Bad News (Routledge Revivals)

Peter Beharrell, Howard Davis, John Eldridge, John Hewitt, Jean Hart, Gregg Philo, Paul Walton, Brian Winston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135229757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

It is a commonly held belief that television news in Britain, on whatever channel, is more objective, more trustworthy, more neutral than press reporting. The illusion is exploded in this controversial study by the Glasgow University Media Group, originally published in 1976.

The authors undertook an exhaustive monitoring of all television broadcasts over 6 months, from January to June 1975, with particular focus upon industrial news broadcasts, the TUC, strikes and industrial action, business and economic affairs.

Their analysis showed how television news favours certain individuals by giving them more time and status. But their findings did not merely deny the neutrality of the news, they gave a new insight into the picture of industrial society that TV news constructs.

1 REVIEWING THE NEWS

Reluctance to display its codes is a mark of bourgeois society and the mass culture which has developed from it.

R.Barthes

Contrary to the claims, conventions, and culture of television journalism, the news is not a neutral product. For television news is a cultural artifact; it is a sequence of socially manufactured messages, which carry many of the culturally dominant assumptions of our society. From the accents of the newscasters to the vocabulary of camera angles; from who gets on and what questions they are asked, via selection of stories to presentation of bulletins, the news is a highly mediated product.

This study is an attempt to unpack the coding of television news. It aims to reveal the structures of the cultural framework which underpins the production of apparently neutral news. At some common-sense level television news has to appear neutral or its credibility would evaporate.

There is the agreement widely shared in our society that television news is more objective than the press. Indeed most people still firmly believe that it is intrinsically more trustworthy. Historically, it is argued, the press is partisan, whilst broadcasting is more neutral. It is this illusion, this ‘utopia of neutralism’, that many of our findings deny. So thoroughly convinced are most media professionals and the public that television news is trustworthy that the basis of such beliefs must lie in the national culture. The public seem prepared to credit the national television organisations with a neutrality they would deny to others.

A BBC survey conducted in 1962 demonstrated that 58 per cent of the population use television as their main source of news, as against the 33 per cent who principally rely upon newspapers. Most significantly the survey showed that 68 per cent of the population interviewed believed that television news was the most trustworthy news medium, whilst only 6 per cent said this of the press.¹

One perceptive critic, Trevor Pateman, has noted that whilst British audiences seem prepared to believe that foreign news services are faulty, biased, or distorted, the same judgment is not accorded our own news services. He suggests that this privileged assumption that our news service is best and is reliable, rests upon an unstated nationalism which historically is only made credible by the BBC's role during the Second World War.²

In the post-war period television has come into unchallenged dominance as the prime medium of entertainment and news communication. Such news is bound by law, and convention, to be balanced, impartial, unbiased and neutral. The news is produced on a day-to-day basis by a professional media élite who whilst doing their best, embody in their routine practices ideological assumptions which reinforce certain stratified cultural perceptions of society and how it should, ought, and does, work.

Much of the debate about the ideology of television production in general and news in particular would be unimportant were it not for the fact that television is now the front-runner medium eclipsing everything else bar face-to-face communication. In the UK most families spend four to five hours per day watching television, whilst on any given day around 60 per cent of the adult population hear or see at least one broadcast news bulletin. Moreover, until recent shifts in public attitudes, the objectivity of television news was highly regarded.

The most obvious feature of this huge audience is that it tunes in mainly between 5.30 and 10.30 p.m. each day, with the maximum number watching at about 9 p.m. This five-hour period includes five out of the eight weekday news bulletins. The main evening programmes of BBC1 and ITN therefore occupy commanding positions in the evening's schedule and each is regularly watched by about 17 per cent of the population, although this percentage falls during the summer months. For competing broadcasts such as the main and early evening bulletins, the audiences are about the same and there has been little change in recent years (see Table 1.1).

Seventy-five per cent of the viewers of an early evening bulletin will also watch one later in the evening. Since the main bulletin audience is larger, about 40 per cent of the audience of a 9 p.m. bulletin will have watched an earlier one. This degree of overlap is not acknowledged as a rule in the output. The easily noticed lack of reference back in the bulletins from day to day and week to week might indicate an assumption that the television audience is conversant with the general trends of the news; yet on a daily basis the daily repetition from bulletin to bulletin makes little concession to the overlapping of audiences.³ Predictably, viewers of one channel are more likely to view that channel again than another channel, and the strength of the preference varies little for the three channels. Less predictably, Goodhart et al. found that the audience for news was no different in its viewing habits from the audiences of other programmes.⁴

Table 1.1 January-March weekday audiences amongst UK population (aged 15 and over)

The half to two-thirds of the population who watch one or more bulletins on the average weekday is described by both the BBC's and the IBA's research organisations in terms of socio-economic groupings using a simple market research classification. The composition of audiences as measured by the BBC is shown in Table 1.2. BBC is watched by a considerably larger proportion of the numerically small ‘A’ top socio-economic group than ITN. To a lesser extent the same applies to the ‘B’ group. The picture is reversed in the ‘C group, which has a larger following on ITN. This is confirmed in JICTAR research for the same period (March 1974), which shows that a majority of ITN's audiences was composed of viewers from lower socio-economic groups.⁵

Table 1.2 Estimated audience composition for television news (Wednesdays January-March 1974)

Just as there is a larger proportion of ITN viewers among the lower socio-economic groups in the audience, so there is a difference in the way that the two organisations were viewed by those groups. In a 1970 BBC survey the ‘C’ group nominated ITN as their ‘main source’ of news more frequently than either BBC television, radio or the press. The ‘B’ group nominated BBC television more frequently than any other source. Only in the small ‘A’ group was the press cited more frequently as a ‘main source’ than television.

Although high levels of interest were claimed by all socioeconomic groups, this 1970 study showed that a greater proportion of the middle class were ‘very interested’ or ‘extremely interested’ in the news. Where above-average interest was shown, however, radio and newspapers were more frequently cited as a ‘main source’ of news. A comparison of these 1970 results with those of the similar survey in 1962 shows that, in 1962, only 38 per cent cited BBC as their ‘main source’, 20 per cent ITN, 33 per cent newspapers and 17 per cent radio. In 1970 ITN had drawn level with the BBC. There has been a trend in favour of television news in general and ITN in particular.

The people interviewed in 1970 were also asked to say which source of news was ‘most interesting’. Approximately equal proportions cited BBC and ITN (34 per cent and 35 per cent respectively), which again reflected a trend in favour of ITN since the 1962 study. But the most important result of these BBC surveys is to be found in what they reveal of the audiences’ perceptions on the accuracy and trustworthiness of news sources. Results in 1957 and 1962 indicated that when asked to judge the trustworthiness of different sources of news, viewers elevated television news to a greater position of trust than either radio news or newspapers. These results were confirmed in 1970 (see Table 1.3). It is of course to be expected that the main selected source of news will usually be regarded as trustworthy. What is most interesting about this Table is that even among those who claim that the newspapers are their ‘main source’ of news, far more thought television news, especially on the BBC, to be more ‘accurate and trustworthy’ than the papers they read. The supposed lack of editorial content on television news, the brevity of news items, the widespread feeling that ‘the camera never lies’, the lack of firstperson statements, must all contribute to this result.

Table 1.3 The ‘most accurate and trustworthy’ news

Trustworthiness is not, however, impartiality, and another slightly different question revealed that perceptions of the ‘impartiality’ of the television news have changed dramatically. BBC television news was thought to be ‘always impartial’ by 62 per cent in 1962 but only by 47 per cent in 1970. This trend was particularly marked among younger viewers. The BBC have suggested that this does not ‘constitute proof of a decline in the BBC's standards of impartiality. It may be “society” that has changed, more people (particularly the young) taking a sceptical view of organisations seen as part of “the establishment”’.⁶ This jaundiced view of the young cannot alter the fact that less than half of the sample interviewed believed the BBC was always impartial. To blame society for this is to argue without evidence that there is some platonic notion of truth obvious to and practised by the broadcasters, but only the audiences’ increasing wilfulness prevents them from seeing it.

Concern at the absolute and relative decline in the standing of BBC news led to a further in-depth interview study in 1972 to determine the causes.⁷

At a general level opinions of the news cannot be separated from opinions about each channel as a whole. The news is not normally seen in isolation from the rest of the output; news watching is, according to these interviews and other studies,⁸ habitual, often passive, and governed by behaviour patterns which have little to do with the news programmes themselves. These factors help to explain why public opinion emphasises stylistic differences; the BBC's formal, serious, humourless and establishment image, and ITN's interesting, friendly, human image. Among the attitudes to the BBC revealed in the 1972 study, the features singled out for criticism were a class bias in favour of the Conservative party and management, unnecessary complexity of language, and a stiffness and formality in presentation. On questions of detail (including the balancc of items, the use of film, etc.) there is less clear differentiation between channels in the minds of the interviewees. Where it does exist it is more likely to arise from general attitudes towards BBC and ITN rather than from specific differences in news output.

Thus, for example, although BBC was thought to concentrate on more serious items and ITN to aim for a balance of serious and lighter items, this was a judgtnent about style rather than selections or balance of items. But despite these perceptions and the fact that the channels are supposedly in competition, our study found few structural differences between them. The amount of time devoted to each category of news; how long the individual items last; how much film is used, all vary very little from channel to channel. The main differences are that ITN industrial items tend to be longer than the BBC's, possibly a result of the different organisations in the two newsrooms. ITN have a team of three covering industrial and economic affairs, whereas during the period of our study the BBC had two correspondents independent of each other. BBC, with an education correspondent, cover rather more in that area than ITN. Aside from this, ITN uses more photographs than the BBC, and although they use about the same amount of film, ITN's film contains fewer interviews, fewer ‘talking heads’. In fact ITN, certainly in News at Ten, covers a slightly greater range of stories rather more quickly than the BBC does. But none of this alters our fundamental finding that at a deep level, considering the range of journalistic approaches available, the bulletins are very similar. Out of the range of possible stories they both make a closely corresponding selection day by day, often down to running the same joke human interest items at the end.

In view of our own findings that, in most structural essentials, BBC and ITN news bulletins do not differ, the 1972 survey is significant. What the broadcasters know of audience perception has allowed them to turn these questions away from themselves and place the onus on the viewers. Thus, the BBC claims ‘balance is important to the news viewer, but different sections of the audience understand different things by it. This being so, it seems unlikely that one could produce a news programme which seems “balanced” to everyone who sees it.’⁹ By implication the broadcasters here again separate themselves from society, which is too differentiated to perceive the balance the broadcasters achieve. The achievement of balance cannot thus be checked against perceptions. What it can be checked against is not suggested.

In view of the findings that television news is still widely regarded as an ‘accurate and trustworthy’ source, it is not surprising to discover that, in this study, few people were concerned about bias or indeed believed that it existed. Those who did claim to detect deliberate or avoidable bias seemed to derive their view from an overall assessment of BBC and ITV rather than from a particular sense of bias in the news. Only some of the younger interviewees appealed to ‘significant absences’ as a source of bias, arguing that the lack of space given to the IRA or Vietcong point of view was evidence of a lack of objectivity.

Thus the BBC was able to dismiss the issue of bias as ‘not really relevant’, or at least simply a question of style. At the surface level, the results of our own study tend to confirm that there is little to choose between the two sources of news on grounds of content, technical competence and consistency. Yet by the broadcasters’ own findings more than half the viewers now see their news output as not ‘always impartial’. Whether those viewers are young, extremists, or otherwise, this change-around cannot be dismissed easily and has created what Anthony Smith, has termed the ‘contemporary crisis in news credibility’.¹⁰

The news bulletins are becoming a contentious area. Yet it is in exactly this area that the appearance of credible neutrality is so crucial. For as Smith suggests, ‘Credibility in the minds of the actual audience is the sine qua non of news. All else is propaganda or entertainment.’¹¹ Smith argues that the trades union movement has mounted a steady campaign against news reporting which fails to satisfy what trades unionists may feel are adequate standards of neutrality. Smith overstates his position, for with few exceptions the complaints about trades union coverage from unions are fairly informal and cannot be said to constitute a campaign. The notable exception to this is the pioneering study undertaken by the ACTT Television Commission in 1971. This study was an imaginative if albeit limited attempt to assess the impartiality or otherwise of news and other programmes’ coverage of industrial and trades union issues. The researchers found that the BBC was erratic in its coverage, and tended to trivialise. It also suggested that on a number of occasions it had failed to maintain impartiality. This was said to be less true of ITN whose treatment, they found, ‘evidences conscientious effort to maintain impartiality’.¹² It also criticised the trades unions for not being fully aware of the ‘positive role they must play in supplying and checking television coverage of industrial affairs’.¹³

Smith remains convinced that the most likely outcome of a debate on any given area of news is that the ‘news will in the course of time simply mop up the areas of discontent in order to regain credibility’.¹⁴ However true this might be of the broadcasting institutions’ on-going relationship with such bodies as the TUC or CBI, these political activities find little reflection on the screen. Smith appears to be wrong on both counts. The ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 REVIEWING THE NEWS
• 2 CONSTRUCTING THE PROJECT
• 3 INSIDE THE TELEVISION NEWSROOM
• 4 MEASURE FOR EASURE
• 5 CONTOURS OF COVERAGE
• 6 TRADES UINIONS AND THE MEDIA
• 7 DOWN TO CASES
• APPENDIX 1
• APPENDIX 2
• NOTES