ABSTRACT
In one of his essays, G.K. Chesterton said of popular journalism, 'it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another.' This study has sought an understanding of how part of that world of life-in-the-newspapers is fashioned and sustained, how journalists and their sources combine to create and recreate it daily. Chesterton is correct in saying that it is 'another' world, but we would be wrong to divorce it entirely from the world of 'life' and to dismiss it simply as 'fiction' . Newspaper fiction is not the antithesis of factual reality, it is a distortion of that reality, pulled and puckered out of shape by the interests and the everyday practices of newsmen and their informants. As a distortion of reality it is far more persuasive than mere fiction. Even, for the sceptic, with his commonsense caveats about not believing everything one reads in the newspapers it may still pass as an approximation to truth. His problem, and ours, is to know which parts of the approximation are inaccurate, to know in what ways our windows on the world are subject to flaws and imperfections and tricks of the light. Without this knowledge the worlds of life and life-in-the-newspapers begin to dissolve together. As Jock Young in his study of drug taking has shown, the impact of newspaper stereotypes and approximations on the real world, has the effect of translating fantasy into reality - media representations create preconceptions and new situations
are negotiated by their participants to fit them (Young 1971). What the previous chapters of this study have argued is that newspapers do not necessarily distort reality in random ways. They rather transform the world of life in a systematic fashion. lt is a process which exhibits patterned regularities governed by a consistent set of interests, practices, and professional relationships. Any analysis which seeks to understand the process by which media representations are created must treat that set of interests, practices, and relationships as an integreated whole; and, as I indicated in chapter 1, this is precisely what the major research tradition of the social sciences has generally failed to do. lt is only when we have completed such an analysis that we can begin to discover the wider political meaning of media representations, to explore linkages, for instance, between media institutions and the repressive agencies of the state, to draw out the implications of life-in-the-newspapers for life-in-the-real-world.
