ABSTRACT
In essence the Glasgow studies see television news as ‘a manufactured product based on a coherent set of professional and ideological beliefs and expressed in a rigid formula of presentation’. It ‘conveys many of the culturally dominant assumptions of our society’. In general terms the proposition that the mass media are involved not only with reflecting reality but in some sense defining and creating it would be accepted by many communications researchers. But the Glasgow argument goes further. The processes of news production are neither neutral nor pluralist. Instead, they result in certain meanings or perceptions of reality being preferred while others are rendered marginal or illegitimate. In short, the Glasgow Group appear to be knocking away the principle on which news and current affairs claims to rest, and the terms in which they have customarily been discussed. But what they are replacing it with is far from clear.
