Glasgow University Media Group: Really Bad News, Writers and Readers, £2.95 pbk.
A Ministry of Defence official, commenting on journalists’ complaints about their treatment on the Falklands, remarked: ‘It's important that the attitudes of journalists are re-educated to operational controls’ (Observer, 13.6.82)
There are presumably rules that journalists lacking experience in a war zone have forgotten or perhaps never learned, although there has been precious little in the Falklands coverage to suggest it. Back home, the mass media are filtered by the ‘operational controls’ on everyday life and events, nowhere through such a fine mesh as is applied to much of TV's news and current affairs output
The achievement of the Glasgow University Media Group is that it has had the stamina to scrutinise segments of this television output over the past half dozen years: and more, that its deciphering of the codes of bias now comes with a basic interpretation of the economic facts and political avenues the codes are designed to obscure.
Really Bad News, the latest in the group's ‘bad’ series, reviews some old ground and examines some fresh, concluding with chapters on the general features of media in a class society, and suggesting demands to put the ‘mass’ in media by providing us all with access to TV.
The main new critique is of Labour Party coverage in the period when the left's battle for party democracy and accountability brought the gains of the 1980 annual conference, and consequent matters arising
The analysis reveals numerous ‘operational controls’ at work, from the way in which ‘threats’ always seem to come from the left, never from the right; the counterposition between socialists and ‘realists’; the questions which never get put, such as: ‘Mr Healey, can you deny that your calls for unity are no more than an attempt to avoid criticism of the last government?’,
When the group re-treads previous ground, such as the coverage of the Glasgow dustcart drivers’ strike in 1975, it is framed in a broader political context. Thus we had a number of our friendly neutral newscasters and reporters vigorously upholding the Labour government's incomes policy.
Their devices included monitoring pay claims for their ‘acceptability’, dropping comparisons of wage and price rises when the latter got too steep, and describing various government moves as ‘reinforcing its determination to stand firm in the face of mounting pay claims’ without a hint of other interpretations or options. TV economics was reducible to: wage demands = inflation = unemployment
If for a moment Mr Callaghan had entertained the idea of letting up on his living standard reducing policy, the screen mandarins were always there to insist he did no such thing
The Glasgow group's books bite, as evidenced by the fraught discussions held by top-level BBC personnel (and could [illegible] please be published in the Radio Times, so that the licence payers can find out what they're really paying for); The group’s analysis aids the handful of dissidents cautiously at work in the newsrooms. And not least it arms us, since even the most alert and radical viewers will otherwise certainly miss a trick or two
GEOFFREY SHERIDAN is business manager for New Socialist.