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Ideological practice in labour news reporting

University of British Columbia

This study of ideology in the news media attempts to describe the ways in which a practical activity such as labour reporting is implicated in a larger process of constructing a view of the world from the perspective and in terms of the enterprises of those who "rule". Ideological practice in this study involves those organizational practices for creating "objective" news accounts which introduce a fundamental source of bias from a management perspective. In Chapter I the social context in which labour news accounts are made in advanced capitalist societies is discussed. She traditional approach to communications theory is criticized as a means to describe how an institutionalized or ""biased" point of view is produced. This approach is rejected in favour of working within the framework of the "social organization of knowledge This is concerned with the understanding of how "factual", documented accounts are constructed in bureaucratically organized settings. In Chapter II and III we examine the practical work activities involved in labour reporting at the "Star", a major Canadian daily newspaper in Western Canada. The practices involved in generating news accounts and establishing their factual status in an organizationally warrantable manner at the "Star" are examined. In Chapter II, three aspects involved in the generation of news accounts are viewed, i.e., those routine practices for locating, defining and writing news accounts. The manner in which, "events" and "facts" are constructed in these processes reveals that the presuppositions regarding "labour" attain practical significance in the procedures for perceiving what could be defined as newsworthy. Chapter III contains a discussion of the methods for documenting these accounts which express a management perspective in the construction of "labour". In this section, the following practices are examined for establishing the factual status of an account in terms of this relation to labour: a) the use of "reliable" sources to authorize an interpretation; b) reference to "objective" standards of interpretation to guard against "bias"; c) how the reporter's opinion on "the story" are separated from "the facts", and d) the production of "facts" through consensus. We conclude that the ordinary, routine procedures for reporting labour news construct a "managerial" conception of "labour" in the media. The ideological practices for "objective" reporting structure the relation of peoples' everyday experiences to their modes of thought about the world. This symbolic mode of action is one aspect of the unequal distribution of knowledge In advanced capita list societies and is a product of the ruling institutions which reproduce the extant relations of domination under capitalism.

Text

2010-01-30

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/19430

Sociology

University of British Columbia

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