ABSTRACT
Access to the news is given mainly to the powerful. The view of social and political life that informs news production limits who is able to appear to put his or her case. It is a view of the world from the top downwards, in which those at the top do most of the talking. Restriction of access to a small minority of powerful people cannot be explained, in terms of ‘shortage of time’, mistakes by individual journalists, or difficulties of putting together a live news programme. These arguments may apply to an individual bulletin – but our evidence underlines that restriction of access occurs regularly over hundreds of hours of news bulletins. Over such a long period, arguments such as the shortage of time simply will not hold. They cannot explain the consistently one-sided nature of access.
