ABSTRACT
Today we inhabit an increasingly competitive and market-driven news environment where the need to attract and retain audiences has become an important determinant of the character of news. For critics such as Bourdieu (1998:27), concentrating on attracting audiences has meant that ratings are now the journalist’s ‘Last Judgement’, having consequences for the type of news that is provided, the way in which journalists work, and the relationship between the audience and the way that news is packaged and sold. In order to understand this point more fully, I propose to focus in this chapter more on television news than on press news, since this has drawn the greatest amount of comment and criticism in recent years due to its position in ‘the commanding heights of the UK news system’ (Hargreaves and Thomas 2002:5).
