ABSTRACT

‘Pure bias’. Succinct, to the point, this was Arthur Scargill’s characterisation of the two main evening television programmes’ coverage of the 1984 coal strike. Blunter still, the leader of the Nottinghamshire miners roared at the cameras, ‘It’s all being distorted. Take the bloody thing away’. Painting with strokes that are bold to the point of caricature, since both these stories have been amply told elsewhere, one of the salient elements was clearly the rise of television itself. Only recently a minority outlet that was still not taken altogether seriously, it had established itself as the most pervasive of all news media, and among the most trusted. It was now a force to be reckoned with, even feared. In most respects the unions conduct their affairs more openly than many other power-holding groups in Britain. Their internal arguments and tensions are more readily accessible to reporters than those in the board room, where more discreet forms of carnage are the norm.