ABSTRACT
Conservative critics have attempted to deny the work’s ‘academic credibility’. They have done this sometimes by pointing to the work’s left-radical political position, maintaining the mythology of their own work as disinterested, and sometimes by denying the statistical evidences of the work and presenting counter-statistics.2 What has followed has been a set of quasi-legal arguments and counterarguments about often very small details of the Group’s empirical evidence. I think a good lawyer would have no difficulty resolving most of these arguments in the Group’s favour; occasionally, perhaps, some points lost; sometimes an uneasy stalemate. But these arguments have tended to conceal another set of issues. Put briefly, conservative critics have largely avoided engagement with any of the Group’s major arguments about power, control and influence in the production of news, and have offered defences of present practices which seem at times to be extraordinarily complacent: news professionals are excused on the grounds that they are short of time and have a hassling job; any criticisms should be based on the professionals’ own criteria of what they do or aspire to do; instances of bias are infrequent or trivial; in short, news is fine as it is, or if there have been isolated instances of ‘bad news’, these can be corrected by minor reforms or a certain extra vigilance by the professionals themselves.3
