ABSTRACT
The basis for one of Bad News’ principal lines of attacks is laid in their sections exploring the ‘Contours of Coverage’ — outlining the volume of industrial news, the relative attention paid to strikes within that, and the distortions in the pattern of coverage as compared with the ‘real’ distribution of unrest across the various sectors of industry. The ‘contours of coverage’ might have been markedly different if they had chosen 1976, which was much quieter, or 1984, when the coal strike featured in almost every news broadcast for months on end, accounting for over 20 per cent of output. For the Glasgow Group the conclusion is clear: ‘This reveals a highly distorted picture of UK disputes during the period of the study’. There is a ‘rather arbitrary relationship between strike severity and news coverage’. ‘The information given by television on these events is, in a statistical sense at least, unrepresentative.
