ABSTRACT
The edginess about social work’s media coverage is both personal and political. On the one hand practitioners and managers fear that the next furore will spotlight their department, their own team. It could even be their own face in the photograph beneath the accusing headline. At the same time, adverse media coverage is taken as an index of the poor public standing of the profession as a whole. Attempts at explanation by social work insiders have, as we have seen, blamed media values and practices, or have accused the social work profession itself of poor self-presentation. This inability to present a better image is in turn explained by the alleged characteristics of social workers themselves, how the profession is organized, who dictates its aims and methods, and the lack of accurate public knowledge of, in the Barclay Committee’s phrase, social work’s ‘rôle and tasks’ (NISW 1982).
