Trade Unions in British Television News

Abstract

During the past five years the idea that television may be biased has increasingly gained currency in political and journalistic discussion. The notion has particularly become attached to television news coverage of trade unions and the Labour movement. This paper aims to test for the possibility of political bias through close examination of one especially long and important transmission of BBC news, one which, having receded a few years into the past, enables a certain gain in critical perspective. On 14 May 1980 the TUC organized a 'Day of Action' to protest at government policies. It was reported on the BBC 9.oo pm news of that evening. Because of extra time in a football match the transmission did not go out until 9.56 pm. By a happy coincidence ITN was blacked out by a (wholly separate) strike action, so there is no problem about contrasting two versions of the news. Most people now regard television news as both their main source of news and their most reliable source of news: if they were to get a wider picture of the Day of Action on the evening of 14 May, it would be via BBC television news. The eleven minutes of air-time and I,46o words (see 'Appendix' for transcript) thus provide an unprecedented and extended text one not since matched in which one may consider how a sense of trade union activity is produced by British television news. Analysis will be concerned particularly with questions of genre, denotation versus connotation, and the deployment of what I shall call 'a regime of truth'. The conclusion argues that currently television news works through a form of 'balance' but a weighted balance which leans against the Labour movement. In addition to civil law, a particular statutory obligation to report news fairly and impartially is placed upon television news, both BBC and ITN. The IBA Act (1973) requires 'that due impartiality is preserved on the part of persons providing the programmes as respects matters of political or industrial controversy...' and the BBC's Licence, Clause 13 (7) (I981), requires that the Corporation 'shall at all times refrain from sending any broadcast matter expressing the opinion of the Corporation on current affairs or matters of public policy'.' This principle is invariably glossed and re-affirmed in the annual BBC Handbook, for example when it says that 'for the BBC to take sides in any controversial issue would ... be contrary to its own long-established policy of