Fitzgeraldetal Libre

GENERATING NEWS :

AGENDA SETTING

IN RADIO BROADCAST NEWS

Richard Fitzgerald

University of Queensland

Adam Jaworski

Cardiff University

William Housley

Cardiff University

INTRODUCTION

The news broadcast is a highly familiar institutional event in

which the latest ‘news’ is presented through routine discursive struc-

tures that provide a newsworthy framework for events to be reported

into (Clayman and Heritage, 2002). However, as has been emphasised

by many authors, news is not only concerned with reporting ‘events’.

Rather, media organisations are in the business of news production.

‘They construct it, they construct facts, they construct statements and

they construct context in which these facts make sense. They

construct “a” reality’ (Vasterman, 1995, quoted in Harcup and

O’Neill, 2001 : 265 ; see also Tuchman, 1978). Or, as Schudson puts

it : ‘To ask “Is this news ?” is not to ask only “Did it just happen ?” It

is to ask “Does this mean something ?”’ (Schudson, 1987 : 84). Thus,

while ‘breaking’ news, i.e. reporting on unanticipated major events,

may still be the top priority among newsmakers, the work of new

journalists has been likened to the work on the assembly line with

news being searched for, gathered, selected, and eventually turned

into stories in a routinized process of news-making (e.g. Gans, 1980 ;

Cook, 1998).

07-Fitzgerald.qxd 30/12/07 14:50

Reporting and presenting stories gathered by a programme,

however, creates a possible site of tension where usual editorial values

may be passed over in favour of carrying a story the programme has

sourced through its own investigative journalism. We explore this

blurring by focusing upon the discursive placement of news and the

creation of a news agenda through an examination of two examples

taken from the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. Using the ethnome-

thodological approach of membership category analysis, we suggest

that the presenters are seen to engage in complex categorial work in

the process of creating a topical context for an issue to appear in the

news programme as well as the subsequent development of the issue

as a relevant news agenda during the programme.

The data analysed in this paper is taken from a corpus of recor-

dings of BBC Radio 4 news programmemes collected over the course

of four weeks between 21st May and 15th June 2001, and forms part

of a larger research project focusing upon the genre of radio news

language and in particular on the issues of temporality in BBC radio

news broadcasts (see Jaworski et al., 2004). Within news broad-

casting, the Today programmeme enjoys a high profile within politi-

cal and media circles as a bedrock for quality news interviews, chal-

lenging, questioning and setting the day’s political agenda. Broadcast

on weekdays between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., and on Saturdays between

7 a.m. and 9 a.m., the programmeme attracts prominent political and

social commentators as well as influencing to a lesser or greater

extent the order of political discourse (Fairclough, 1998).

NEWS VALUES AND NEWS PRODUCTION

The Today programmeme is organised around cyclical slots for

news, finance, sport, review of the morning papers and news bulletins

but is also progressively oriented towards major news interviews oc-

curring in the later parts of the programme. This orientation involves

a common practice of reporting a story in the early part of the

programme and then following up or developing the story through an

interview towards the end of the programme. Whilst introducing and

returning to a story over the course of the programme is a routine oc-

currence in the data collected, there were also a number of instances

where the stories were based around an event or item sourced by the

programme itself. What became apparent in these instances was that

the presenters would work to build a newsworthy context for the items

to appear into, and that following the initial reporting, the stories

would then be paced through various stages including character

appearances towards a major interview later on in the programme.

2 L’analyse linguistique des discours des médias


In our data sample, we have identified four instances of this

practice and we build our argument around two randomly selected but

typical examples. Our two case ‘stories’ are referred to as ‘law and

order’ and ‘transport and the environment’. The law and order exam-

ple involves a previously high profile and controversial legal case

where in 1999 the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin shot dead a burglar

(and injured another one), for which he was sentenced for five years

in prison (he was released after three years). The programmeme

returns to the case after two years and interviews Tony Martin by way

of introducing a broader debate on law and order, as part of an

ongoing election campaign. The second example involves the Today

programmeme’s presenters and correspondents producing and dis-

cussing a report on transport and environmental issues also in the

context of the election campaign.

As has been mentioned, we are interested here in examining the

discursive processes of what can be referred as the ‘manufacturing’ of

news (cf. Cohen and Stanley, 1973). With our focus on close textual

analysis of the data extracts, we offer an insight into how discourse

(here : radio talk) works towards establishing the newsworthiness of

the target item (the interview of the day with a prominent politician).

As the interview is not a ‘real-life’ event to be reported on as news but

a media event to be presented as news, the discursive processes

preceding the main event are geared towards enhancing what Bell

(1991 : 158-160) has referred to as the ‘values in the news process’

such as continuity (making the interview part of an on-going story),

competition (scooping one’s rivals with an ‘exclusive’), co-option

(presenting lesser news items in relation to a high-profile story or

item), composition (presenting a mixture of different kinds of news),

predictability (pre-scheduling of events), prefabrication (the exis-

tence of ready-made text which can be transformed into a ‘story’).

Bell distinguishes these procedural news values from Galtung and

Ruge’s (1965) news values concerned predominantly with the

contents of news and status of news actors (see also Harcup and

O’Neill, 2001). As will be clear in our discussion below, the identity

of the main interviewees in our examples (Home Office Minister,

Shadow Home Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister) is also impor-

tant for the newsworthiness of the interviews ; after all, they are elite

politicians – members of the UK cabinet or shadow cabinet. However,

it appears that even with such high-profile news actors, the BBC

needs to establish a newsworthy context to justify their presence in a

live, prestigious media slot.

To restate, it is the decision-making and active negotiation bet-

ween editors, journalists, lawyers and presenters where the news is

Generating news 3


made (Molotch and Lester, 1974). The routine everyday work of

turning ‘stories’ into ‘news’ involves the constraints of balance, neu-

trality and objectivity together with the news values of time, access

and appeal within a news frame that serves to order the events as a

story in the world, as well as presenting the story to the world, or the

imagined audience (van Dijk, 1998 ; Fowler, 1991). However, the

selection, ordering and presenting of news events through the creation

of a news frame involves imposing familiar structures for novel

events and in so doing renders the representation of the ‘new’ or

‘unusual’ as ‘ordinary’ (Bell, 1991). Indeed, it is the very ordinariness

of the presentation of events, the very ordinariness of the structure

and appearance of the events and characters, which goes some way to

neutralize the possible reflection upon the events as ideologically

informed (Allen, 1999). This ordinariness is also at the heart of what

Fairclough (1995a) refers to as the ‘conversationalization’ of media

language. In Fairclough’s (1998) analysis of a radio news programme,

also applied to the Today programmeme, he identifies the added news

value of the programmeme, the possibility of influencing the political

order of discourse, as located in the presenters’ ability to emulate the

language of ‘ordinary discourse’, or ‘the man propping up the lounge

bar on a Sunday lunchtime’ (Fairclough, 1998 : 157). He also notes

how this programmeme is able to assemble a large number of promi-

nent commentators and interviewees and how it repeatedly returns to

a story throughout the three hour programme. However, although

identifying these characters as central to the unfolding of a story, in

Fairclough’s analysis they remain largely unexamined as to how,

where, when and why they appear (Fairclough, 1995b). Thus, in

treating the different appearances of the news and characters as

weighted equally, Fairclough neglects the construction of a particular

issue as a progressive series of news events that build upon each other

and develop over the course of the programme.

The organisation of topical characters in news stories is not

simply a matter of them appearing, but that these voices or characters

appear at temporally relevant times doing relevant actions during the

progression of the story in such a way as to provide a particular

structure to the story. With this in mind, it is important to trace not

only the evolution of a story over the course of a programme or

through the series of broadcasts on the issue but also through the

unfolding organization of the appearance of relevant characters

(Nekvapil and Leuder, 2002). This involves paying attention to the

use of familiar discursive structures of presentation and re-

presentation through which content becomes organised and made into

news in any particular instance.



TOWARDS A MEMBERSHIP CATEGORY

ANALYSIS OF NEWS DISCOURSE

Our analysis of the data draws upon the methodology of mem-

bership category analysis (MCA) embedded within a sequential

organisation (Sacks, 1995 ; Watson, 1997 ; Hester and Eglin, 1997a,

1997b ; Housley and Fitzgerald, 2002 ; Fitzgerald and Housley,

2002). This method involves paying analytic attention to the use of

description in conversation based upon methodical appearance of

sequentially relevant categories. The methodological approach

initially developed by Sacks (1974) in his example ‘The baby cried.

The mommy picked it up.’ demonstrates how deliberate categorial

considerations are illuminated by an analytical process of how we

make sense of this story. We understand the story in terms of the

‘mommy’ picking up her ‘baby’ in response to baby crying. For

Sacks, we understand this story in this way because we associate the

categories of ‘baby’ and ‘mommy’, with the membership categorisa-

tion device ‘the family’. Of course, both ‘baby’ and ‘mommy’ may be

categories of further collections such as the ‘stage of life device’. In

addition, this framework was complemented by the notion of category

bound activities (CBA’s) which were used to describe how certain

activities were commonsensically tied to specific categories and

devices (e.g. the tying of the activity of crying to the category ‘baby’)

(cf. Housley and Fitzgerald, 2002). For Sacks, such categorisations

and their devices formed part of the commonsensical framework of

members’ methods and recognisable capacities of practical sense

making. Whilst Sacks for the most part talked of categories and

devices as referring to personal social categories, subsequent

developments have extended category analysis to non-personal refe-

rences such as buildings (McHoul and Watson, 1984), social structure

(Coulter, 1983), as well as a broadcast news story (Hester, 2002).

The method of MCA enables close analysis of language use but

also allows an analytic flexibility through which differing levels of

category and sequential work are made visible. In the analysis below,

we suggest that the categorial organisation works on (at least) two

levels. Firstly, the overall story operates as a category of ‘news story’

in the device of ‘news programme’, and, secondly, as the story

unfolds, it uses the sequential appearance of relevant ‘characters’, at

specific stages as part of the internal development of the story, i.e.

they ‘appear-on-cue’ (Sacks, 1995 : Fall 1965, lecture 9 ; Spring

1966, lecture 20). In his discussions of the ‘appearance of characters’

within a story, Sacks refers to both ‘character’ and ‘category’ :

Generating news 5


[B]ack in the beginning of the course when considering ‘The

baby cried. The mommy picked it up,’ one of the things I was

remarking there was that when a character who has some

proper grounds for occurring and some proper thing to do,

has its cue, then there is no need to account for how they

happened to have come on the scene. (Sacks, 1995 Fall

1965, lecture 9 : 183).

Whilst not fully interchangeable, the notions of ‘characters’ and

‘categories’ have similar properties in the way categories of persons

appear as characters in the telling of a story such that a ‘character’ is

heard as the individual representation of a ‘membership category’.

Following this methodology, we examine the way the two news stories

selected are developed through distinct, temporally separated

episodes which act retrospectively and prospectively drawing upon

past discussions in order to premise and direct subsequent discus-

sions, and which are organised around the placement of topical

characters strategically placed to structure and guide the development

of the story.

Example 1. ‘ Law and Order’

Analysis of the language of broadcast news provides an answer

to why a story appears, why the story is newsworthy now. As Clayman

(1991) points out, news interviewers work to situate the news

interview within a sequence of newsworthy events and so create an

immediate, and hence newsworthy, context for an upcoming

interview.

The opening is plainly designed to convey an agenda for the

forthcoming interview and to situate it within an ongoing

stream of newsworthy happenings. In this way, the occasion

of talk is portrayed as a response to events and processes in

the larger social world. Establishing this connection is a

basic means of displaying the interview’s ‘newsworthiness’,

for it is through such discursive practices that the interview

is linked to public occurrences in the wider society (Lester

1980). (Clayman, 1991 : 55)

What Clayman outlines is that newsworthiness is not only a matter of

reporting on events that happen in the world or reporting on events

that are selected through the editorial process but involves the method

of presentation where the presenter discursively creates a context for

a current event to appear into. Whereas Clayman identifies this



discursive practice as synchronous with the interview locating it in its

‘opening’, what is of interest in our data is the way the process of

preparation can occur diachronically through a series of discrete

events, sometimes apparently unconnected, and spread over the

course of a programme. Overall, such processes of generating news-

worthiness can be linked to the notion of news values (see above) and

the legitimising of news topics or social actors participating in news

and other broadcast formats (cf. Thornborrow, 2001).

In exploring how this process of presentation unfolds in our first

example, it is important to examine the initial reporting of the item in

the early part of the programme to show how the presenter works to

build a newsworthy context establishing the item as ‘news’ for further

discussion.

EXTRACT 1

Law and Order. Today, 24.05.2001, 07 :32 a.m.

JH : the Home Secretary Jack Straw told senior police officers

yesterday that recorded crime is on the way down. last week he

was booed and jeered by rank and file officers of the Police

Federation. law and order is an issue in this election campaign,

if there is one thing during the last Parliament .hhh that

crystallised the whole debate about law and order .hhh it was the

conviction of Tony Martin. for murdering a teenager who tried

to burgle his remote farmhouse in Norfolk. .hhh the

Conservatives promised to tighten up the law on self-defence.

Labour accused them of jumping on a bandwagon. Tony Martin

himself became a national figure whether praised or

condemned. .hhh we’ve obtained an interview with Mister with

uh Tony Martin recorded on the phone from Gartree Prison in

Leicestershire. our reporter, Dominic Arkwright, asked him

whether he felt that levels of policing especially in rural areas

was encouraging people to take the law into their own hands.

In this extract, events are assembled and presented through the

familiar introductory structure identified by Clayman (1991) that

pulls together a number of events in order to generate topical

relevance. A speech by British Home Secretary Jack Straw on law and

order is topically linked to a previous event the week before of Straw

being ‘booed and jeered’ by an audience of police officers (line 3).

From this, the programme introduces the ‘issue’ of law and order in

the election campaign (line 4). An example of this ‘issue’ is then

presented as the ‘Tony Martin’ case prominent a while back (line 7).

This temporal shift to the past is then brought back to the present with

the announcement of an upcoming interview the programme has

‘obtained’ with Tony Martin from the prison where he is still serving

Generating news 7


his sentence (line 12). Thus the ‘case’ of Tony Martin provides an

example for the current ‘issue’ of law and order and in doing so pro-

vides temporal relevance to the interview sourced by the programme

with him about to be broadcast.

Thus, the interview with Tony Martin is discursively situated as

newsworthy through the selection of this item in conjunction with

other ‘current’ newsworthy agendas and topics. As indicated earlier,

Clayman (1991) documents the way news items are routinely

organised and introduced following a collection of related events and

then situating them within that ‘created’ newsworthy context. Viewed

through a categorial organisation, the events are offered as a collec-

tion of related events which together form a topical collection. The

introduction, then, invokes events as membership categories collected

as part of a newsworthy topical device into which the next item, the

next category, can be seen as belonging, i.e., the interview with Tony

Martin. The initial collection once established as a newsworthy device

then provides the topical basis through which to engage the story,

laying out the issues through a further layer of category work which

progressively organises the internal structure of the story. For exam-

ple, starting with Tony Martin, a number of relevant characters, or

categories, are introduced at progressively and sequentially relevant

times in the next extract that follows immediately after the interview

with Martin.

EXTRACT 2

Law and Order. Today, 24.05.2001, 7 :45 a.m.

JH : well unfortunately er the phone card that Tony Martin had been

using ran out and we were we couldn’t ask him about Fred

Barret we didn’t have time that the boy who died. .hhh we did

contact uh Fred Barret’s family we offered them the right to

reply to that interview but they and the family of the other

victim the other person who was shot, Brendon Fearen both uh

declined to comment .hhh on the line now though i:s

Superintendent Kevin Morris who is the President of the Police

Superintendents’ Association, .hhh of England and Wales, .hhh

er it’s it’s a bit unusual I grant you Mister Morris to be asking a

Police Officer to comment on something that a man who’s been

convicted of murder has had to say uh but what do you make of

that ?

KM : erm well I’ve you know obviously he’s entitled to his own

opinions, but I think there’s there’s always going to be a danger

when people take the law into their own hands, um I mean even

today, I’ve read a newspaper article where somebody was

convicted of manslaughter for tackling a youth who was stealing



his car, you you’ve got rights everyone has rights to defend their

own properties but there’s a limit and I think if you exceed the

limit you expect to be punished.

JH : yes I mean in that case you just mentioned, th- the a boy was

battered to death wasn’t he ? in effect, I mean that’s absolutely

unacceptable under any circumstances so your not defending

[

KM : yes

JH : that in any way, right fine let’s talk about police numbers this

[

KM : no no no

JH : was Martin’s uh principle complaint a complaint of course of

many other people as well that there simply aren’t enough police

officers to do the job that is needed to be done.

After playing the pre-recorded tape of Tony Martin, the presenter

makes reference to the families of Martin’s victims who had been

offered the right to reply but declined. Thus although the victims’

families did not wish to take part in the programme, the presenter

makes their absence as ‘noticeably absent’. This reference to absent

categories suggests that there is a sequentially relevant slot for them

to appear into, and if they do not then their absence may be accounted

for (cf. lines 3-7). The sequential orientation to relevant categories is

continued in the introduction of the next character. After Tony Martin

and the (absent) families of victims, JH introduces Superintendent

Kevin Morris (line 8). The way the Superintendent is introduced

suggests that he is oriented to as the next sequentially relevant

character as no preamble or contextual background for his appearance

in the programme is provided. However, JH’s hedging of his initial

question for KM (‘er it’s it’s a bit unusual I grant you Mister

Morris…’ ; line 7), signals that Kevin Morris’s presence on the pro-

gramme is not ‘naturally’ linked to the Tony Martin case itself.

Evidently, once the idea Tony Martin’s right to defend himself has

been dealt with by KM (lines 14–21), JH gets an opening into the

sequentially more relevant and unproblematic topical category of ‘law

and order’ he has been waiting for (‘right fine let’s talk about police

numbers’ ; line 27). Note here the two discourse markers ‘right fine’

signalling a shift to a new, preferred topic. Thus, JH moves on from

the particular (Tony Martin) to the general (police numbers) which

now makes KM’s category appropriate for the unfolding story.

Up to this point the introduction and development of the story

can be seen as part of the programmeme’s current affairs remit to

explore issues of public interest, although in its next incarnation the

Generating news 9


story appears in a news bulletin thereby imbuing it with wider news

credibility by being reported back to the programme as ‘headline

news’ (Extract 3). Moreover, the news bulletin recontextualises part

of the interview with Tony Martin, and the sound bite selected for the

news bulletin summarises and re-focuses on Tony Martin’s complaint

about insufficient police numbers in rural areas in the UK.

EXTRACT 3

Law and Order. Today, 24.05.2001, 8 a.m. (news bulletin)

RM : Tony Martin the Norfolk farmer who was jailed for life for

shooting dead a sixteen year old intruder at his remote farm, has

criticised both Labour and Conservative policies towards law

and order. .hhh in an interview for this programme from Gartree

Prison in Leicestershire .hhh Martin said they amounted to

nothing more than rhetoric. he was also critical of rural police

for failing to act against criminals.

TM : when you want help .hhh from the police suddenly there isn’t

any help. .hhh and I mean in my own particular case, I mean I’ve

gone down the road over several years, .hhh of giving them lots

of information. but they won’t, they won’t do anything so

basically (.) you’re on your own (.) well I’m afraid with the

police you are on your own aren’t you ?

24-hour news broadcasting orientates to hourly time cycles in

which regular features and news updates appear in rigidly time-tabled

slots within the 60-minute unit (Richardson and Meinhof, 1999). The

audience, it is assumed, do not watch or consume news 24 hours a day

but will (barring major news events such as ‘disaster marathons’, cf.

Liebes, 1998 ; Jaworski, Fitzgerald, Constantinou, 2005) dip in, catch

up and move on. In this cycle, the headlines in a news bulletin provide

a punctuation point where the ‘news’ is summarised and also, as in the

three-hour long Today programmeme, edited to move on with the

programmeme’s daily agenda. What is especially noticeable in Extract

3 is that the focus of the reporting shifts from his personal case and

the ‘local’ issue of rural crime to Martin’s criticism of the country’s

politicians (cf. ‘[Tony Martin] has criticised both Labour and

Conservative policies towards law and order’ ; lines 2-4). Thus, from

an interview that covered a wide range of topics mostly around Tony

Martin’s own plight and lack of remorse (not transcribed here), the

sound bite selected is one that invokes the wider national political

issue of ‘law and order’ as part of the programmeme’s agenda to make

it part of the discussion of the election campaign and to prepare the

ground for an upcoming interview with a Home Office Minister and

the Shadow Home Secretary. Moreover, although the programmeme’s



agency in assembling the interview in the first place is clearly stated

in the initial introduction of the story (cf. ‘we’ve obtained an inter-

view’ ; Extract 1, line 12), it is entirely eclipsed in Extract 3. Rather,

in Extract 3, the issue of law and order is seen to emerge sponta-

neously, through the use of non-transactive language (Hodge and

Kress, 1993) (cf. ‘in an interview for this programme’ ; Extract 3, line

4).

To re-cap, by reporting the issue as headline news, the summary

acts as a punctuation mark, a topical bridge by which the issue is

transformed from the ‘local’ issue of rural crime (cf. Extract 1), to the

issue of national policy presented as headline news (Extract 3). One

headline news in Extract 3 mention the two main UK political parties,

this inevitably makes allows the representatives of each party to be

brought in in the final hour of the programmeme.

EXTRACT 4

Law and Order. Today, 24.05.2001, 8–9 a.m.

JH : when a couple of young men broke into an isolated farm house

last year, the farmer Tony Martin was waiting for them with a

loaded shotgun. he shot at them and killed one of them and he

was convicted of murder. .hhh that conviction divided the

nation, and the politicians, and it continues to do so to this day.

as law and order is discussed in the election campaign .hhh the

case of Tony Martin is still there in the background. we spoke to

him on this programme earlier. .hhh it raised some important

issues. the right of a homeowner to defend himself as he thinks

best, to take the law into his own hands, the level of crime and

policing, in rural Britain. .hhh Mister Martin Tony Martin said

that people in areas such as he once lived in simply did not feel

safe. so let us discus law and order with the Home Office

Minister Charles Clarke, and with Ann Widdecombe, the

Shadow Home Secretary. .hhh er M:ister Clarke there

[interviews continue]

Extract 4 comes from a broadcast approximately one hour after

the introduction of the ‘law and order’ issue (cf. Extract 1) and

follows immediately after the news bulletin at 8 a.m. (Extract 3). In

creating a topical context for the newsworthiness of this item, the

main interview slot of the day, an assemblage of relevant categories

together with predicated actions are invoked. The introduction is

initially structured around a summary of the controversy surrounding

the Tony Martin case. Into this topical context or device are now

placed the categories of ‘criminal’, ‘victim’ and ‘convicted murderer’

as well as the categories of the ‘nation’ and ‘politicians’ through their

Generating news 11


action of ‘taking sides’.

The invocation of both the public and politicians acts to move the

categorial relevance on and begins to orientate to the upcoming

debate between Clarke and Widdecombe. By this point, the case of

Tony Martin and the earlier interview with him become mere ‘back-

ground’ (Extract 4, line 7). The presenter uses the interview to intro-

duce a number of new issues through the categories of ‘homeowners’,

‘self-defence’, and ‘people in rural areas’. It is the latter that is finally

transformed into the category ‘victim’ or ‘potential victim’ (‘people

in areas such as he once lived in simply did not feel safe’ ; lines

12–13), which legitimises the subsequent interview with the two

politicians (‘so let us discuss law and order’ ; line 13).

Note that in Extract 4, not unlike in Extract 1, law and order is

introduced as part of the ongoing election campaign (cf. Extract 1,

line 4 ; Extract 4, line 6), but apart from the recent speech by Jack

Straw mentioned at the beginning of Extract 1, the issue seems not to

be particularly live in either of the main political parties’ campaigns.

Therefore, the programmeme seems to source a controversial

interview with Tony Martin as a catalyst in staging the media debate

on a particular topic and relies on the construction of the topic as

newsworthy through careful categorial work in order to build up and

legitimate the main interview of the morning.

The categories made relevant in the context of this pre-interview

can be seen as forming part of the sequential flow and categorial

development of the topical issue over the course of the programme.

The introduction of Clarke and Widdecombe is the ultimate

realisation of the trajectory of the ‘issue’ of law and order raised

through the Tony Martin interview an hour earlier. Apparent then is a

progressive pacing of the issue over the course of the programme

through the appearance of relevant characters at sequentially relevant

times as the story is unfolded by the presenter. In the next example, a

similarly orchestrated trajectory is apparent where a topical issue is

raised in the early part of the programme in order to provide a

legitimate vehicle for an interview the programme has obtained with

a prominent and newsworthy character.

Example 2. ‘Transport and the Environment’

In a similar way to the discussion of the Tony Martin story above,

a progressive trajectory is present in the development of the

‘forgotten’ issue of transport and the environment. However, what

becomes apparent here is that the newsworthy aspect is not so much

the ongoing discussion of transport and environment policies during



an election campaign, but that the programmeme has obtained the

first interview with John Prescott – the Deputy Prime Minister and

Minister for Transport and the Environment – after an incident in

which he punched a member of the public who had thrown an egg at

him.

The topical issue is introduced in the first hour of the programme

during which the presenter, James Naughtie, poses the question of

transport and the environment being ‘forgotten issues’ :

EXTRACT 5

Transport and the Environment. Today, 29.05.2001, 06 :35 a.m.

JN : are transport and the environment the forgotten issues of this

campaign ? our correspondent Roger Harrobin is here, we’re

gonna look at transport a little bit this morning Roger, and

indeed talk to John Prescott after eight o’clock. .hhh what are

the issues that the parties should be having a squabble about in

transport ?

RH : well if you remember when Labour came to power, it was in the

wake of Swampy inspired road protests [interview continues]

Here JN introduces the item by posing a question based on the

absence of the issue of transport and the environment in the election

campaign before identifying that the programmeme is about to focus

on it today (cf. line 3). That is to say, the introduction does not then

premise a newsworthy issue but indeed a non-newsworthy issue that

according to the programmeme should be news. Into this non-news

vacuum the correspondent is brought in in order to report on what

apparently are the newsworthy issues (cf. lines 5–6). The subsequent

report (not transcribed) focuses upon the reported disquiet amongst

‘civil servants’ with the current government’s apparently misleading

statements and counter action concerning environmental protection

and future road building. The report includes taped interviews with

parents outside schools, animated readings of selected parts of the

Labour Party manifesto and its paraphrases by unidentified ‘civil

servants’. As yet, no official voices from the government are heard in

the report.

Forty minutes later Roger Harrobin’s report is repeated but it is

also recycled as a party political and, consequently, election issue

(Extract 6). This is a rather dramatic shift from the script on Extract

5, where transport and the environment were presented as ‘the

forgotten issues of this campaign’ ; Extract 5, lines 2–3).

Generating news 13


EXTRACT 6


JH : Labour has been accused of misleading the public over what it

says about Transport, in its manifesto, it says road schemes that

damage the environment have been scrapped, .hhh but civil

servants have told this programme that that’s the case with only

two such schemes many more have been approved and more still

are expected if Labour wins the election. .hhh well this

programme has learnt that in spite of public denials government

consultants are urging a motorway style box a sort of ring of

motorway roads, through green belt land right around the

Birmingham conurbation. .hhh our environment correspondent

Roger Harrobin is with me: Roger

RH : when Labour came to power, it was in the wake of Swampy

inspired road protests [Repeat of the report by Roger Harrobin

first broadcast at 6 :35AM]

JH : Roger Harrobin reporting and on the line now is Alan Francis of

the Green Party, er goes without saying that you’re opposed to:

what to all road schemes ? or just most, Mister Francis.

AF : um to all road schemes, and certainly those that have been listed

so far this morning,

In this the second outing for the story presented in Extract 6, the

agency for introducing the ‘issue’ of transport into news is shifted

from the programmeme itself to an unattributed and temporally

dislocated accusation of the Labour Party ‘misleading the public’

(line 1). JH subsequently claims knowledge of further inconsistencies

between the Labour Party manifesto for re-election to government

and the current Labour Government’s actions. However, he removes

the agency of the programmeme in bringing up the issue by assem-

bling the relevant categories of ‘civil servants’ and ‘government

consultants’ who are identified as the sources of news. The recontex-

tualisation of RH’s report in Extract 6 from Extract 5 positions it as a

response to the criticisms voiced against the government rather than

its source. Subsequently, the next character brought in by the pro-

gramme is a spokesperson for the Green Party Alan Francis. His

‘natural’ presence in this slot is discursively signalled by JH’s amplifi-

cation ‘goes without saying’ (line 16) preceding his questioning of

AF.

An hour later (Extract 7), the issue is returned to and again

presented as one the programmeme is reporting on without any refe-

rence to its own agency in creating the agenda in the first instance.



EXTRACT 7


JN : one of Labour’s claims when it was elected was that it would

give us a better transport system, it would be (.) integrated it was

the great word of the day, there would be a better balance in

particular, .hhh between road, and rail. well the railways have

been in chaos, as we know, and on road building as we reported

earlier this morning it does seem as if the government may

already have broken, its last manifesto pledge. the minister

whose vast Department of Transport Environment and the

Regions was to deliver the changes, is of course the Deputy

Prime Minister himself, John Prescott, he joins us now, morning

Mister Prescott

JP : Hello Jim

During the course of the morning, the programme has dedicated

two separate slots to the story (cf. Extracts 5 and 6), the interview

with John Prescott being the third (Extract 7). The two slots prior to

the interview with Prescott assembled a list of relevant named and

unnamed categories creating a build up or relevant context for the

final slot. In the third outing for the story, however, there is no

mention of any of these specific voices. Instead, they are collectively

turned into ‘current news’ of the government which ‘may already

have broken, its last manifesto pledge’ (lines 6-7). The role of the

programmeme is presented not as in sourcing news but merely

reporting it (‘as we reported earlier this morning’ ; lines 5-6). Then,

during the twenty minute interview that follows (not transcribed

here), John Prescott answers a wide range of questions about the

incident with the demonstrator, transport and the environment, his

general job of Deputy Prime Minister, and progress of the election

campaign.

Shortly after the Prescott interview is over, it is recycled in a

news headline spot without any reference to the former key theme of

transport and environment.

EXTRACT 8

Transport and the Environment. Today, 29.05.2001, 08 :30 a.m. (News

headlines)

NR : the Shadow Chancellor Michael Portillo has repeated demands

for Tony Blair to spell out to voters what the question in any

referendum on the Euro should be. .hhh the Deputy Prime

Minister John Prescott told this programme a more important

issue was Conservative spending cuts.

Generating news 15


The absence of the issue of transport from subsequent headline

news (Extract 8) suggests that it was not, then, the main news topic of

the day but rather a topical device created to provide a newsworthy

context into which the interview with Prescott could be placed.

In the final part of the programme, the topical issue is returned

to for one last outing, the issue being not reported any further in the

subsequent news programmemes of the day. The interviewees in this

slot are from the two major opposition parties active in the ongoing

election campaign.

EXTRACT 9

Transport and the Environment. Today 29 :05 :2001. 08 :50 a.m.

JH : does any of the parties have the answer to Britain’s transport

problems ? Labour promises to spend a fortune, but not to allow

any road schemes that would damage the environment, though

this programme has been told by civil servants that that’s exactly

what is happening, >JOHN PRESCOTT< told us earlier that it’s

not. well what about the other parties Bernard Jenkin is the

Conservative’s transport spokesman Don Foster is the Liberal

Democrats’

In the last ten minutes of the programme (introduced in

Extract 9), JH brings in two more relevant characters identified as res-

ponsible for the topical issue of transport in their respective parties.

Again, however, the appearance of the Conservative and Liberal

Democrat politicians does not seem to hinge so much on the news-

worthiness of their recent activities but rather they bring to an end the

cycle of ‘naturally’ appearing categories in a media-generated story.

As the Today programme routinely aims to provide and be seen to

provide balanced coverage of the three main political parties during

an election campaign, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat

politicians introduced in Extract 9 complete the device of relevant

equal representation.

In sum, the presenters create news from non-news through a

report about what they deem should be a newsworthy issue, which

then forms the context for further discussion during the programme.

However, what is revealed in our analysis is that whilst the presenters

assemble various relevant characters to discuss the issue, the main

agenda for the issue is to legitimately place an interview with John

Prescott. The gestalt shift between the two agendas of discussing

transport and obtaining an interview with Prescott is revealed in the

news bulletin where the headlines ignore the apparently topical issue

to report Prescott’s criticism of Conservative spending cuts, and



where the categorial balance of the opposition parties is not given air

time to debate with Prescott but is placed at the end of the

programme.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, we have highlighted the way in which the temporal

ordering and ‘placing’ of news items has become a central feature of

news management. Following Clayman’s (1991) observation of the

discursive structures creating newsworthiness for interviews in

broadcast talk, we demonstrate that these legitimising practices may

well exceed the moment of the introduction of the interview. Instead,

a major interview during a news programme may be legitimated over

the course of the programme in a sequence of subsidiary reports,

commentaries and pre-interviews. This is especially clear in the cases

when the newsworthiness of the main interview is in question, i.e.

when its news value (Galtung and Ruge, 1965) does not pertain so

much to the nature of ongoing events or the news actors (although it

helps when they fulfil the criterion of eliteness). It is then that news

broadcasters may turn to the values of the news process (cf. Bell,

1991, discussed above) to legitimise the interview. We have demons-

trated how the Today programme creates these values in our two

examples of self-generated news/interviews : continuity (anchoring

‘news items’ in past events, e.g. the conviction of Tony Martin,

protests against Labour transport policy) ; competition (claiming

exclusivity to the interviews) ; co-option (ongoing election campaign

as backdrop) ; composition (giving fair coverage to the three main

political parties) ; predictability (working towards a planned media

event) ; prefabrication (recontextualising of interviews and reports to

legitimate the programme’s own agenda).

As our analysis demonstrates, despite its apparent focus on the

‘real world out there’, news, and especially media-generated news, is

to a great extent self-referential and circular. What we find within the

confines of one programme, for example, is not only the setting of its

own agenda, to which politicians are held accountable in a series of

interviews, but also the programme’s own reports and interviews

feeding into the ongoing development of the ‘story’ and making

headline news as if they originally appeared independent of the

programme’s agency (cf. Bourdieu’s 1998 : 28 notion of ‘information

about information’). Moreover, through the MCA-informed approach

to our data, we have demonstrated how the programme exploits

characters, or categories, ‘appearing on cue’ relying on their actions

and/or institutional status, to give the unfolding stories the legitimacy

Generating news 17


of a naturally occurring, linearly progressing chains of events. The

two stories are structured around a succession of relevant characters

appearing ; around a series of people as embodied categories talking

about aspects of the topic, which serves to structure the development

of the topic as they appear at relevant times in order to perform some

kind of expected category action. In so doing each appearance

becomes a developmental step mediated by the presenters towards a

particular goal.

As Scollon (1998) observes, social interaction that is broadcast

talk takes place between journalists, politicians and other public

figures as a spectacle for the watching and listening public (cf. Bell,

1991 ; Bourdieu, 1998). Following Goffman, Scollon also notes that

news discourse ‘is carried on with the same fundamental ritual

practices for establishing the grounds for interaction (the channel),

establishing the identities and social positioning of the participants,

and establishing topics as found in other forms of social interaction

such as telephone calls and face-to-face withs (Goffman, 1963, 1974,

1981)’ (Scollon, 1998 : 189). The meta-discursive strategies in

broadcast talk that have been our focus here attest further to its

‘everydayness’ and the conversationalisation of public discourse.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This paper arises from the research project ‘Back to the Future’ :

Reporting of the Future in Broadcast News Programmes funded by

the Leverhulme Trust (F/00407B).

CHARACTERS APPEARING IN THE EXTRACTS

AF = Alan Francis, Green Party

JH = John Humphrys, Presenter

JN = James Naughtie, Presenter

JP = John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister (Labour)

KM = Kevin Morris, President of the Police Superintendents’ Association

NR = unidentified News Reader

RH = Roger Harrobin, Reporter

RM = Rory Morrison, News Reader

TM = Tony Martin, Farmer



TRANSCRIPTION NOTATION

under

[

yes overlapping speech

. falling intonation

, fall-rise intonation

? rising intonation

(.) brief pause under 1 second

one emphasis

.hhh hearable in breath

>John Prescott< increased pace

JOHN PRESCOTT increased loudness

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES] ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT

THE EXTRACT

Generating news 19


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