Minimisation: The Pizza Charter

Binakuromo Ogbebor

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-37265-1_8

Abstract

AbstractMedia scholars have observed that mainstream newspapers trivialise and denigrate efforts at ensuring press accountability, in a bid to protect their self-interest (McChesney, The political economy of media: Enduring issues, emerging dilemmas. New York: NYU Press, 2008, p. 451). It is this trivialisation and denigration of attempts at reforming media policy that is referred to as the strategy of minimisation (Thomas and Finneman, Who watches the watchdog? Journalism Studies, 15(2), 172–186, 2014). In the media reform debate that arose from the News of the World phone hacking scandal and the Leveson Inquiry, the strategy of minimisation manifested in a number of ways: (1) playing down the cross-party Royal Charter on press regulation, (2) playing down the Leveson Inquiry, (3) playing down the scandal, (4) in a discourse of “unfair” treatment of the press and (5) critiquing critics of the press’ position. All these were geared towards protecting the neoliberal interpretation of press freedom.

Highlights

The emerging journalistic metadiscourse in all newspapers apart from Guardian undermined the meeting because of the resultant Royal Charter underpinned by statute
The Royal Charter currently before Parliament is unchanged from the deal agreed by Mr Grant’s friends over pizza in March. (Slack 2013, n.p.—Daily Mail)
My investigation into how the strategy of minimisation was used in the press coverage of the debate that followed the News of the World phone hacking scandal revealed that the strategy was used in varying degrees by all newspapers in the coverage. It manifested in the forms of press disparagement of the Royal Charter which they nicknamed the Pizza Charter; interpretations of press reform proposals as acts motivated by political self-interest; by de-legitimising the Leveson Inquiry, describing it as illegitimate and unfair; and by using the character smear technique against supporters of stringent press reforms

Summary

Guardian Daily Daily

6.1 7.4 1.5 100.0 expenses scandal (Forsyth 2013, p. 15) as can be seen in the headline “MPs want revenge on press over expenses” (Daily Mail 2013, n.p.). This article from The Sun summarises the press’ argument: He [Sir David Bell] was a founder of Common Purpose, a shadowy organisation dedicated to curbing the Press He helped set up the Media Standards Trust which virtually scripted Leveson proceedings, Hugh Grant’s Hacked Off, and the disastrous Bureau of Investigative Journalism which led the BBC to falsely suggest Lord Alistair McAlpine was a paedophile. In The Sun, this character smear minimisation technique came second among dominant themes in the paper’s coverage of the debate, just after the “threat to press freedom” argument It emerged as the dominant theme in 8.3 per cent of The Sun, 5.0 per cent of Daily Telegraph, 3.6 per cent of Daily Express, 2.0 per cent of Daily Mirror and 0.6 per cent of Guardian (see Table 8.3). The pair later explained that they went on the holiday together to discuss the possibility of a future relationship and decided

Critiquing critics of

Findings

Conclusion