Risk, Advice and Trust: How Service Journalism Fails Its Audience

Abstract

This chapter examines a particular aspect of British news coverage of two ‘food scares’ — BSE/vCJD1 (also known as ‘mad cow disease’) and salmonella infection in eggs. It focuses on the sub-section of news that can be described as ‘service journalism’ in order to examine the possibility that such coverage might provide progressive alternative perspectives to those which are part of a dominant ‘official’ discourse. In terms of the themes of this collection, the question is whether audiences are justified in putting their trust in service journalism; does it address the ‘problems of everyday life’ (in this case, food scares) as (sub-) political issues demanding collective, and therefore political forms of response, or as individualised problems requiring only consumption-based responses; does it address audiences primarily as citizens, or as consumers? In particular, I want to examine the arguments of Eide and Knight (1999) who suggest that despite the tendency of service journalism to ‘individualize problems’, it is ‘amenable to politicisation’ due to its focus on the same kinds of issues that are dealt with by the social movements and pressure groups which drive ‘subpolitics’ (1999, p. 525; see also Beck, 1994, pp. 22–3). They theorise their arguments via Habermasian notions of the public sphere (Habermas, 1989) and Ulrich Beck’s risk society thesis (1992b; 2000) and suggest a hybrid social identity in which citizen, consumer and client roles interact.