ABSTRACT
One of the more serious charges levied at television news is that it consistently failed to provide viewers with the most basic and elementary information about the disputes it covered: ‘which trades unions are involved in a dispute is…not normally given; ‘routine facts as to whether disputes are official or unofficial are rarely given’. Drawing these criticisms together during a later discussion of information theory the Glasgow Group maintain that: ‘[When] the news moves on to some industrial coverage with its common forms of introduction, such as ‘And now some industrial news’, culturally attuned viewers should know that well over 50 per cent of the time they are about to hear news in which strikes and disputes will figure. The difficulty in assessing these charges is that while their general drift is clear, words like ‘rarely’ or ‘not normally’ lack the precision one expects in a ‘scientific’ critique.
