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For over twenty five years the Glasgow Media Group have argued that both BBC News and ITN cannot refrain from editorialising
and fall short of their legal obligation to present political and industrial news in a balanced, neutral and objective fashion.
They argue that television news:
Does not reflect the full range of views
Is undemocratic in its choice of who
is allowed to speak
Broadcasters defy notions of accuracy and impartiality
The Group argued that: the dominant ideology
works in the production of television news. (GUMG 1980 p497) In addition, the first two volumes made a clear distinction between
the distorted false consciousnesses generated by the media and the independent reality of events found in true consciousness:
Our argument in Bad News Volume 1 of this study was that routine news practices led to the production of bad news. For
example, viewers were given a misleading portrayal of industrial disputes in the UK when measured against the independent
reality of events. (GUMG 1980 xiii).
One of the key problems with the Groups research is concerned with the manner
in which they gather the data for their arguments. The group rejected conspiracy theories of the media; rather the group have
always argued that news was structured and organised by taken for granted professional routines of journalists. Their initial
research made use of the content analysis in an effort to identify and measure ideology and its consequences. John Eldridge
has strongly supported the use of the content analysis by the Group. Eldridge (1995) argues that the content analysis is
a methodologically unobtrusive measure, which can be used to analyse data without influencing what is produced. However, there
are issues about how the group define and measure ideology and if conceptual and methodological devices the Group used can
support their conclusions. When asked to explain what the Glasgow Media Group understood by ideology Greg Philo and David
Miller recently explained:
We define ideology as social perspectives or ways of understanding which are linked to
class or other interests In addition, their work does not simply reproduce the Marxian conception of ideology: Our studies
have gone a long way beyond traditional models of the Bourgeoisie and the Exploited classes We have been centrally concerned
with the role of media in the mass production of misunderstanding and ignorance We have also shown how the media do have a
role in the legitimisation of powerful interests and how ideologies can actually work to convince populations. (Philo and
Miller 2001 p17) In addition, Philo and Miller also argue that the content analysis can be effectively used to describe and
measure ideology.
Content Analysis
Positivists, such as the Glasgow Media Group, who use the
content analysis, assume that numbers and number systems have a logic and meaning to them. In addition, positivists, such
as the Glasgow Media Group, also assume that human behaviour has a logic and meaning to it. Most importantly, the assumption
is that the logic and meaning of number systems can be applied to human behaviour in order to fully describe and explain human
behaviour in a way that non-positivists never could.
The Glasgow Media Groups content analysis involves producing a
set of analytical categories in advance, which were then objectively applied to recorded television news programmes. The information
from the news programmes was fitted into the categories. The number of times each category appeared in the news programmes
was counted and the numerical quantification was said to reveal the true meaning of the news. In other words, the group has
evidence to support their conclusions used the saturation of predefined analytical categories.
In 1982 the Group
argued:
Public broadcasting is committed to an ideological perspective which is founded on the view of consensus, one
nation and the community The broadcasters attempt to relay ideas which are already more or less present and interpret them
for what they mistakenly see as a mass audience. (GUMG 1982 p134).
The important question here is how did the Group
get from the numerical quantification of the content analysis to that conclusion? Similarly, Eldridge has argued:
But we did suggest that unspoken, unacknowledged assumptions, practices or perspectives help to constitute what Goffman had
called the primary framework, whereby news talk becomes meaningful. (Eldridge 1995 p22)
The question here is how can
the content analysis capture this?
In his discussion of media institutions and journalists Greg Philo (1995) claims:
.. the routine working practices of journalists are informed by class assumptions of the society in which they live..
(Philo 1995 p181)
They usually wish to claim that their reportage is accurate and trustworthy, although as we show in
the case studies of our original work the unconscious political assumptions which they hold produce selection and distortion
which often invalidate these claims. (Philo 1995 p182)
Apart from the obvious objection that the production of news
and current affairs programmes is not performed in an unconscious fashion. Of course the content analysis cannot measure such
things as unconscious political assumptions. The content analysis can never tell us anything about the production of the content
it describes. What is happening here is the imposition of an analysis rather than the objective discovery of data. The Group
simply present a set of complex looking numbers to enhance the look of their arguments, which were formed and well rehearsed
in advance of the data collection. The analytical categories were defined in advance of the data collection and were then
used as evidence to support a theory that was already in the minds of the Group. The content analysis was never more that
a projective test that reinforces the researchers own analysis.
In addition, the content analysis can never tell
us anything about the mass production of misunderstanding and ignorance because the content analysis can tell us nothing about
how the audience consume the meaning of the news. Again as Eldridge makes clear in his discussion of the findings of the Group:
This does not imply that television viewers interpret the news in the same way. (Eldridge 1995 p22)
In response to
argument that the Group a simply propagating the myth of the passive viewer, the Group gave the unconvincing response that:
The argument outlined above is nothing more than a restatement of the classic reinforcement view. (GUMG 1980 p140). However,
they continued to assume that media audiences passively accept often-repeated messages with no justification.
Even
if we accept the Groups argument that news was structured and organised by taken for granted professional routines of journalists.
What Philo and the Group need to do is to justify why their perspective of news events is superior to that of the journalistic
accounts. Ironically, in support of their arguments the group regularly make use of what they consider to be authoritative
news sources such as the FT or Management Today. Surprisingly, although the Group spend a great deal of time telling their
reader what is news and what is not news, what is due impartiality and what is distortion, the Group shy away from placing
the truth at the centre of their analysis.
The Group develop a critique of postmodernism that is clearly outlined
in Message Received (1999) edited by Greg Philo. In this volume Greg Philo argues:
.. much of this subject area (and
much else in social science) has lost the ability to engage critically with the society in which it exists and has drifted
into irrelevance. We argue that this was in part the result of the growth of post-modernist approaches and the adoption of
their inadequate philosophical assumptions about the relationship between language and reality. The most important assumption
here has been that the real world is understood through language, but because language changes its meaning in use (and between
cultures and groups) therefore reality also changes and is never absolutely defined or agreed upon.
Within the post-modern
vision, there can be no agreed reality or facts because meanings are not fixed but are re-negotiated in the constant interplay
of the reader and the text. (Philo 1999 pix)
In this passage, Greg Philo is assuming that there is an objective
reality which can be grasped by a true consciousness and he is also objecting to the argument that audiences are proactive
in their consumption of media texts. Not only do members of the Glasgow Media Group including Greg Philo himself regularly
argue against the idea of a true consciousness and the idea of a passive audience. Most importantly, for his critical comments
about postmodernist positions, Greg Philo and the Group have a tendency to drift off into the mists of relativism. At the
centre of their analysis the Group have the Deleuzian notion of the rhizome the assumption that no account of the world is
superior or inferior to any other conception of the world. The only reason why the work of the Group has any critical edge
to it is because of these postmodern assumptions. As Greg Philo explains:
Reality is not, therefore, something which
is simply out there waiting to be measured a neutral set of facts. Rather, what can be seen in the reality depends in part
upon assumptions that are held of what the reality is, and of what are the relations which produce it as it is. (Philo 1990
p229)
The Group argue that due impartiality is impossible to achieve and criticise both BBC News and ITN for not
achieving it:
We find it difficult, indeed unhelpful, to assign labels like objective, impartial or neutral to such
a manufactured product. (GUMG 1985 p237)
[We] .. realise the inadequacies of using a term like bias, as though there
were a wholly objective account of the world that can be reported on a news bulletin instead of different ways of constructing
the account. (Eldridge 1995 p13)
In addition, it is interesting to note that in the more recent work on mental illness
(Philo 1999) Greg Philo clearly argues that ideas about mental illness, presented via television drama, sitcoms and film etc.,
are not part of a class-based ideology. However, in attempting to account for the origin of ideologies about mental illness
the Group embrace a number of Foucaudian themes.
Apart from the obvious embracing of full-blown postmodernism by
Greg Philo and other members of the Group. The content analysis is clearly an inappropriate research method for reading ideologies,
which probably explains why the Group initially supplemented it with more semiological approaches and thematic approaches
and eventually moved away from gathering empirical data by research methods and opted for producing political tracts from
a distinctly Old Labour perspective which relied on print and broadcasting products that the Group approved of: Panorama,
Dispatches, The Observer, The Guardian, Marketing Week; for an example of this newspaper/political campaigning approach and
the drift of the Group away from their token attempt at empirical research and into mere speculation, see Philos Television,
politics and the rise of the New Right in Philo (1995) pages 198-233.
In More Bad News (1980) the Group did give
a brief defence of the content analysis, including a justification that the content analysis can be used to make empirically
valid statements about the process of news production and ideology. The Group argue:
It has been a basic contention of
our approach that the detailed examination of the output of television journalism can be used to demonstrate its ideology
and practices. (GUMG 1980 p407)
How is this possible? The justification of the Group is:
Since the output clearly
has meaning, then the production of that meaning can be as clearly be studied on the screen as it can be by interviewing either
producers or audiences. (GUMG 1980 p409).
There are several problems with this argument. The group are assuming
that any text has only one meaning for an audience. In other words, the Group mistakenly see a mass audience in the same way
as the journalists they accuse. Moreover, the Group assume that the reading of the audience is one and the same as the imposed
reading of the Group. Which is clearly not the case. Some of the assumptions that the Group make about the process of news
production such as key role of unconscious political assumptions could not be studied either by content analysis or interviewing,
but only implied from responses. The meaning of the output generated by the content analysis is dependent upon the analytical
categories used in the process of data collection. The categories merely reproduce news output in a form that reproduces
the prejudices of the researchers. Again, meaning is implied and imposed but never discovered by the Group.
What
is a thematic analysis?
Throughout their work the Group make unjustified assumptions about the enduring nature of
class and class cultures. In the later books this approach, of imposing a form of class analysis on the data prior to the
numerical quantification was described as a thematic analysis. Greg Philo describes this process as: A key issue .. to show
the meaning of individual words or statements in their specific contexts. (Philo 1990 p167). Setting the context as one of
enduring class structures and enduring class cultures is simply the imposition of a class analysis by fiat. On the whole
this class based assumption of the relationship between class interests and belief is shared by all members of the Group,
but not always by Greg Philo. In Seeing and Believing (Philo 1990) he argues: But class experience was not synonymous with
political belief. (Philo 1990 p153). Similarly, Philo has argued: Firstly, the beliefs of an individual are not a single
coherent entity derived in a linear fashion from one aspect of their class position. (Philo 1990 p185).
Although
Greg Philo is sometimes unclear and uncertain about the relationship between truth, class and ideology, one thing that is
clear is that the nature and origin of the theme is always unstated.
Countering ideology
Greg Philo (1990)
does give the reader a clear indication of how to combat the mass production of misunderstanding and ignorance. Protection
from ideological distortion of the media can be achieved by:
Drawing upon ones direct experience (Philo 1990 p154)
Drawing upon direct contacts (Philo 1990 p154)
Drawing upon political culture (Philo 1990 p154)
Drawing upon our
class experience (Philo 1990 p154)
Drawing upon processes of logic (Philo 1990 p154)
Drawing comparisons between
different accounts (Philo 1990 p154)
On this last point Greg Philo argues: A second major reason for doubting television
news was the comparison of it with other sources of information, such as the quality and local press or alternative current
affairs programmes and radio. (Philo 1990 p150). This raises the question of why Greg Philo holds some journalistic accounts
in such high regard and regards BBC and ITN accounts in such low regard. The basis of this privileged positioning of some
accounts needs some justification. In addition, Greg Philo seems to be suggesting that people who read the same quality and
local press, watch the same Channel Four documentaries, share the same friends, political culture and logic as Greg Philo
are liberated from ideology. Greg may be a legend in his own mind, but the rest of us would like to see some justification
for how he claims to have knowledge that the rest of us do not posses and to be able to adjudicate between competing cognitive
claims, how does he justify his claim to hold such a position of epistemological privilege?
Conclusions
The Glasgow Media Group do not pose interesting questions because they have their answers in advance. Greg Philo has
no concept of ideology. Ideology is merely news and views that he disagrees with. The whole argument of the Group is wrapped
up in a romantic package about what life was like before the new right. One of the reasons why many people have embraced
postmodern ideas is because of the total and complete intellectual collapse of Marxism as the basis of an explanatory framework
for anything.
Shaun Best
The Nottingham Trent University
Eldridge, John (ed) (1995) Glasgow
Media Group reader: News content, language and visuals Vol. 1: News content, language and visuals London, Routledge
Glasgow
University Media Group (1976) Bad News; foreword by Richard Hoggart London, Routledge
Glasgow University Media Group
(1980) More Bad News London, Routledge
Philo, Greg (ed) (1995)Glasgow media group reader Vol. 2: Industry, economy, war
and politics London, Routledge
Philo, Greg (1990) Seeing and believing: the influence of television London Routledge
Philo, Greg (1999) Message received: Glasgow Media Group research, 1993-1998 Harlow: Longman
Philo, Greg and Miller,
David (2001) Market Killing: A Reply to Shaun Best Social Science Teacher Vol 31 No 1 Autumn 2001 page 17
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