ABSTRACT
In addressing the issue of ‘the ideological’ in news, the critical paradigm has primarily been occupied with an inventory of reportage which could be used to demonstrate most explicitly the connections between journalism and communicative power. In practice, this turned out to be an investigation of that news which appeared to have the most direct relationship to questions about the exercise of social control, the construction of legitimacy, and efforts to forge consensus and maintain hegemonic leadership; in short, to questions related to various historical and institutional manifestations of political culture. There were some notable exceptions. Brunsdon and Morley’s textual analysis of Nationwide (1978), a British current affairs programme specializing in human interest and non-political topics; historical work by Curran, Douglas and Whannel (1980) on the ‘political role’ of the ‘apolitical human interest content’ in the popular press; and Curran and Sparks’s account (1991) of the ‘essentially conservative “common sense” views’ lodged within the ‘dimensions of entertainment’ in the tabloid newspaper. Within the critical paradigm however, attempts to examine the non-consequential news, especially as this occurs in television, have been marginal to its main research agenda. Disregard for what Fiske and Hartley (1978: 189) describe as television news reporting’s ‘great preoccupation . . . [with] disasters, accidents and human interest stories’ becomes a notable omission in an Australian context given the evidence which suggests that the amount of this type of news may actually be increasing during the major daily news bulletins on television (Gerdes and Charlier 1985).
