ABSTRACT
In the course of the Democratic Party Nominating Convention of 1948 there occurred an incident in which the delegates from the Southern States, roused to anger over a credentials dispute, resolved to stage a walk-out. No department in any broadcasting organisation, however, is as carefully scrutinised and supervised as that which is responsible for news. In recent years the argument about broadcasting has resolved itself, internationally, into an overall ‘case’. News is a genre, a literary ‘kind’, like drama, epic, the ode, the pamphlet, the novel, the documentary. There have been many arguments advanced for the growth of a ‘pluralism’ within news. There is therefore no easy recipe for solving what one might call the contemporary crisis in news credibility. Indeed, if one looks at the present conflict in a detached way one can see plenty of room for the traditional consensus of credibility to continue.
