feed public appetites. This is acknowledged in work done on journalistic practice, which emphasises ‘news values’ and ‘newsworthiness’ (Hetherington, 1985; Palmer, 1998; Harcup and O’Neill, 2001). In an important sense this newsworthiness is a re-expression of what the public want, a distillation of decades of journalistic experience of what interests the audience. By extension, a story that patently lacks ‘news value’ will fail to animate or excite journalists. If EU stories lack this, then broadcasters,

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like any other journalists, will be less inclined to give them space. So when a small or declining number of stories are being broadcast, this may well be the inevitable working through of audience demand. The problem for the EU is that stories about Europe meet the demanding criterion of newsworthiness only intermittently. But from this perspective, television journalists are not wholly responsible, since the audience – to an extent – gets what it wants. The journalists, then, should take some responsibility for the prominence of EU coverage, but it should be shared with the audience. But should it be shared with anyone else? Naturally, the production of European news is not just about the journalists and viewer, but involves a broad range of players, sources and actors, amongst them the British government, Her Majesty’s Opposition and the EU itself. But New Labour have been criticised for its increasing reluctance to engage with the issue of the euro. The impression is given that they fear exposing divisions in the party and, more importantly, they want to avoid antagonising the eurosceptic press. The Conservative Opposition are none too keen to push the issue either, as it is patently not an election winner (Collins and Seldon, 2001; Whiteley et al., 2005) and raising it may simply open old wounds. Yet if domestic political actors share some responsibility for the low profile of Europe, so too does the EU. The communication problems outlined in the previous chapter are only part of the problem. In addition, the EU faces some fairly serious difficulties simply in generating interest and gaining attention. For instance, many have pointed out that EU policy-making processes are complex, arcane, slow-moving, bureaucratic, dispersed, detailed and, in some areas, secretive (Kevin, 2003; Anderson and McLeod, 2004; Bruggemann, 2005). Consequently, the EU’s communication specialists face formidable presentation problems, and even specialist journalists may struggle to generate enthusiasm for unpicking the complex intricacies of the system. If this is a difficulty for specialists, how rivetingly interesting is it going to seem to the average British viewer? One of most important recent initiatives by the EU – the substantive changes proposed by the Draft Constitutional – seem to exemplify this quite neatly. One commentator has noted that these include: … the recognition of the legal personality of the Union … the elimination of the pillar structure … the recognition of the supremacy of EU law … reduction and simplification of the instruments used in law-making and decision-making procedures, plus the introduction

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of a hierarchy of legal acts … a delineation (although far from unambiguous) of the distribution of competences … [and] … the generalization of qualified majority voting in the Council and the designating of co-decision as the standard procedure … (Eriksen and Fossum, 2004, p. 449) Important though these are, they are not going set the world alight nor quicken the pulse of the average viewer or journalist (regardless of their commitment to educate and inform). Inevitably, journalists will have difficulty in distilling and encapsulating these details, and may struggle to make them comprehensible, meaningful and, above all, relevant or interesting. If EU output continues to look like this, it is difficult to envisage a step-change in the number of stories broadcast or imagine that the public will get more interested, engaged and, therefore, knowledgeable. But, in this instance, we can hardly blame the public or the broadcasters.

EU and broadcasting contributions to mediated democracy Clearly, then, the EU has some responsibility for the level of coverage. But does the EU have the capacity to change things, or to reverse any decline in the prominence of European stories? A concern here is not just the apparatus of promotional communication, but, rather, the tactics they are able to use, the likelihood they will be implemented, and their potentially counter-productive effects. A number of suggestions have been made that address the problem of making European affairs more interesting for journalists and for citizens. Kevin (2003), for instance, proposes that the press conferences held by the European Council and Council of Ministers avoid separate sessions where representatives address their own domestic media. Instead, these could be replaced with joint meetings where all participate, thus raising the profile of the event. However, this is a cosmetic rather than a substantive change, and in any event, nationally oriented sessions offer significant advantages to the main players, since their interests are served by having the space to spin EU stories in their favour. An alternative suggestion is that greater emphasis be placed on the scrutiny of EU governance at the level of the national parliament – with the national dimension making the issues more interesting and relevant, and therefore visible (De Vreese, 2003). Yet this too seems rather unrealistic, given the British media’s well known lack of interest in the minutia of parliamentary procedure.

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A more realistic prospect is the recommendation that the European Parliament train its MEPs to manage the media and use the acquired skills to get a message across (Anderson and McLeod, 2004). On the other hand, De Vreese (2003) advises that the EU take account of a common mode of media address – a ‘conflict frame’ – which can be used to generate interest and raise profile. In addition, he prompts the EU to spotlight the economic benefits that stem from its actions or initiatives (the ‘economic consequences’ frame), preferably with the inclusion of a human interest dimension. Money, after all, is an extremely important consideration for most citizens, and stories that touch on this will have intrinsic news value. The same could be said of human interest stories, which also serve the important function of enhancing awareness of how one’s fellow citizens experience the world (Murdock, 1999). Realistic as they may seem, these prescriptions have some fairly serious and negative consequences which limit their usefulness. MEPs may well become more media savvy, but past experience suggests that television is less than anxious to cover their activities (Morgan, 1999). Even if more copy is squeezed from the European Parliament, there is a strong probability it will simply highlight the divisions that are so evident within it. The same might be said of the conscious use a ‘conflict frame’ to generate interest in the EU. This risks the overemphasis of dispute or conflict, and the sort of resultant ‘negativism’ visible in other areas of media commentary (notably in respect to unemployment). A more productive tack would indeed include a greater emphasis on economic benefits and rewards. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that all EU stories can be framed in such terms, as the Draft Constitutional Treaty example alluded to earlier attests. And even if they were, it is conceivable that ‘economic losers’ will figure as prominently in the coverage as ‘winners’, given journalists’ seemingly obvious fondness for a ‘bad news is good news’ approach. Finally, the use of the human-interest angle also has a down-side. Over-attention to human-interest stories is central to a critique of news broadcast coverage, and is seen as a symptom of the dumbing down of news, as we saw in an earlier chapter. The broadcasters would therefore have to handle this very carefully if they were to avoid such flak. The problems faced by EU ‘spin doctors’ are, therefore, formidable. But this does not minimise the role broadcasters have to play, especially in a context where their coverage is an important counterpoint to lopsided reports from a hostile or hesitant press. The broadcasters have, indeed, been exercised by these considerations and the BBC has commissioned research on audience engagement with news about EU affairs

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(BBC, 2004). Primarily a study of audience perceptions of the fairness and balance of the coverage, it also has a bearing on how the public come to be ‘switched on’ or, more likely, ‘switched off’ by EU coverage. Three categories of viewer were identified in this study. A ‘knowledgeable minority’ hold strong views about the EU and are sufficiently well clued to make an informed judgement on the nature of the coverage. A second, more numerous group is the ‘interested but uninformed’, who can be confused by reports and misunderstand their substance. Like the viewers of domestic economic news alluded to in Chapter 4, they get the ‘gist’ of EU stories, but do not find them readily accessible. Finally, the ‘uninformed’ have little understanding of EU affairs and little inclination to follow them through the news. The categorisation is useful, although the way the study explains the level of public interest in EU coverage is more controversial. A connection is made between pre-existing knowledge of EU affairs, audience interest in the topic, and subsequent exposure to news coverage. The important point is that the interpretation of the connection is questionable, and as a consequence mitigating strategies may be misguided. The problem is that prior knowledge is seen as the key: ‘Lack of understanding tends to translate into low interest and limited consumption’ (p. 4). Limited understanding, then, is seen as the root of audience disengagement: The difficulty many have in discussing the EU and BBC’s coverage stems from a lack of basic knowledge and understanding of the EU as an organisation and a lack of interest in the ‘political’ issues that surround it. The one drives the other – respondents’ lack of knowledge and understanding acts as a barrier to generating their interest in the EU, while their lack of interest in the EU (and ‘politics’ generally) acts as a barrier to their being receptive to current affairs programmes that feature the EU. (p. 34) So lack of knowledge stifles public interest and, as a result, people do not seek exposure to EU coverage. However, a strong case can be made that this puts the cart before the horse. Primacy should, instead, be accorded to the level of audience interest rather than lack of pre-existing knowledge. This alternative assessment is based on research into the so-called ‘knowledge-gap’ (McQuail, 1993). This theory was not really about ‘interest’ per se, nevertheless the processes uncovered speak to the issue of audience engagement with

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EU news. Initially the knowledge gap theory uncovered the fact that simply increasing coverage of a topic did not necessarily lead to more informed citizens. Instead, those with a higher level of education or from a more privileged socio-economic background picked up more information than their less well educated counterparts, thus creating and widening the gap between the ‘knowledge rich’ and the ‘knowledge poor’. But this model has been challenge by a growing body of evidence suggesting that, irrespective of education, background or intelligence, those who are interested in an issue are more inclined to expose themselves to coverage of the topic, and as a result, learn more (among others, Genova and Greenberg, 1979; Kwak, 1999; Holbrook, 2002). This appreciation of the processes involved reverses the connection that the BBC seems to have made between knowledge or comprehension, the interest that the audience expresses and subsequent exposure to coverage. Instead, the key to audience understanding is making reports on the EU more relevant and interesting to the audience, thus stimulating exposure and facilitating information uptake. The broadcasters, from this perspective, do have some degree of responsibility for any lack of exposure to EU news or lack of demand for coverage of European affairs. Television journalists cannot simply bemoan the fact that the public have little knowledge and, therefore, little inclination to watch EU news. The broadcasters do have some responsibility to help generate that interest, although as we have already noted this is shared with the EU itself, and with a range of domestic political actors too. For the reasons already outlined, meeting these responsibilities will not be easy, and broadcasters may have to adopt new or novel formats. But stimulating audience interest in what can be a complex and, in some instances, a detailed and dull topic, is a much tougher task than making the news accessible, comprehensible or jargon-free. The broadcasters have risen to this sort of challenge in the past, and some highly innovative formats have been used to draw in and stimulate the audience.11 The BBC programme ‘Referendum Street’ is a good example, and it shows how broadcasters can put a human face on the European issue, and without overly emphasising divisions and tensions within the EU.12 In this instance, normal, ordinary residents of an entire street were picked out and encouraged to discuss and debate the topic of the euro. The subjects in this experiment became enthused and interested in the euro issue, and as a result gained an understanding of the issues they had not previously had – precisely as we might expect from the modified ‘knowledge gap’ model referred to above. People can become enthused about what can be a dull and distant issue. The fact that the individuals involved

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actually changed their opinion on the euro (a majority ‘against’ becoming a majority in favour) should also give broadcasters and other interested parties alike, pause for thought. This example must be a tantalising prospect for the EU’s communications people, and for anyone concerned with stimulating public interest in coverage likely to elevate, inform, educated and entertain. But this is a prospect that may recede into the distance if we appreciate that the Referendum Street experiment was just that, a one-off experiment. Traditional news formats – with their talking heads, conventional ‘journalist-to-camera’ interludes and what are necessarily rather pedestrian visuals – do not easily lend themselves to this type of innovation. Nor is this likely to change any time soon. The EU on television is only rarely going to look like Referendum Street, but then again, one is inclined to wonder whether the broadcasters can be blamed for this.

The EU, broadcasting and democracy The conclusions we can draw from this and the preceding chapter have a bearing on a range issues, and for the Europhiles amongst us, a number of these will be quite dispiriting. First, the press will, in all likelihood, continue to approach EU affairs as it has in the past – with a mixture of studied indifference, committed (if sometimes lukewarm) support or passionate hostility. Although this is a form of contribution to public deliberation, it will not deliver what we might hope for in terms enlightened and informed debate. Given that the impact of these reports is most pronounced where the messages carried are consonant with television coverage, this puts a particular onus on the contribution of the broadcasters. And in any event, we expect from them a level and depth of reporting that is commensurate with the gravity of the issues, given their public service obligations. But here the picture is not as grim as is sometimes envisaged. Throughout the periods surveyed there were numerous, reasonably balanced contributions to the debate on the euro, covering some of the themes that are conspicuous by their nearabsence from press reports. A range of voices were also heard, straddling the major institutions and political actors, and involving the general public in Britain and in comparator countries in Europe. This is all to the credit of the broadcasters. Nevertheless, we discerned a slow decline in the number of stories broadcast dealing with the euro and the European economy. This brings us to a second point. Television journalists simply may not be in a position to always deliver what we expect from them. We

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may, indeed, have rather unrealistic or unreasonable expectations of what they can achieve with respect to mediated European democracy. The space for additional coverage is definitely circumscribed, unless we imagine it appropriate that the broadcasters put Europe on the agenda, irrespective of audience reaction or the newsworthiness of the topic. In some form or other, they have to deliver what the public want or generate a level of interest that is patently absent at present. The fact that the EU has not been at its most effective in its attempts at self-promotion, does not help matters here. Image management has been ineffective, and the tactical options open to the EU are limited and in some instances may be counter productive. The nature of the beast is an issue too. The EU is not intrinsically telegenic, and a complex procedural setup makes it as difficult to promote as it is to cover. But, in any event, ‘more coverage’ will not necessarily mean ‘good coverage’. Consequently, if affairs within the EU are not handled carefully in terms of political marketing and promotion, this will mean an erosion in the depth and calibre of European coverage, with the attendant erosion of accountability and meaningful democracy. But facing those difficulties is better than underestimating them, ignoring them or hoping they will go away, as the EU has occasionally done in the past. The Commission does appear to have made the appropriate psychological adjustment. The question is whether this is too little, too late. A third issue concerns the economic context within which the media institutions work, and the impact this has on the quality of coverage. Our surveys of coverage in the preceding chapters showed that in many respects ITN’s European coverage clearly lagged behind the BBC in the quality and quantity of provision. ITN carried fewer and shorter stories, and in both respects there was steeper decline on the commercial channel. The number and range of voices accessed, and the breadth and depth of explanatory commentary, have also become more limited. There is an obvious worry that these differences are the product of a range of resourcing, staffing and prioritising issues that stem from market imperatives and related audience preoccupations. Unfortunately, it is highly improbable that these pressures will go away any time soon. The BBC, for its part, is not completely insulated from these considerations, although their bite is perhaps felt less sharply, since the license fee offers some shelter from the turbulence of the market. The struggle to cover the EU in a manner that is adequate in terms of accountability and European democracy, has to be seen in this context. And the evidence of this and the preceding chapter argues for the continuation of these arrangements, if the public are to get the most from their televisual media.

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The BBC seems to have both the will and the capacity to address EU affairs in an innovative manner. But there must surely be a concern for how far this can go in a context where the current affairs format most suited to this innovation, is marginalized, and where news bulletins are palpably ill-suited to the job. Reassuringly, the BBC is also ready to ‘worry’ the issue of audience engagement (or, more accurately, their lack of engagement) with European issues. But public exposure to European coverage can only be increased if the broadcasters understand the processes involved. They cannot simply bemoan the fact that the public, for the most part, lack knowledge of EU affairs, and therefore are likely to be obstinately indifferent and unlikely to ‘switch on’. Instead, the coverage needs to be made more interesting and relevant to an indifferent public. This is a tall order given the nature of the topic. But the BBC and the broadcasters in general need to be ready to meet the challenge if democracy and accountability at the EU level of politics is to be in any way meaningful.

Part IV Conclusions and Implications

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8 Democracy in Danger?

The state we could be in The fact that democracy can persist despite citizens and media that fall short of the expected performance suggests that political culture may be more important than citizen wisdom and media excellence. (Graber, 2003, p. 139) The American author of this quote (Doris Graber) based her observation on the fact that many of our high-minded expectations for mediated democracy are, she argues, unreasonable. The media are not free from government control, it is not a forum for debate, it does not really represents the voice of the people, and its powers of surveillance are rather ineffective. The audience, it is contended, is less than attentive, nor does it have the inclination or, indeed, the capacity to drink in news about politics. Instead, she says, we have to be more realistic. The best we can expect is the ‘monitorial citizen’, who is, ‘… informed enough and alert enough to identify danger to their personal good and danger to the public good’ (p. 149), and who is capable of taking advantage of what she claims is still is an adequate stream of hard news from the mainstream media. However, the thrust of the argument looks a lot less convincing in the aftermath of the disastrous American intervention in Iraq. A strong case can be made that the ‘monitorial citizen’ was shortchanged. Hard and penetrating news was not overly conspicuous in this instance, and the results were predictable and ultimately rather unpleasant. This is confirmation of the fact that in a democracy we need the media to conform to a rather more exacting set of standards than Graber seems to concede. The Iraq War and its aftermath are an object 165

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lesson in the dangers of accepting a role for the media and, indeed, expectations of the audience, that are too narrow and underambitious. From this perspective, democracy is in danger if the media do not produce an adequate supply of news and, as a consequence, the public fail to become sufficiently well informed about events. The opening chapter of this book concurred with at least one of the premises embedded in Graber’s argument. The average British person (like their American counterparts) is not exactly the idealised citizens of the Athenian demos, often having neither the will nor the time to follow politics closely. But perhaps this puts an even greater premium on there being a fairly continuous stream of reliable news. This book, as a whole, sought to test whether in Britain the sort of hard news that Graber refers to is getting to be in short supply, with all the attendant dangers this might bring. The object was to focus on the subject of the economy, and its coverage. This topic did not have the gravity of war, but nevertheless is an important and recurrent theme in politics. Some have pointed to the fact that economics and ‘the economy’, pervade every aspect of modern political and social life in a way they never used to – the so-called ‘economisation’ of society (Mårtenson, 1998). The way this realm of discourse is structured and represented, and the manner in which it is subsequently understood by the public, therefore, has important implications for a citizens’ ability to make sense of society and politics. What do we expect from the media in this sort of context? If the political communications literature is any guide, the answer is ‘quite a lot’. Some feel the media should be a forum where issues and policies are fully thrashed out and debated (Meyer, 2000), while others see its function as re-presenting a wide variety of opinions and positions to the public (Street, 2001). The media can also have a role in the consideration and determination of societal goals (Commission on Freedom of the Press, 1947). A ‘liberal’ model of democracy is said to require that the media help socialise citizens around a societal consensus (Baker, 2002). On the other hand it is felt that the media should help cultivate a shared sense of communal identity (Meyer, 2000; Street, 2001). But for all their merits, these expectations are perhaps as idealised as the notion of the fully engaged and participatory citizen. In the real world, what we ought to expect from the media is perhaps a little less ambitious, but no less important. The press is often raucously and chauvinistically partisan, and too often driven by the proprietor’s capricious political will. Consequently, perhaps the most we can expect from the newspapers is a colourful and entertaining, but highly inflected and potentially

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unreliable, contribution to the complex potpourri of ideas, opinions and beliefs that circulate in society at any one time. In contrast we expect a great deal more from the broadcasters, especially those who are financed directly from the licence fee. Mercifully, they have adopted a much more exacting set of standards. Not only should their programming be entertaining, engaging and accessible, in much the same way as the press coverage is, but it is their civic duty to inform and educate the public. This encompasses the notion that the broadcasters should elevate and improve. They should also represent the community to itself, in all its glory, and thereby allow an audience a window on itself. But in doing all this, the broadcasters should remain impartial and objective, fair and accurate, comprehensive and reasoned. There are, however, those who feel that the broadcasters are less and less able to fulfil these obligations. This is partly an issue of finance, especially where production is costly, as is the case in news programming. The BBC is forced to operate in an environment where licence revenue is increasing slowly while production costs are increasing rapidly. The other major players, the commercial broadcasters, are also afflicted by revenue difficulties, as they deal with savage competition in the new digital environment. One strand of thought suggests that in dealing with such pressures, the broadcasters are forced into a situation where standards begin to slip quite seriously. Balance, depth and objectivity, it is claimed, are being sacrificed to the need to entertain the viewer and maintain audience size. The imperative to be ‘pacey’, dramatic and confrontational can, it is claimed, lead to a ‘dumbing down’ of news content. Commercial broadcast output is said to be quite badly affected already (Ursell, 2003; Murdock, 2004), but the BBC is also afflicted. This latter point is a serious issue for the broadcasting environment more generally. The broadcasters can, with some plausibility, be considered a counterbalance to the chauvinistic press. But some commentators suggest that the BBC also helps maintain standards throughout the broadcasting industry more generally, acting as a beacon for, and an example to, the other commercial operators (O’Hagan and Jennings, 2003; Padovani and Tracey, 2003). Alternatively, BBC output is seen as filling any gaps left by commercial broadcasters who are more keen on entertaining than in elevating or informing a news audience. Either way, if standards slip at the BBC, then standards across the board will suffer. But some critical commentators maintain that neither BBC nor the commercial broadcasters should be held up as beacons of sanity and hope. A longstanding critique suggests that broadcast output, just like its less subtle newspaper equivalent carries a distinctive ideological inflection.

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This can involve the reification of the economy, in a way that unjustifiably depoliticises it. But a form of bias is also manifest in the overemphasis on sources close to the political and commercial elites which dominate contemporary society. Rather than informing and educating the public in a manner that is balanced and impartial, from this perspective, the media (press and television alike) are involved in the reproduction of an ideology that serves the interests of a narrow segment of society. This situation is exacerbated by the rise of the ‘public relations culture’. Relentless image management by those who can afford the best PR advice or political marking intervention, alongside ‘spin’ from the politicians, means that the media are less and less able to make a constructive contribution to political debate. Elites have become adept at projecting their view of society and politics, to an extent that begins to undermine the very notion of an informed and egalitarian democracy.

From idealism and criticism to evidence This picture painted by contemporary observers is as unflattering as it is dangerous and worrying, and it is no wonder that an author like McNair (2000) observes a ‘pervasive pessimism’ in the analysis of the relationship between politics, the media and contemporary democracy. The thrust of the analysis in the preceding chapters has been to establish whether the media in general and broadcasting in particular are indeed in a conspicuous state of decline and impoverishment. The approach was content oriented and explicitly and consciously evidence based. This is in sharp contrast to a great deal of research on the state of the media. The notion of ‘quality’, for instance, can emphasise statutory requirements that are rather general (Corner and Harvey, 1996, pp. 234–5). Alternatively, there can be greater emphasis on abstract assessment and theoretical refinement of the term, than on how it is translated into practice for particular genres, like news (Mepham, 1990; Corner, 1995; Born and Prosser, 2001). But on top of this, research can often focus on the experiences of journalists or on the broader context of news production. This can be done without much by way of systematic engagement with the product of the processes involved – news output. The preceding analysis sought to address this gap. The central focus was news about domestic economic themes like employment and inflation, but the study has also encompassed a topic with important supranational and international dimensions – coverage of the euro. These are all mainstream issues, but the research extended to the analysis of non-mainstream politics, as represented by anti-globalisation movements and their

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activities. This allowed the investigation of news at the margins of politics, on the grounds that the broadcasters at least should be judged on how they represent the outer edges of the political community to the viewer. The primary focus was on flagship television news bulletins from the main broadcasting providers (BBC and ITN), supplemented by secondary analysis of extant studies of press coverage. But a lack of research on press engagement with anti-globalisation issues necessitated a detailed study of newspaper reports. What does the accumulated evidence show? The initial foray touched on the issue of ‘tabloidisation’. But rather than explore the pervasiveness of a phenomenon which is almost impossibly difficult to define, the approach was to determine the prevalence of ‘hard news’, its antithesis. With a spotlight on stories about the domestic economy, the euro and ‘European economics’, the issue here was one of the ‘quantity’ of new stories. From an exhaustive survey stretching over several years, it was found that an enormous number of these ‘hard news’ stories were broadcast on both BBC and ITN. The transcripts for the whole corpus completely fill seventeen lever-arch folders, and if a citizen wanted a body of information that was reasonably extensive and accessible, they could do worse than look here. Nevertheless, this positive conclusion needs to be tempered somewhat. There was also a noticeable decline in the number of stories broadcast on these topics. This was true for both channels, though ITN generally started from a lower base. Now, for the domestic economy, this is just about pardonable given the fact that economy was doing well at the time, and the economic crises that some predicted for New Labour’s first and second terms signally failed to materialise. Still, the economy was a deeply and persistently disputed political issue in this period, figuring prominently in the two adjacent elections. Economic policies – particularly though not exclusively New Labour’s ‘Welfare to Work’ agenda – were also central to the government’s legislative programme. This made economic news important if citizens were to develop a reasonable understanding of an important part of the political environment. The decline is therefore a concern, given the centrality of the domestic economy to party politics and much else besides. The picture that emerges from the data is, therefore, not overwhelmingly positive, but it looks a little grimmer for news about the euro. The BBC maintained a reasonable stream of stories, but the trend was downwards, a disturbing feature in a context where the historic launch of the new currency was imminent. ITN’s contribution was less in absolute terms, and seemed to be declining to almost vanishing point, a situation

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scarcely altered by their coverage at the dawn of the new currency in January 2002. Plainly, there is a problem here. There may be nothing approximating the sort of comprehensive ‘communication deficit’ on Europe that some observers fear. But there is clear and present danger if the associated issues are allowed to drop off the agenda at such a time. If a reliable diet of information and news is necessary for meaningful involvement in domestic debate and deliberation, it is doubly important at the European level where citizens are a good deal more dependent on the media. If citizens are to develop a clear understanding of European affairs or make appropriate decisions which will affect not only Britain and its position in Europe, but also the trajectory of Europe itself, they need to be better served than they were, at least as far as ITN is concerned. The observer is tempted to conclude that the broadcasters in general and ITN in particular are getting the balance wrong with respect to news about Europe. They may have avoided stories that were dull, complex and often lacking in drama and in the process kept a large segment of viewing public happy with other fare. However, the obligation to inform and educate seems to have been sacrificed in the process. Evidently, there was, in this instance, no ‘virtuous cycle’, where the BBC sets a standard that commercial broadcasters feel compelled to emulate, and only in a limited sense did the archetypal public service provider help maintain the quantity of coverage elsewhere. Over and above this, it is clear that the output from the BBC only compensates to an extent for the lack of interests shown by their commercial counterparts. And there is even a danger that in future the BBC will be less able to fill the gap left by more audience-oriented commercial operators. So a tentative overall conclusion must be that, while the more lurid claims of the critics concerning tabloidisation and dumbing down are overdrawn, there is still cause for considerable concern, particularly for a future where the financial pressures on the commercial broadcasters are set to get worse (‘After the watershed: Disastrous ad revenue and fallout from Greg Dyke’s failed takeover bid forced ITV to slash budgets and cut jobs’, Guardian, 26/6/06). We have not then, in fact, witnessed a descent to a position where hard news is being removed completely from the air waves, as some critics fear. But there is a descent nevertheless, with all the danger this entails for informed democracy. Yet coverage of the economy cannot be judged on the basis of ‘how much’ questions alone, important though these are. The substantive and formal characteristics of coverage also need attention, and here an altogether more promising story emerges. Economic news can be

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judged against a range of criteria. One is whether the criticism of its detractors are borne out. Alternatively, programme content can be contrasted with the press output on the same topic. And finally, the output can be gauged against defendable criteria that help establish its level of objectivity. In this last instance, news can be explored to determine whether its contours mirrored those of a ‘spectrum of plausibility’ around the issue (a criteria gleaned from what the scholarly literature tells us about the range of plausible facts, assumptions, explanations etc that can reasonably be entertained). By almost all of these criteria, domestic economic news on both channels did very well and had many conspicuous strengths. The one exception was the almost relentless negativism in the coverage, which was very sharply at odds with the buoyant employment prospects at the time. Harrison (1985) is undoubtedly correct in asserting that the news should not slavishly reproduce economic statistics. Nevertheless, the overall tenor of news was firmly at odds with almost every conceivable way of measuring the level of (un)employment. Clearly, the news needs to cover the dramatic events that happen to a range of communities. This is an important public service commitment and explains the focus on job losses. But it also needs to help citizens get an appropriately informed sense of what is happening on a broader national scale, something that also falls within the public service remit. A balance between the two obviously needs to be struck, but it is not apparent that it was in this particular instance. However, this was only one dimension of the economic news surveyed and should not be allowed to obscure the positive aspects of the coverage. For one thing, the news patently did not have many of the characteristics its critics so readily scorn. The insidious bias introduced by reification of the economy was not overwhelmingly apparent in the coverage, and the range of voices heard and accessed went far beyond those of the political or corporate elite. Finally, the commentary offered a wide and balanced explanatory exegesis, excluding only those dimensions which had clearly lost currency in academic debate. The conclusion surely, therefore, has to be that the broadcasters held faithfully to their public service obligations. They seemed to have fulfilled their remit to offer citizens a wide, impartial and informative exploration of the issues involved, and this is also sharply at odds with what is known about the way the press handle the issues involved (Emmison, 1983; Rae and Drury, 1993; Warner and Molotch, 1993). The results could also be read as a partial vindication of BBC Director General John Birt’s organisational efforts to address what he saw as a ‘bias against understanding’

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in television news coverage (Birt and Jay, 1975a, 1975b and 1975c; Birt, 2002). These efforts have not been viewed with unalloyed enthusiasm, either by insiders or by political communication researchers (Born, 2005). However, if the consistent strength, depth and quality of the BBC news output surveyed here are in part a product of these changes, then it could be tentatively suggested that the Birt years should not be viewed in as uniformly negative a light, as they occasionally are. These strengths in the BBC coverage were also evident in news about the euro. Clearly the broadcasters were capable of giving a balanced and nuanced appraisal of the issues, particularly with regard to the pros and cons of euro involvement for Britain. Around the time of the euro launch a wide range of voices were also heard. But perhaps most important of all, BBC and ITN news canvassed a range of important themes that are often wholly absent from press coverage, notably the euro’s contribution to cohesion, peace, security and cooperation. At the launch of the euro, the broadcasters, therefore, played a significant role in redressing the balance in what, given press hostility, could otherwise have been a discursively unequal environment. Nevertheless, there were some disconcerting signs that ITN news coverage carried some conspicuous imbalances with regard to explanatory coverage. And if this reflects the shortness of the stories and the limited amount of space allotted to their elaboration, the finding further reinforces the conclusions which emerged from the analysis of the quantity of stories in Chapter 2. There is a danger that with respect to ‘news from abroad’ at least, this commercial broadcaster is losing sight of its obligation to produce balanced, sustained and informative coverage (a finding reinforced by a range of other studies, Barnett et al., 2000; Franks, 2004 and 2005). And if, indeed, this is a symptom of the working through of marketdriven imperatives, we may have to qualify the rather relaxed and sanguine view taken by some, of the impact of commercial pressures on the quality of broadcasting provision (McNair, 2000a and 2002b). But if one of our principal broadcasters failed to engage important themes in a way that it should, both channels could be criticised for their coverage of anti-globalisation protest. The focus of Chapter 5 was the anti-globalisation demonstration in Trafalgar Square in 2000. To their credit the broadcasters did not give the titillating and salacious elements of this story the extended treatment they got in the press. However, neither BBC nor ITN acquitted themselves particularly well otherwise. There was little by way of explanation of the motivations of the protesters. There were also evident imbalances, with greater emphasis on violence than on peaceful protest. Furthermore, the sources accessed were predominately

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those of the political and policing elites. Finally the BBC came as close as it dared to the use of explicit, critically judgemental commentary in its description of the protesters. In the space of a few short stories, the broadcasters seem to reproduce what some critical observers have termed ‘the protest paradigm’. This paradigm constitutes a set of structural features that act to marginalise or demonise protest activity (particularly of the Left), and is a feature which seems firmly at odds with a commitment to balance and impartiality. The press, for its part, did little better. The ‘protest paradigm’ was much in evidence here too, and although some broadsheets gave space to the motivations of protesters, on the whole an emphasis on violence, criminality and withering criticism, displaced a fuller commentary on the event.

Bad news and ‘spin’ in perspective So the anti-globalisation protesters seemed to have been on the receiving end of some unjustified ‘bad news’, as on occasion were Europe, the EU Commission and the euro. But the analysis undertaken in Chapters 5 and 6 suggests that the media were not entirely to blame, and that the coverage is not necessarily the product of an intrinsic and unacknowledged bias against the respective actors. Instead, it is in part the product of a clear and catastrophic failure to engage with the issue of effective political communication. Ironically, the anti-globalisation protesters and the EU were rather similar in this respect. Both had been sceptical of public relations and suspicious of the press. Both had flattened and dispersed organisations and power structures, and therefore had a degree of inherent indiscipline in the way they acted, presented themselves, and dealt with the self-interested positioning of constituent elements. Both also struggled with disagreement over goals and the means of achieving them. Finally, they both could have a difficult ‘product’ to ‘sell’, like the decline in the value of the euro, the unravelling of the EU Stability Pact in 2003 or, in the case of Trafalgar Square, vandalism and violence. These weaknesses led almost inevitably to a bad press. Nevertheless, the analysis also concluded that the deficiencies were particularly damaging only in specific conditions, notably where the ‘opposition’ was well organised, proactive, media savvy, disciplined, or had a strong and well-articulated case to get across. The Seattle protest and Attac examples highlighted in Chapter 5 show that even organisations of the Left can get their message across. However, this is done not by defying what some have seen as a pernicious ‘media logic’ which puts a premium on image management (Meyer, 2002). Rather, it has

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been achieved by embracing it, as the trades unions in Britain appear to have done, and quite successfully it seems (Davis, 2002). This puts the bad news that anti-globalisation and the EU sometimes get into some perspective. But it also illuminates the debate on political marketing and ‘spin’. There is a widespread assumption that this is necessarily and intrinsically a bad thing. A case is often made that effective political communication simply elevates style over substance, obscures political issues rather than illuminating them, trivialises politics, deadens effective criticism and, in the worst-case scenario, deflects blame for policy disasters and other scandals (Franklin, 1994 and 1999; Barnett and Gaber, 2001; Jones, 2004). But others dispute this dystopian vision, suggesting that effective political communication can be about garnering credit where credit is due or, alternatively, deflecting unjustified attacks, and clarifying complex issues (Scammell, 2004; Needham, 2005). It can also be about making a message understandable and intelligible, getting across practical information or connecting with the needs and interests of an audience (Scammell, 1999; Lees-Marshment, 2001; Palmer, 2002). As one author succinctly put it, ‘Political marketing is more responsive and informative than persuasive and manipulative’ (Lees-Marshment, 2004a, p. 393). Now, it is very unlikely that either one of these utopian or dystopian visions adequately characterises the reality of modern political marketing. But the broadcasters, as we have already shown, are capable of handling political issues with a degree of discrimination and balance. Consequently, it could be argued that the dividends derived from effective political communication by anti-globalisations protesters or the EU probably outweigh the dangers, especially when it is appreciated that when ‘bad news’ is appropriate, it will almost certainly be reported. The findings in Chapter 3 also illuminate the limits of effective spin. At the time of our survey of (un)employment news, New Labour were feted as the new ‘sultans of spin’ and quickly gained a reputation for supreme effectiveness in news management (Kuhn, 2005). However, as we saw in Chapter 3, the government does not appear to have been particularly successful in managing news about jobs, which on many occasions had a turn that was distinctly and perhaps inappropriately negative. Like the business community, the government was also unable to mask its role in creating unemployment. New Labour may have been able to influence the way a good deal of politics was portrayed in the media, but clearly that power was bounded. The political communication literature tends to carry a tone suggesting that spin and image management are a pernicious influence on the body politic.

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The discomfort this engenders is heightened to the extent that spin has a significant influence on coverage of the political agenda. However, it is clear that important players – not least corporate Britain – are unable to manage media affairs in quite the way they would have hoped. Governments too, it seems, cannot keep an eye on every ball, and damaging coverage in the important domain of ‘the economy’ is testimony to the limits of agenda management. The evidence from Chapter 3 indicates that image management may not be as effective as some contend. This finding, in turn, suggests that the research agenda on image management ought to have more emphasis on coverage-related issues than it has had hitherto.

News and its impact The broader significance of the findings explored thus far can, however, only be appreciated fully in the light of the issue of ‘impact’. The evidence accumulated and interpreted in Chapters 4 and 7 does shed some light on the influence of the news output that was assessed in our survey. Clearly, only some of the people, some of the time, pay attention to economic news, a facet of reality that is consistent with what is already know about ‘low information rationality’ and the capacities and orientations of the average citizen (Downs, 1957; Popkin, 1991; Lupia and McCubbins, 1998). But the British public take enough interest to make the quality of the coverage they are exposed to a significant consideration. However, this is not to admit that the coverage explored in previous chapters had a uniform effect. Stories can influence the perceptions of the public and help them set the agenda. However, they do this only in certain circumstances and under certain conditions. Press coverage of the domestic economy does have some impact, but this is by no means uniform. The low circulation broadsheets do have some influence on the perceptions of their readers, but the ‘black tops’ only have an affect on a segment of the public, while the ‘red top’ tabloids have none (Gavin and Sanders, 2003b). And the impact, where there is any, is actually quite weak. Television on the other hand, has a much more consistent influence on what the public think about the economy and, by association, the government. Yet even here the power is quite limited and is still partly contingent on the strength or otherwise of a viewer’s partisan leanings (Goddard et al., 1998; Gavin, 1998). Television’s coverage of the domestic economy, the European economy and the euro can also help set the agenda, though again this impact is weak and

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clearly does not extend to all of those exposed. Finally, the impact of European news seems to be contingent upon the audience’s level of dependency on the media for information, and the degree of consonance of coverage across a range of media. A number of implications follow from these findings. The weak and contingent influence of the press with respect to the domestic economy puts a further premium on the broadcasters’ contribution to informed democracy. They obviously get through to the public in a way that press can fail to do, and this puts the public service commitments of the broadcasters into sharp relief. The impact of television and the press is also relevant to coverage of Europe, but in a different way. Observers of developments in Europe would not be as worried about the ‘communications deficit’ or the hostility of the British press as they obviously are if they though that the media had no appreciable influence on public perceptions of European affairs. It seems they are wrong to worry about a generalised and comprehensive ‘communications deficit’. But they are right to worry about the impact of coverage from a hostile or hesitant press, especially when its contours are broadly similar to (i.e. ‘consonant’ with) the stories broadcast on television, as they were in some instances, as Chapter 6 revealed. The impact of both press and television output underscores the centrality of media coverage to informed and meaningful citizen engagement with politics at the European level, and in a way often underappreciated by theorists of European democracy. And it puts a further spotlight on the image management capacities and organisation of the EU, all the more so if, in the future, significant developments at EU level, like involvement in the euro or accession to a European constitution, are to gain informed approval and legitimation. The results also have a bearing on how power relations might be considered, though here the conclusions need to be much more cautious, provisional and tentative, given the narrowness of the evidential base. In neo-elitist models the media’s role is only to offer the public enough information to make a competent choice between alternative players, any subsequent government turnover assuring a regularised circulation of elites (Scammell, 2000; Baker, 2002). Critical models point to ownership patterns and the control exerted by dominant groups. In both conceptions, politics is dominated by small coteries of individuals and groups whose power is largely undisturbed by the masses (Davis, 2003). And both critical and neo-elitist models of power distribution tend to have either an explicit or implicit conception of media influence. The legitimacy of this system is maintained though effective control of what the masses are exposed to in the media (Cox, Furlong and Page, 1985).

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The media are seen as deflecting and manipulating public preferences and perceptions, or obscuring and camouflaging social and political patterns of control. News helps reproduce a dominant and supportive ideology, and buttresses or protects the vested interests of the powerful. A conception of impact is immanent in this argument, and an evaluation of the descriptive plausibility of the models therefore hinges, at least in part, on how the media’s power to influence the public is assessed and understood. The very limited, and sometimes negligible, impact of the media outlined in Chapters 4 and 7 is relevant in this respect. The power of the press, television and the entrenched media elites seems to be been fairly limited, at least with respect to some citizen preferences and perceptions. Now this, in itself, is hardly conclusive, but it needs to be taken in conjunction with the findings from other chapters in this book. They highlight the failure by government or corporations to obscure or defect blame for their part in joblessness. And it encompasses the lack of reification in commentary, alongside the degree of ‘democratisation’ of sourcing evident in Chapter 3. It might also include the lack of correspondence between economic opinion of City elites and the way that television news conveys the economy to the public, as we saw in Chapter 4. Though not conclusive, this accumulated evidence should counsel some forbearance when we are tempted to endorse critical models of dominance or ideological reproduction. Likewise it speaks to the plausibility of the elite models that have recently seen something of a rehabilitation (Davis, 2003), and which in any event suffer from some other and perhaps more profound weaknesses.1 Overall, the evidence suggests that the world is an altogether more complex place than elite theorists or theorists of ideological reproduction might imagine.

Into the future? The preceding study focussed on a significant set of political issues revolving around, broadly speaking, ‘the economy’. The findings cast light on a number of themes, but not always in a way which confirmed established appreciations of how the broadcasters (or even the press) perform. The critics of broadcast news, in particular, were often contradicted. This argues for an approach to the analysis of political communication which draws more heavily on content-related evidence than it has hitherto. This is especially important in controversial domestic areas like health and education, but is also relevant to themes in the international domain. Here we need to be quite circumspect about what

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we claim with confidence about the quality of media coverage, and without doubt we need to show a good deal more restraint and discretion than some have displayed.2 The evidence that has been generated as part of the current exercise was not designed as a guide to broadcasting policy. However, the results do speak to the current and likely future state of broadcasting. We have seen that while the BBC seems to be holding the line in terms of the quality and quantity of hard news, the commercial broadcasters are doing less well, notably with respect to coverage of international topics. At the time of writing, a settlement of the future of the BBC licence fee was still being negotiated and had not been finalised. However, the BBC seems likely to see a shaving of its revenue, with licence revenue set to rise, year-on-year, by appreciably less than inflation. If one considers, as this author does, that broadcast coverage makes an important contribution to informed democracy, this is a significant development. Clearly, the mere presence of a non-commercially funded broadcaster does not in itself ensure that all broadcasting output conforms to high standards – a ‘virtuous cycle’ where the BBC keeps the rest ‘honest’ cannot be relied upon. This puts a great onus on the BBC to hold the line, especially if one of its roles is to ‘fill any gaps’ left by its commercial counterparts. This will be more difficult in the context of squeezed revenue, and where the commercial broadcasters are forced to retrench in the face of digitised competition. This will be especially dangerous in the domain of foreign coverage, where perhaps the British citizen needs adequate programming provision, now more than ever. At the present we can say that television news is relatively safe in the hands of broadcasters. Whether it will continue to be the case, remains to be seen.

Notes Chapter 1 1. See MORI’s survey of Web use at the 2001 general election: http://www. ipsos-mori.com/polls/2001/Hansard.shtml. 2. This is in sharp contrast to the 90 per cent of British people who express a trust in BBC and ITV news (Hargreaves and Thomas, 2002) and who see television as the most important source of political information (Dunleavy and Husbands, 1985; Independent Television Commission, 1996; and Barnett, 1989). In specific domains of politics – like Europe and the euro – it is also clear that television supersedes the Internet as the medium people turn to when they want information (Norris, 2000). 3. See Schroeder and Sjoquist (1986) for an accessible introduction. 4. For an accessible treatise on the technique, see Hansen et al. (1998).

Chapter 2 1. This represents a regression line with the generic structure y  a(x)  b. Here ‘a’ is the gradient and ‘b’ the point where it hits the vertical axis. In mathematical terms the line minimises the sum of the squares of the distances between each observation and the line itself. The specific equation for our summary line is, in fact, y  0.196(x)  24.3. The gradient is negative, meaning that we have a downward trend in coverage. 2. The equation for the superimposed line is y  0.146(x)  19.5, which again has a negative ‘slope’. 3. The graphs here are not directly comparable to those for domestic coverage. British economic news tends to stand alone as a discrete story topic, but euro stories often touch on either the domestic economy or, more often, economic affairs in other European countries. So in Figures 2.3 and 2.4 we have isolated and counted any story that touched on the Single Currency, although it was clear that the patterns subsequently uncovered were very similar to those observed when we looked at the smaller number of stories dealing exclusively with the euro. Nevertheless, the vast majority of these stories more than amply fulfil the criteria used by other researchers to identify stories with significant European content (Meyer, 2005, p. 127; Peter and de Vreese, 2004, p. 10). 4. The regression equation for Figure 2.3 is y  0.046(x)  5.0, while the corresponding one for Figure 2.4 is y  0.045(x)  3.2. The average number of stories per month is nearly four on BBC and just under two on ITN. 5. http://www.itnarchive.com. 6. ‘The European economy’ is defined in terms of the same economic subtopics which constitute the ‘domestic economy’, but where they are reported as events and developments in other EU countries. 179

180 Notes 7. Again, when we focus only on stories dealing exclusively with the EU economies, reassuringly a similar set of patterns still emerges. 8. The equation for the summary line is, in fact, y  0.0195(x)  6.1. 9. The equation for the ITN summary line is, y  0.031(x)  3.8. 10. The slope of the summary equation for BBC is mildly positive at 1.056. That for ITN is even more shallow at 0.185.

Chapter 3 1. As in the previous chapter, the focus was on BBC and ITN’s flagship bulletins at 9 O’Clock and 10 O’Clock respectively. 2. Stories which were specifically about (un)employment or which figured the associated issues in the opening to a report, were isolated. A range of close synonyms to (un)employment, jobs and joblessness were used in this process, including ‘redundancies’, ‘posts’ axed or created, ‘staff’ and ‘staffing’, the shutting, creation or opening of businesses, and ‘lay-offs’. 3. Employment-related responses to MORI’s survey question ‘What is the most important issue facing the country?’ fell from a peak of forty five percent in mid-1998 to twenty percent in December 1999. For details see: www.mori. com/polls/trends/issues.shtml. 4. Not all these stories have a clear indication of the likely trends in (un)employment in Britain. In others, new jobs and job losses are equally prominent, while many carry significant conditional elements that make it impossible to code them as unambiguously positive or negative (‘Last month the Royal Opera’s chairman, Sir Colin Southgate threatened huge lay-offs unless staff to agreed to changes including less pay and longer hours’, BBC, 28 October 1998). Also excluded are direct statements about (un)employment by politicians, on the grounds that it is known from survey evidence that these individuals are not trusted by the public. 5. Details of the Labour Force Survey’s ILO (International Labor Organisation) agreed definition of (un)employment, plus a definition of the Claimant Count are explained at: www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=165. 6. Typically, close and detailed textual analysis of economic news has tended to focus on a very small corpus of printed or broadcast material (Emmison, 1983; Jensen, 1987; Rae and Drury, 1993).

Chapter 4 1. The studies look at not only the news about the general state of ‘the economy’, but also at interest rates, prices, changes in taxation, sales and spending, wages and disposable income, the balance of payments, short-time working, state borrowing and the housing market. 2. And what little we know about the impact of explanatory coverage does tend to suggest that it has a measurable agenda-setting effect, i.e. the agents portrayed in the coverage as responsible for economic turbulence, may soon figure in the minds of public as such (Benton and Frazier, 1976). However, there is no comparable research for the United Kingdom.

Notes 181 3. I am very grateful to Professor David Sanders of Essex University for his help in setting up the statistical models elaborated below. The interpretation of the models is my own. 4. For details of the coding scheme see Sanders and Gavin (2004). 5. The introduction of the lagged independent variable is a standard procedure in this form of lagged endogenous variable models. The unemployment and inflation variables were the Claimant Count and RPI respectively. 6. These included the following: interest rates; taxation; sales and spending; wages, pay and disposable income; imports/exports and the balance of payments; short-time working; state borrowing; and the housing market. A final broad category of stories encompassed the ‘economy generally’, including the issues of recovery and recession, trade, production, investment, growth and business, as well as references to the general health of the economy. 7. A range of OLS regression models were run, using news as the dependent variable. City attitudes were the dependent variable, with real world economy measures deployed as controls, as in our previous models. The models used a stringent test of the relationship by looking at the change in Fund Manager’s attitudes and how this related to the balance of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ news broadcast. The details of the models can be obtained from the author on request.

Chapter 5 1. For a visual perspective from the point of view of some of the protesters see: www.urban75.org/mayday/index1.html. 2. For different views of both the Cenotaph and Churchill statues see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/733601.stm; and http://news.bbc.co. uk/1/hi/uk/732791.stm. 3. The stories were derived from a search of the Lexus-Nexus database, focused on a key-word search that included ‘May Day protests’ and ‘anti-capitalist’, cross-checked against ‘anti-globali*ation’ and ‘globali*ation’. 4. The calculations here include each newspaper’s Sunday sister publication, with the exception of the Sun and the Guardian. 5. The key terms that were used to determine this concerned the appearance of the word ‘violence’ itself, but also fighting, clash(ing), trashing, injuring, attacking or assaulting, battles, war and war zone, weapons, ammunition, hitting, targeting, the throwing of objects and aggression, casualties, destruction, thug(gery) and threats. 6. The table simply shows whether the various elements of the protest paradigm were present or absent. Rendering this into percentages would have been potentially misleading given the small numbers of stories. 7. A.T.T.A.C. stands for ‘Association pour une taxation des transactions financiers pour l’aide aux citoyens’ and was originally formed to press for the socalled ‘Tobin Tax’ on all financial share transactions. 8. One peaceful demonstrator was filmed as he was kicked in the groin and then shot at point blank range with a baton round. 9. A very wide range of groups were involved, these embracing a disparate set of aims and objectives – amongst many others they included ‘Reclaim The

182 Notes

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Streets’ (who were, notionally, the lead organisation), but also ‘Earth First’, ‘Corporate Watch’, ‘The Socialist Workers Party’, ‘Class War’, ‘Black Dog’, ‘The Anarchist Federation’, ‘Animal Action’ and the ‘Revolutionary Communist Unionists of Turkey’. The following give a sense of what some saw as the demonstrations’ principal features: www.eco-action.org/efau/issues/2000/efau2000_0607.html; www.eco-action.org/dod/no9/may_day.htm; www.urban75.org/mayday/010. html; www.redpepper.org.uk/mkisby.html; and www.zing.icom43.net/ mayday/report.html. The Guardian leader on the days after the demonstration is a case in point, but see also Gott (2005) for subsequent criticism from the New Statesman. These include George Monbiot (Guardian, 10/5/00), the anti-globalisation group ‘Corporate Watch’ (Times, 9/5/00) and the editor of the environmental magazine The Ecologist writing in the Telegraph (15/5/00). See http://homepage.ntlworld.com/ketmania/mayday.htm. Examples here are the Halloran et al. (1970) study of the media’s treatment of the anti-Vietnam demonstration in Grosvenor Square, Deacon and Golding’s (1994) assessment of the anti-poll tax disturbances, alongside research on press reaction to anti-WTO protests in Seattle (Rojecki, 2002), and perhaps even the analysis of coverage of the riots in Britain in the early nineteen eighties (Tumber, 1982; Murdock, 1984). A case could also be made for including political demonstrations in Northern Ireland, but these are closer to the politics of low intensity warfare than to ‘conventional’ protests, demonstrations or riots. There were 26 stories in all dealing predominately or exclusively with the disturbances in Parliament Square, fifteen in the broadsheets and eleven in the tabloids. These were derived from a search on the Lexus Nexus database, using the nested key terms ‘fox-hunting OR foxhunting OR demonstrat* OR hunt*’. One Express report headlined ‘Police batter missile hurling mob with batons as demo by middle-aged and middle-class to save foxhunting descends into frightening violence – the bloody battle of Parliament Square’ (16/9/04) is almost an archetypal example of the protest paradigm. It contains twenty two references to violence and three to peaceful demonstration. Two policemen, one League Against Cruel Sports representative and a critical bystander (Tory MP Peter Bottomley) outnumber the three protesters quoted. Arrests feature prominently, and in a nine hundred word article, an explanation of the motives and aims of the protesters takes up just seventeen. A similarly structured article appears in the Sun (‘Carnage as riot cops hit demo mob’, 16/9/04), though with more protesters quoted. See ‘Hunting protests: Out of bounds’, Guardian, 16/9/04, ‘Toff with their heads’, Mirror 16/09/04, ‘Nice protest chaps, but pointless’, Independent on Sunday 19/9/04 or ‘Yes storm the House, but for a proper cause’, Mail on Sunday 19/9/04. For example, ‘Two outspoken figures give their views as the debate reaches its climax’, Express 16/9/04) or a 3000 word report in the Times ‘Tally-ho Rebels: ‘Its Civil War’ (19/9/04). Another exception might be the race-related demonstrations and disturbances that occurred in northern Britain in 2001, since these have been the

Notes 183 subject of considerable scholarly attention (amongst others, Karapin, 1999; Kundnani, 2001; Amin, 2003).

Chapter 6 1. In the case of Trenz (2004) and Meyer (2005) they focus only on the Guardian and the Times newspapers, Charteris-Black and Musolff (2003) on the Financial Times. 2. Eurobarometer surveys consistently suggest that when citizens seek information on Europe they place TV before the press: http://europa.eu.int/ comm/public_opinion/index_en.htm. 3. BBC 04/01/00. 4. It was apparent on letters pages of the Financial Time (28/03/02 and 01/04/02) and the Independent (04/01/02). Europe’s direct taxation responsibilities figured in a Guardian report in April (13/04/02), with harmonisation of corporate tax resurfacing as an issue later that month (30/04/02). Rupert Murdoch broached the issue in an interview for the same paper in June (11/06/02) and the Dutch Commissioner Frits Bolkestein’s statement on it prompted more coverage in July (29/07/02). Divergent tax regimes figured in the Independent (26/02/02), as did Prodi’s call for new taxation powers (23/05/02), the tax harmonisation thread in European Convention deliberations (24/05/02 and 01/08/02) and Commission proposals to harmonise diesel duties (25/07/02). The issue was again apparent in Independent reports on French and German moves to revive the issue in December (03/12/02). 5. Channel 4 also had one interviewee comment that ‘... I just think it [the euro] brings people together’ (02/01/01). 6. When the Guardian tried to test the boundaries of this new ‘openness’, the Commission rescinded its initial authorisation to access some sensitive official documents, stating that its original decision had been an ‘administrative error’, and in the process generated some friction with a title that was otherwise generally sympathetic to the EU. 7. The Europa Website offers us a list of 42 relative unknowns, largely from the business and legal communities, dispersed across the entire British Isles: europa.eu.int/comm/relays/teameurope/pdf/london.pdf 8. Comparable problems are reported in other studies which deal with the EU’s offices in London (Anderson and Weymouth, 1999) and with some of the standard operating procedures of the Council of Ministers (Kevin, 2003).

Chapter 7 1. Mori poll for the Sun newspaper, September 2000: www.mori.com/polls/ 2000/s000930.shtml. 2. Mori poll for the Times newspaper, June 2000: www.mori.com/polls/ 2000/t000627.shtml. 3. One percent could name a few of them, though six percent could state that sustainable convergence between the British and the euro economies was a prerequisite: Mori June 2000: http://www.mori.com/polls/2000/notw000623. shtml.

184 Notes 4. This is expressed in a MORI poll on people’s reasons for being in favour or against Britain joining, and again in a survey asking people what would persuade them to change their views: www.mori.com/polls/1999/gmb-euro. shtml; and www.mori.com/polls/2001/gbishop2.shtml. 5. As noted in Chapter 2, this represents a regression line with the generic structure y  a(x)  b . Here ‘a’ is the gradient and ‘b’ the point where it hits the vertical axis. In mathematical terms the line minimises the sum of the squares of the distances between each observation and the line itself. 6. This issue can be easier to flag than to address (Gavin and Sanders, 2003a), and can be a problem not only with the analysis of European coverage (Carey and Burton, 2004), but with studies of the domestic impact of the media (Curtice, 1997). 7. I am very grateful to Professor David Sanders of Essex University for his help in setting up the statistical models elaborated below. The interpretation of the models is the current author’s own. 8. The dependent variable was the percentage answering ‘Europe/Common Market/Euro’ in response to a recurrent Gallup question ‘What would you say is the most urgent problem facing the country at the present time?’ The independent variables were as follows: the dependent variable lagged one month; Eurimp(t1); either the number of stories broadcast (Eurstory) or their word length (Eurcount); and two dummy variables corresponding to some of the most significant political events in the period, the start and finish of the bombing in Kosovo, March 1999 to June 1999, (Kosovo) and the petrol crisis in September 2000 (Petrol crisis ‘00). The models passed the standard battery of test which assure their statistical validity (for details contact the author). 9. See the Eurobarometer archive: http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ eb_arch_en.htm. 10. Hodess (1997) has remarked that ‘... political science treatment of European integration has consistently failed to incorporate media into the framework of analysis of political change within the European Union. Given the media’s numerous effects on politics, the continued lack of academic interest in media coverage of European integration seems curious’ (pp. 20–1). One is tempted to enquire just how far political science has come in the intervening period. 11. For instance, the ‘Mark Steel Lectures’ for the Open University convey abstract and difficult themes in a way that is humorous, irreverent, engaging and interesting, and Channel Four has used much the same tactic with the ‘Mark Thomas Product’: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/guide/articles/m/ marksteellectures_999031007.shtml; and http://www.channel4.com/news/ microsites/M/mark_thomas/we.html. 12. This can be viewed at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/ uk/2001/referendum_street/default.stm.

Chapter 8 1. For instance, how many elites actually are there, and can this be answered without the theory changing into something like neo-pluralism (Dunleavy and O’Leary, 1987; Smith, 1995)? Alternatively, where does ‘the elite’ actually

Notes 185 start and stop? Ironically, this issue is flagged up without much by way of recognition in Aeron Davis’ (2003) attempted rehabilitation of elite theory. He quotes Lord Tim Bell as stating, ‘Politics is a very tiny place ... if you know 100 people in the right places you can talk to the whole country’ (p. 681). But senior press journalist Kevin McGuire also says ‘The great danger is that it [politics] becomes a small world of 2000 people’ (p. 682). Both implicitly underscore the fact that the cut-off point for differentiating the elite from ‘the rest’ is essentially and irredeemably arbitrary, a point also underacknowledged in attempts to identify a specific journalistic elite (Sutton Trust, 2006). 2. Claims have recently been made about the biases embedded in broadcast news about the conflict in the Lebanon between Hizbullah and Israel, on occasion without much by way of evidential substantiation (‘Unfriendly fire from all sides’, Guardian, 31/07/06).

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Index The pages in bold are those where the topics concerned are given particular emphasis. accountability European, 151–4 , 161, 162 political, 10, 48 accuracy, 5, 10, 47, 48, 52, 56, 67–8 , 81, 92, 128, 167 anti-globalisation, 22, 95–6 , 107, 108, 110, 114, 117, 168–9 , 172, 173–4 Attac, 108, 110–11 , 173 attribution of responsibility, 19, 49, 59, 75–6 , 81, 88 for unemployment, 59–66 for euro depreciation, 126–7 audience, 9, 10, 53, 59, 93, 116, 140 comprehension, 159 dependency, 75–6 , 122, 147–8 , 149, 170, 176 experience, 10, 14, 58–9 , 74, 75, 92, 147, 157 exposure, 77, 79, 127, 146–7, 148, 158–9 , 162 figures, 8 fragmentation, 8 knowledge, 3, 9, 11, 15, 49, 144, 146, 158–9 , 162 interest, 9, 14–15 , 16, 36, 41, 48, 72, 77, 93, 132, 154, 156–7 , 158–60 , 162, 162, 174 motivations, 14–17 partisan identification, 15, 81, 175 selectivity, 127 share, 8, 154 sources of news, 5, 15, 16–17 , 78, 80, 122 balance, 95, 167–8 in the press coverage of the economy, 13, 49 of Europe, 123 in television coverage

of the economy, 10, 11, 18–19, 48, 53–4 , 65, 66–8 , 72, 76, 93, 100, 105, 113, 118 of Europe, 121, 127, 130, 134–5 , 140, 141, 152, 160, 170–3 Bank of England, 57, 60, 62, 152 Barclay brothers, 6 BBC licence fee, 8, 9, 167, 178 bias, 19, 48 definition, 66–7 , 68–71 and objectivity, 67–8 on television, 48–50 , 51 ‘bias against understanding’, 18, 59, 66, 72, 77, 107, 116–17, 171–2 Birt, John, 9, 66, 171–2 Black, Conrad, 6 Blair, Tony, 13, 62, 125, 140 broadcasting commercial, 5, 8, 11–12 , 18, 40–1, 167, 170, 172, 178 digital, 7, 8, 167 finances, 9, 167 journalists, 11, 21, 77, 90, 108, 112, 117–18 , 139, 141, 155–6 , 160–1 market, 3, 12, 41, 161, 172 regulation, 12, 29, 41 standards, 11–12 , 41, 167 trust by public, 16–17 capitalism, 58, 98 capitalists, 88, 89, 94 ‘Channel 4’, 16 Channel 4 News, 35–6 , 134–5 citizen(s), 51, 57–8, 165 informed engagement, 11, 38, 42, 144, 152, 153, 157, 159, 166, 169–70 , 171, 176, 178 motivations, 14–17 , 158–9 the City, 49, 58, 90–2 , 177 effects on economic news, 89–92

202

Index 203 communication deficit, 42, 170 conflict frame, 122, 157 Conservatives, 13, 80, 124, 136 consonant coverage, 76, 127, 139, 149–50 , 160, 176 content analysis, 23, 53, 80 coverage of anti-globalisation protest, 96, 97, 168–9 in the press, 99–102 on television, 100, 102–3 , 174 of the economy on television, 4, 16, 31–3 , 38, 48–51, 74, 81, 82–4 , 89–92 , 168–9, 171–2 of the euro in the press, 123, 147 on television, 22, 33–6 , 38, 40, 41, 42, 124–36 , 139–41 , 146, 148–9, 154, 159–60 , 169–70 , 172 of Europe in the press, 69–70 , 122–4 , 128–9 , 131, 139, 140, 146, 147, 149, 157, 160, 172, 173, 176 on television, 61, 62, 122–4 , 139, 147, 148, 152–53 , of European economy on television, 36–7 , 38, 40, 41, 42, 123, 147, 148–9 , 154, 175–6 fair(ness), 10, 58, 67, 68, 81, 108, 112, 158, 167 of inflation on television, 50, 60, 76–7 , 82–4 , 90–1 , 126, 127, 133 omissions in, 49–50 , 57, 63–5 , 70–2 , 76–7, 88, 95, 97, 100, 102–3 , 107–8 , 115–6 , 118, 123, 131, 133–4 , 140, 171, 172 of peaceful demonstrators, 97, 103, 109, 112, 114, 115 in the press, 101 on television, 102–3 , 172 of police, 7–8, 109, 110 in the press, 100, 101, 104, 105, 115

on television, 103, 104, 105, 112 of pro-foxhunting demonstration, 115–16 of protester motivation, 97, 105–8 , 111, 115 in the press, 106–8 , 115, 117 on television, 105–6, 112–13, 116 of (un)employment on television, 51–5 , 56–60, 71–3 , 74, 76–7, 80–1, 82–4 , 86, 87–9, 92–4 , 171, 174–5 of Seattle protest, 96, 108–10 , 118, 173 of violence, 97–8, 105, 111, 114, 116 in the press, 100–1 , 103, 115–16 on television. 100, 100–1 , 102–3, 117, 172 critical theorists, 4, 19, 49, 58, 77–8 , 89, 167–8, 174, 176–7 Dacre, Paul, 6, 13, 14 democracy, 3, 5, 16 European, 142, 149–53 , 154, 156–62 , 176 informed/mediated, 3–4 , 17–21 , 25–6, 38–9, 59, 71,77, 85, 95, 114, 165–6 , 168, 170, 176, 178 Desmond, Richard, 6, 13 dumbing-down, 17–18, 24, 25, 48, 158, 167, 170 history of, 26 Dyke, Greg, 9, 170 ‘economisation’, 166 the economy definition of, 31 effects, 4, 19, 20, 23–4 , 77–8, 84–7 , 94, 175–7 agenda-setting, 80, 81–4 , 94, 147, 148–9 , 175 of economic news, 53, 78–81 , 88–9, 175, 176 of (un)employment news, 80, 81, 82–4 , 92–3 of euro news, 20, 142, 146–7 , 149–50 of European news, 20, 142, 146–7 , 176

204 Index elite(s), 4, 15, 16, 49, 88, 89–92, 94, 97, 105, 148–9, 168, 177 elite theory, 176–7 the euro, 30, 33, 138–9, 155, 159–60 introduction in 2002, 35, 129–32, 137, 145, 172 pros and cons, 132–6, 140–1 value of, 126–9 Europe(an) Council, 156 Council of Ministers, 151, 156 Court of Justice, 151 discourse, 122–6, 127, 128–9, 139, 148 division, 124, 126, 127, 139, 157, 159 Draft Constitution, 155–6, 157, 176 identity, 124, 125, 128, 130, 148, 150, 153 image management, 136, 154, 161, 176 integration, 42, 123, 125, 126, 138–9 legitimacy, 125, 126, 128, 139, 150–3 , 154, 176 MEPs, 137, 152, 157 officials, 123, 126, 128, 130, 137 Parliament, 137, 151, 157 peace, 123, 130–1 , 141, 172 public relations see image management Representations, 137 rights/entitlements, 150, 151, 152 Social Chapter, 123 solidarity, 125, 150 Stability Pact, 173 taxation, 123, 124–26 , 127, 128, 132, 134, 135 European Central Bank (ECB), 123, 126, 131, 132, 140, 151–3 European Commission(ers), 125, 137, 140, 151, 161, 173 europeanization, 42–3, 121 Europhile(s), 125, 127, 134 Eurosceptic(s), 125, 128, 129, 138, 141 experimental analysis, 24, 84, 146, 148 explanation of inflation, 50, 76 of (un)employment, 59–66 , 71–2, 171, 174

flagship bulletins, 29, 30, 71, 100, 105, 169 ‘gap filling’, 12, 117, 167, 170, 178 general election(s), 10, 30, 32, 84, 146, 148, 155 ‘gist’, 17, 81, 158 Glasgow University Media Group, 50, 51, 72 Graber, Doris, 165–6 hard news, 7, 12, 29, 37, 39, 40, 43, 165–6 , 169–70, 178 definition of, 28, 30, 169 human interest, 26, 28–9, 147, 157 ideology, 19, 48–9 , 50, 56, 58, 77, 86–9 , 90, 94, 167–8 , 177 image management, 14, 18–19, 73, 108–11, 168, 173, 174–5 impact see effects impartiality, 3–4, 5, 10, 11, 13, 66, 78, 93, 98, 113, 135, 153, 167, 171, 173 indexing, 58, 72 influence see effects information, 3, 5–6 , 14–17 , 42, 47–8, 75, 78, 80, 84, 137, 144, 147, 169, 175 infotainment, 25, 26–7, 39 interest rates, 31, 39, 60, 82–3 , 90–1, 126, 132–5 internet, 5, 7, 8, 61, 78 issue salience, 80, 82–4, 85, 145–6, 148, 154 knowledge gap, 158, 160 Lafontaine, Oscar, 124, 125, 140 managerialism, 3 Maastricht, 123 media competition, 3, 7–8 , 10, 11–12, 29, 39, 116, 167 ‘watchdog’ function, 48 ‘mediatization’, 17

Index 205 monetarism, 63–4 , 65, 70, 71, 76, 88 monitorial citizen, 165 Murdoch, Rupert, 6, 7, 8, 13, 136 negative news, 48–9, 50, 53–6 , 72–3, 81, 113, 131, 138, 139–40, 147, 149, 150, 157, 171, 174 neutrality, 11, 58, 66 New Labour, 13, 14, 39, 52, 63, 64, 73, 85, 88, 155, 169, 174 news frames, 66, 68, 122, 132, 147, 157 quality, 5, 7, 16, 17, 18, 23, 66, 69, 161, 168, 172, 178 quantity, 5, 16, 17, 18, 23, 30–8 , 52, 86, 169–70, 172 News at Ten, 29, 32, 35, 40 newspapers see press news values, 77, 86, 92, 96, 154, 157 newsworthiness, 35, 36, 53, 72, 84, 90, 92, 99, 113, 128, 139, 140, 154, 155 norms (social/civic), 97, 101, 103, 113 objectivity in coverage, 18–19, 48, 93, 98, 111–13 , 118, 128 criteria for, 66–8 and the ‘spectrum of plausibility’, 68 Parliament Square protest, 115, 117 partisan identification, 15, 81, 175 ‘pervasive pessimism’, 4, 5, 168 political marketing, 136, 174 press black tops, 6, 17, 175 broadsheets, 6, 21, 25, 28, 80, 99, 101, 104, 106–7 , 118, 173, 175 motivations, 13–14 red tops, 6, 17, 80, 175 tabloids, 6, 28, 99, 106, 123, 175 trust in, 16–17 print media see press Prodi, Romano, 126, 129, 130 promotion deficit, 137–8 proprietorial intervention, 3, 21, 129, 166 the protest dynamic, 108–11 , 117

the protest paradigm, 97–9, 100–8 , 114–5, 116 public opinion on the euro, 142–5 public relations (PR), 14, 19, 88, 93, 108–10 , 117, 136–8 , 150, 173 public service broadcasting, 9–12 , 40, 114 ethos, 11, 38, 98 obligations, 9–10 , 25, 36, 40–1, 113, 97–8, 105, 116, 139, 160, 176 provision, 47, 50–1, 56, 59, 66, 68–71 , 92–4 , 141, 171 public sphere, 42, 47, 95, 121, 124, 139, 153 Reclaim the Streets, 105, 107, 111 Referendum Street, 159–60 reification, 49–50 , 59–60, 62, 72, 87–8, 171 regression analysis, 23, 82–3 , 148 revenue advertising, 7 broadcasting, 8, 12, 167, 170, 178 salience of the economy, 80, 82–6 of Europe, 145, 148–9 Schroeder, Gerhard, 125, 126 Seattle protests, 96, 108–110 , 118, 173 sensationalism, 11, 50, 57 Single European Currency see euro sovereignty, 123, 132, 134 source(s) see ‘voices’ spectrum of plausibility, 68–71 , 72, 73, 76, 111, 118, 171 spin, 18, 21–2 , 88, 173–5 spin doctors, 14, 93, 157 story length, 38, 39, 135 summary line, 33, 34, 35, 37, 145 tabloidization, 7, 169–70 definition of, 26–7 history of, 26 trade unions, 14, 50, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63–4 , 174

206 Index Trafalgar Square protest as an event, 98–9, 109–10, 111–12, 173 truth content, 48, 66, 67–9 , 81, 118 United States, 15–16, 78–9, 96, 165–66 voices, 49, 56–9 , 103–5 , 112, 130, 172 of consumer groups, 57 of business, 57, 58–9 of EU officials, 130 of fox-hunters, 115

of government, 50, 57, 58–9, 72, 104, 130 of police, 104 of protesters, 104, 105 of trade unions, 57 vox pop, 56–8 , 130 voting, 74–5, 76, 79, 80, 142, 144–5, 151–2 web see internet Welfare-to-Work, 52, 61, 63 World Trade Organization (WTO), 107, 109, 110