Between mediatisation and politicisation: The changing role and position of Whitehall press officers in the age of political spin

Despite widespread critiques of ‘political spin’, the way governments engage with the mass media has attracted relatively little empirical attention. There is a small but growing body of research into bureaucracies’ responses to mediatisation from within which have identified tensions between bureaucratic and party political values, but this has not included the United Kingdom. There are concerns that the traditional dividing line between government information and political propaganda has come under increasing pressure as a higher premium is placed on persuasion by both journalists and politicians battling for public attention in an increasingly competitive market. Within Whitehall, the arrival of Labour in 1997 after 18 years in opposition was a watershed for UK government communications, allowing the government to reconfigure its official information service in line with the party political imperative to deploy strategic communications as a defence against increasingly invasive media scrutiny. Public relations, in government as elsewhere, has grown in scale, scope and status, becoming institutionalised and normalised within state bureaucracies, but how has this affected the role, status and influence of the civil servants who conduct media management? Within the system of executive self-regulation of government publicity that is characteristic of Whitehall, government press officers must negotiate a difficult path between the need to inform citizens about the government’s programme, and demands by ministers to deploy privileged information to secure and maintain personal and party advantage in the struggle for power. Taking 1997 as a turning point, and through the voices of the actors who negotiate government news – mainly press officers, but also journalists and special advisers – this article examines the changing role and position of Whitehall press officers in what has become known as the age of political spin, finding that profound and lasting change in the rules of engagement has taken place and is continuing

Antiphospholipid antibodies prevent extravillous trophoblast differentiation.

Objective We investigated the hypothesis that antiphospholipid antibodies (aPL) have a detrimental effect on human extravillous trophoblast (EVT) differentiation into giant multinucleated cells “in vitro.” Design The EVT were isolated from the placental chorion using enzymatic digestion and Percoll gradient centrifugation. After 24, 36, and 48 hours in culture, giant multinuclear cells (GMC) were identified by immunohistochemistry using antibodies to cytokeratin 7 and counted. Setting An academic research laboratory. Patient(s) Placentas were donated by women having an elective cesarean section for a normal pregnancy at term. Main outcome measure(s) This model was then used to investigate the effect of two different monoclonal aPL to β2-glycoprotein 1 (IIC5 and ID2), and control mouse IgG antibody on EVT differentiation. Result(s) Freshly isolated EVT were nonproliferative but moved together losing their intervening cell walls and differentiated into GMC. Maximal numbers of GMC were detected after 48 hours of culture. The aPL, IIC5, and ID2 significantly inhibited GMC formation, whereas the mouse IgG control had no effect. Conclusion(s) Antiphospholipid antibodies can inhibit EVT differentiation and GMC formation “in vitro” suggesting that a failure of trophoblast differentiation and subsequent uteroplacental development may be an underlying pathology in antiphospholipid syndrome-associated pregnancy loss

MAGNETIC AND STRUCTURAL CHARACTERIZATION OF CoNiCr THIN FILM MEDIA

Thin Co62.5Ni30Cr7.5 films were rf-sputtered onto glass and Cr/glass. Magnetic anisotropy, coercivity and magnetization were compared with inferences from structural characterization. For CoNiCr/glass narrow FMR line widths ƊH, low coercivity Hc and effective anisotropy field Hkeff values close to 4πMs were observed. For CoNiCr/Cr/glass broader ƊH, larger Hc and Hkeff deviating from 4πMs were observed. Crystal texture and grain growth depended on the presence/absence of a Cr underlayer

What Do the Decisions of the European Court of Human Rights Tell About Property Rights Across Europe?

Despite the important role that institutions play in explaining economic growth, there exist few objective quantitative measures of institutional quality. We propose a new quantitative index that allows comparing the strength of property rights across the member states of the Council of Europe. To construct the index, we analyzed all judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) related to property rights for all member states and identified whether the ECtHR had found a violation of property rights in the domestic courts’ decisions. The resulting data were used to calculate the likelihood of finding violation in the judgments of national courts. Assuming that the ECtHR is impartial and unbiased, higher probability of overruling the judgments of local courts from a given country implies that the level of property rights protection is low. Our constructed measure is highly correlated with a number of indices of property rights protection used in the literature and serves as a strong objective foundation for these indices. Furthermore, we found that the ECtHR had received more applications from countries with higher likelihood of national court judgments violating property rights