29 research outputs found
Discursive intersections of newspapers and policy elites: a case study of genetically modified food in Britain, 1996-2000
This thesis explores the under-researched terrain of policy elite-newspaper engagements
and in so doing makes a substantive contribution in formulating an original conceptual
framework for understanding how the interactional dynamics of the political-media
complex work. This framework is then applied to the GM food row in Britain by asking how
contestation emerged, was sustained then subsided in the political-media complex. This
reconstructs the processes by which the pro-GM government consensus was challenged
by newspapers, conflict escalated to fever pitch, threatening policy elite agenda and was
finally negotiated through key compromises.
Drawing on a theoretical framework that combines participatory politics, the political-media
complex and new risks, the thesis conceptualises interactional dynamics as ‘discursive
intersections’. These are shifts in claims and counter-claims that emerge during
engagement at the interface of different sets of knowledge, cultures and agenda in the
political-media complex. However there is an element of unpredictability in discursive
intersections that arises from the paradoxical interdependence-independence of the
relationship in the political-media complex; the elective and episodic nature of
engagement on particular issues; and the variable form this may take with potential for
conflict, negotiation or consensus. Historical and wider argumentative contexts are crucial
to how and what form engagement takes place but do not define it. Thus, the trajectory of
discursive intersections needs to be explored empirically rather than predetermined
theoretically. This is done using a hybrid methodology that draws attention to the
dialogical, persuasive nature of discursive intersections. The substantive contribution of
the research is the formulating of this alternative framework for the analysis of
interactional dynamics and its application to the GM food row in Britain.
It does this by exploring how – that is the process in which - engagement emerged,
escalated into contestation, was negotiated and then subsided. What emerged were the
following findings.
(1) Parallel, sustained and conflictual systems of argumentation about risk were
developed between media and political elites despite elite consensus, abstract
debates and short news cycles.
(2) Newspaper contestation was constructed around a deeply ambivalent suspended
certainty based on claims that there was no evidence of risk or benefit, harm or
safety and demands for elite responsiveness to acute public anxiety over this
Participatory politics, environmental journalism and newspaper campaigns
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journalism Studies, 13(2), 210 - 225, 2012, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1461670X.2011.646398.This article explores the extent to which approaches to participatory politics might offer a more useful alternative to understanding the role of environmental journalism in a society where the old certainties have collapsed, only to be replaced by acute uncertainty. This uncertainty not only generates acute public anxiety about risks, it has also undermined confidence in the validity of long-standing premises about the ideal role of the media in society and journalistic professionalism. The consequence, this article argues, is that aspirations of objective reportage are outdated and ill-equipped to deal with many of the new risk stories environmental journalism covers. It is not a redrawing of boundaries that is needed but a wholesale relocation of our frameworks into approaches better suited to the socio-political conditions and uncertainties of late modernity. The exploration of participatory approaches is an attempt to suggest one way this might be done
A "superstorm": When moral panic and new risk discourses converge in the media
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Health, Risk and Society, 15(6), 681-698, 2013, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13698575.2013.851180.There has been a proliferation of risk discourses in recent decades but studies of these have been polarised, drawing either on moral panic or new risk frameworks to analyse journalistic discourses. This article opens the theoretical possibility that the two may co-exist and converge in the same scare. I do this by bringing together more recent developments in moral panic thesis, with new risk theory and the concept of media logic. I then apply this theoretical approach to an empirical analysis of how and with what consequences moral panic and new risk type discourses converged in the editorials of four newspaper campaigns against GM food policy in Britain in the late 1990s. The article analyses 112 editorials published between January 1998 and December 2000, supplemented with news stories where these were needed for contextual clarity. This analysis shows that not only did this novel food generate intense media and public reactions; these developed in the absence of the type of concrete details journalists usually look for in risk stories. Media logic is important in understanding how journalists were able to engage and hence how a major scare could be constructed around convergent moral panic and new risk type discourses. The result was a media ‘superstorm’ of sustained coverage in which both types of discourse converged in highly emotive mutually reinforcing ways that resonated in a highly sensitised context. The consequence was acute anxiety, social volatility and the potential for the disruption of policy and social change
Constructing the eastern european other: The horsemeat scandal and the migrant other
The Horsemeat scandal in the UK in 2013 ignited a furore about
consumer deception and the bodily transgression of consuming
something so alien to the British psyche. The imagination of the
horse as a noble and mythic figure in British history and sociological
imagination was invoked to construct the consumption of horsemeat
as a social taboo and an immoral proposition in the British media
debates. This paper traces the horsemeat scandal and its media framing
in the UK. Much of the aversion to horsemeat was intertextually
bound with discourses of immigration, the expansion of the EU and
the threat in tandem to the UK. Food as a social and cultural artefact
laden with symbolic meaning and national pride became a platform
to construct the ‘Other’ – in this case the Eastern European Other. The
media debates on the horsemeat scandal interwove the opening up of
the EU and particularly UK to the influx of Eastern European migration.
The horsemeat controversy in implicating the Eastern Europeans for
the contamination of the supply chain became a means to not just
construct the ‘Other’ but also to entwine contemporary policy debates
about immigration. This temporal framing of contemporary debates
enables a nation to renew and contemporise its notions of ‘otherness’
while sustaining an historic social imaginary of itself
A hunger strike - the ecology of a protest: the case of Bahraini activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja
This article uses the case of a Bahraini activist to explore the twin interrelated ecologies of a hunger strike. The first ecology is the ethical framing of a prison hunger strike as a corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction intended to achieve political ends. The second ecology is the operation of global media where international inaction inadvertently foregrounds the political struggles that larger events and discourses surrounding Egypt, Libya and Syria overshadow. What connects these two ecologies is the body of the hunger striker, turned into a spectacle and mediated via a politics of affect that invites a global public to empathize and so enter into his suffering. The connection between the two lies in the emaciated body of the hunger striker in this case, Abdulhadi al-Khawaj
Contested processes, contested influences - a case study of genetically modified food in Britain
This chapter presents the findings of qualitative empirical research conducted in 2006 into elite claims of indirect media influence on the British Government’s policy on GM food between 1997 and 2000. The paper will explore the contributions and limitations of applying Robinson’s interaction model to media-policy relations to this situation. In so doing, it will show how routinized and embedded policy processes and procedures were destabilized by media hostility and a crisis of consumer confidence. These compelled government to act but their scope for action was institutionally circumscribed and this has implications for how we understand the constraints on media influence
[Book Review] of Networking Futures: The movements against corporate globalization by J.S. Juris. Duke University Press: Durham and London
Newspaper campaigning in Britain in the late 1990s
Since the late 1990s there has been an expansion in the number of British newspaper campaigns, but studies have yet to explore the culture of this particular form of intervention in terms of its roots, mythology and how these have influenced its modern manifestations. This chapter argues that while the decision and the reasons for campaigning are likely to be made in secret, the particularities of campaign discourses, processes and practices can elucidate a much more sophisticated range of reasons that are not limited to a commercial imperative but they are also strongly infused by constructions of moral principles and journalistic values. The use of the war metaphor of a ‘campaign’ in the GM food case signified a clearly orchestrated and articulated determination to mobilize public opinion and influence policy. The agenda was broad-ranging, the objectives were clearly stated, the function of the campaign served to sustain pressure and the tactics adopted sought to negotiate challenges posed by this particular type of intervention. This chapter uses a critical case study of the GM campaigns to derive a fuller conceptualization of campaigns than has hitherto been possible and to distinguish it from other forms of media intervention