ABSTRACT
We have already argued that the news coverage which we have examined stands in a highly mediated relationship with the events which are the substance of its content. We wanted to better understand how the newsrooms were fed this content in much the same way as we felt the need to sensitise ourselves to the processes of news production. The literature allows two views of the producers’ function. In one model the production process is seen as being haphazard with a fair degree of producer autonomy, and in another as the result of a series of binding professional, economic, technical and political constraints.1 But either of these views of producers ignores the attitudes and strategies of those they are dealing with. This is of particular importance in the newsrooms. Since this need to qualify the research tradition was not fully conceived of at the design stage but emerged late in the first phase of the project, it was not then possible to establish contact with the total range of all parties used by and using the medium in connection with industrial life. Faced with a choice, but knowing that within broadcasting the hostility of trade unions was known to be regarded as a real constraint on coverage, we decided to concentrate on the unions’ formal relationship with the medium. In particular, we wanted to assess how the structure and development of individual unions may affect this relationship. There may exist a general difference in the attitudes and approach of supposedly middle-class and workingclass unions to the media in general. This involves the familiar distinction between white-and blue-collar workers.
