Academic arguments
Nick Davies’s Flat Earth News was not the first book to incorporate academic research that annoyed senior media figures. This honour arguably goes to the provocatively-titled Bad News, published in 1976 by researchers from Glasgow University.
“Some TV executives were outraged that these young academics could criticise such august institutions as the BBC and ITN,” recalls one of the authors, Professor Greg Philo. A particularly scathing criticism came from Sir Geoffrey Cox, then a director of ITN, who said the book was “Indeed bad news: not, however, for television but for scholarship”.
It is easy to see why Cox and others were so offended. Bad News argued that, contrary to popular belief, British TV news is not impartial. With a focus on industrial disputes and economic affairs, the authors painstakingly analysed 240 hours of ITN and BBC news. They found that certain individuals and groups, typically those on the right, were given more airtime and credence than left-wing voices.
The lack of balance is a common (but certainly not the only) theme in journalism research. In the UK, hundreds of thinkers are devoted to the dissection of journalistic output, the analysis of journalism practice, audience perceptions, and countless other aspects of the media. Undoubtedly, some research is undertaken for purely academic reasons and little is read by anyone outside universities. But for many academics, the purpose is to encourage better journalism. Greg Philo says that journalism research should break out of the libraries and “make a full contribution to informing public debate”.
While these are noble intentions, journalism research is often dismissed by the profession and industry upon which it comments. This is perhaps because it challenges the status quo and highlights problems that were previously unidentified. Some cynics go further and maintain that academics are ivory-tower dwellers who, having never even worked in the media, have no right to pass judgement.
Such attitudes frustrate Professor Justin Lewis of the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. “There is a deeply anti-intellectual culture in the UK and I sometimes wonder if these critics have actually read any research,” he says. “To suggest that academics shouldn’t comment on journalism is ironic when you consider, for example, that most political correspondents have never worked in politics.”
Another criticism is that the methods are not scientific. Greg Philo takes issue with this and says that academic rigour is absolutely fundamental. “Social science research is not infallible, but nor is natural science research.” He said journalism research was always peer reviewed and if a reviewer found something of note, they tried their hardest to disprove it.
Journalism and media research is meticulous to the extreme. Several techniques are used which, when combined, produce compelling arguments. One of the most common is content analysis, used to measure journalistic output. For example, if researchers were looking at the representation of asylum seekers, they would count the number of times politicians, members of the public, and asylum seekers were quoted in articles, and how many words were allotted to their views.
The problem with content analysis is, of course, that it is not qualitative. So researchers will use a complementary method, discourse analysis, to assess how certain phenomena were described. Again using the asylum seeker example, researchers would count positive, neutral and pejorative words (‘flood’, ‘wave’, ‘swamping’, etc).
A graphic example of the power of language and its effects on audience understanding can be found in another of Greg Philo’s books, Bad News from Israel (co-authored with Mike Berry.) They discovered that the words used by TV journalists to describe Israeli deaths resulting from the second Palestinian intifada of 2000 tended to be highly emotive. What’s more, words such as “murder”, “atrocity” and “slaughter” were rarely applied to Palestinian fatalities.
Once they have collected these data, researchers will then measure the effect on audiences. This is done through surveys, questionnaires and focus groups. It’s at this stage that the inadequacies of reporting often become apparent.
The audience research for Bad News from Israel, for instance, revealed that some TV viewers believed, wrongly, that there were more Israeli deaths than Palestinian and related their belief directly to what they had seen on television. Actual Palestinian deaths had outnumbered Israeli fatalities by a factor of between two and three to one, but the research showed there was an emphasis on Israeli casualties, in terms of coverage and in the language used to describe them.
A third criticism of research is that academics are too detached from journalism. Tony Harcup, director of teaching of Journalism Studies at Sheffield University and a member of the Journalist’s Editorial Advisory Board, has sympathy with this view. “Too much research is written in an impenetrable language and some academics look down on journalists. If we really want to encourage better journalism, we need to bridge these gaps,” he says.
Does academic research make a difference? Justin Lewis believes so, but says we should not expect a revolution. “Research informs teaching and current journalists will have been exposed to key research texts during their time at universities,” he says. This may be true but, as Nick Davies and others have found, there are still plenty of deep-seated problems in British journalism.
Many journalists agree with the findings of academic research. But it is the media executives who hold the power and until they read, assess and act on the research, journalism will not have a fertile environment in which it can thrive.
Journalism research online
Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies
www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/en/research/
Glasgow Media Group
www.gla.ac.uk/centres/mediagroup/
University of Sheffield Department of Journalism Studies
www.sheffield.ac.uk/journalism/research
Journalism Studies and Journalism Practice are published by Taylor & Francis. Free online samples can be obtained at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journals.asp?subcategory=AH300000
Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism is published by Sage. A free sample is available at http://jou.sagepub.com/
The Association for Journalism Education (www.ajeuk.org) is focused on journalism education but it also promotes and supports journalism research. Conference papers can be accessed free of charge on its website.
In the US, Colombia Journalism Review’s mission is to “encourage and stimulate excellence in journalism in the service of a free society”. Many articles are available free of charge on its website, www.cjr.org
Gary Merrill is an honorary tutor at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies
- Gary Merrill is an honorary tutor at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies