Abstract
This article is a study of how the press registered and re-registered news as truth about the Westray explosion and its aftermath from 1992 to 2002. The research examines 1,972 news stories and uses Michel Foucault's concept of the “politics of truth” and Stanley Cohen's ideas about cultural denial to understand the social organization of news production and the implications of the media for witnessing and accounting for Westray's “truth” when corporate and state institutions stand accused. I argue that truth-telling exercises were diverse and divergent and produced “regimes of truth” around natural accident, legal tragedy, and political scandal. But the absence in the presence of these varied truth-telling exercises was a social vocabulary of corporate crime. This absence marked the limit of the press's ability to tell the truth to powerful corporate and state interests, the place where their truth-telling was made coincident with the exercise of power and where workplace crime was made invisible in popular culture.
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