ABSTRACT
Having explored academic perspectives in Chapters 2 and 3, we turn now to the broader critique of news and journalism in the UK, incorporating the views of both scholars and non-scholars as they survey the media landscape and engage in public debate about the state of the British news media. Later chapters focus on trends and issues affecting the various sectors of the UK journalism industry. This chapter explores the arguments advanced about journalism by commentators in the public sphere – the meta-discourse of news, as it were, or journalism about journalism. Such commentaries are commonplace since the emergence of media supple-
ments in the broadsheet newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s. The expansion of journalism described in Chapter 1 has also contributed to a growing sense that the content of the journalistic media does matter – to the health of democratic processes, to sound social administration and good governance, and to general public well-being and the quality of life. All categories of media output are important, and all are discussed regularly in the media. The state of journalism, however, real or perceived, has the potential to bring forth particularly heated debate, often accompanied by calls for legislation and senior resignations, such as those of the BBC’s Director-General and Chairman following the publication of the Hutton report in 2003. We will consider the issues raised by the Hutton inquiry in this chapter. First, though, we will address a longstanding anxiety of observers of British journalism – the extent to which it has been, and is being, degraded by commercial and competitive pressures.
