Strike Talk: A Case Study of News
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abstract
This article presents an exploratory analysis of strike news as reported by two Toronto dailies during the 1980 postal strike, in light of a number of recent British studies of industrial relations news (Beharrell and Philo, 1977; Clarke and Taylor, 1980; Connell, 1979; Edwards, 1979; Glasgow Media Group, 1976, 1980; Hartmann, 1975-6; Morley, 1976). These studies point to the way in which industrial relations news is framed so as to draw upon and reproduce certain dominant assumptions and beliefs about the nature of social reality. In this respect, they bear closely upon other recent conceptualizations of news as 'ideology1 (Fishman, 1978, 1980; Gitlin, 1980; Hall et al., 1978; Tuchman, 1978). This concept avoids the overly empiricist and psychologically reductionist limitations of the conventional idea of news 'bias' by viewing the form and content of discourse as socially determined, as the structural outcome of cross-cutting relations of power. The implication is that discourse remains partial in the sense that what is included stands in usually silent relation to what is excluded, viz. alternative ways of seeing and knowing the world. Thus, news accounts may be unbiased and balanced but nonetheless ideological in that they are bounded unwittingly and uncritically by assumptions about what is newsworthy in particular and credible knowledge in general.
