ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a case study the national daily newspaper coverage of the 1989-90 Ambulance Dispute. It describes the traditional industrial relations news frames which news organisations habitually reproduced; the association between union activity and ‘militancy’, the representation of the labour movement as a channel for the pursuit of self-interest, and so on. The concentration upon events and effects, rather than contexts and underlying explanations for industrial disputes, is a widely recognised feature of news media coverage, noted by researchers from a variety of theoretical positions. As is well known, the critical tradition is not without its own critics both academic and from within journalism. During the 1980s, ‘a new wave of revisionist writing’, developed a body of research findings which explicitly challenged the work of the Glasgow team, and by implication much of the remaining work in the critical tradition.
