Bob Franklin

Education, education and indoctrination! Packaging politics and the three ‘Rs’

This paper explores how recent Labour governments have tried systematically to package educational and other social policies for media presentation and public consumption. This concern has resulted in the criticism that Labour is concerned with policy presentation above content: strong on policy spin but weak on policy delivery. The first section explores Labour’s attempts to set a favourable agenda in news media for its educational policies by implementing a rigorous news management strategy: the subsequent section analyses Labour’s unprecedented use of advertising to promote key areas of government policy. There is a particular focus on government advertising in the run up to the 2001 general election. The paper concludes that governments’ increasing reliance on advertising may cross the line which should separate the provision of public information from any attempt to persuade the public to support particular policy choices.This paper explores how recent Labour governments have tried systematically to package educational and other social policies for media presentation and public consumption. This concern has resulted in the criticism that Labour is concerned with policy presentation above content: strong on policy spin but weak on policy delivery. The first section explores Labour’s attempts to set a favourable agenda in news media for its educational policies by implementing a rigorous news management strategy: the subsequent section analyses Labour’s unprecedented use of advertising to promote key areas of government policy. There is a particular focus on government advertising in the run up to the 2001 general election. The paper concludes that governments’ increasing reliance on advertising may cross the line which should separate the provision of public information from any attempt to persuade the public to support particular policy choices.

The Media Abuse of Children. Jake's Progress from Demonic Icon to Restored Childhood Innocent

While scholarly analysis of child protection and the media has grown substantially during the 1990s (Aldridge, 1994; Franklin and Parton, 1991; Kitzinger and Skidmore, 1995), studies have ignored a crucial dimension which forms the focus for discussion here. We wish to suggest that media reporting of children and child abuse may itself constitute an abusive activity. Media presentations of children and childhood, since press coverage of the Bulger case in 1993, have assumed a distinctive and sinister guise which, we argue, fundamentally revises the previously held perception of children and childhood. We suggest that this new understanding of childhood is damaging to children and, because of the impact of such media presentations on the public mood and policy climate, harms their interests. The discussion is in three parts. First, newspaper reporting of the Bulger case is analysed to reveal how coverage challenged the idea of childhood as a period of innocence and replaced it with a perception of childhood as essentially ‘evil’. Second, the characterization of Jake, the central figure in Alan Bleasdales recent television dramaJakes Progress, is analysed to serve as an illustrative exemplar of this new construction of childhood. Finally, we consider the possible messages conveyed by such presentations to perpetrators and victims of abuse.

Surviving in the Hackademy

Two journalist-academics suggest that, judging by the experiences of some rather research-battle-weary delegates at a recent conference of the Association for Journalism Education, it can be an uphill struggle to persuade the university to consider journalism research as suitable for the Research Assessment Exercise. If journalism courses and hackademics are to flourish, they write, it is important to balance delivering a quality professional education with publishing scholarly research - the latter generally being viewed as the route to promotion and career advancement... Despite the obstacles, we are certain that academic life demands scholarship from everyone. Teaching is a privilege and a pleasure and, we believe, so is research.

Priming the Parish Pump

Abstract In this article we argue that the almost exclusive focus of political communications research on national political actors and agencies has led to an inadequate understanding of the functioning, the relevance, and the influence of local political communications strategies. This paper seeks to redress this neglect through exploring political marketing strategies of national political actors and agencies which have implications for local political communications; and political marketing strategies of local political actors and agencies and their implications for local political communications, with specific reference to the local newspaper coverage of the local campaign in the 2001 UK General Election. Drawing on a unique and extensive analysis of local newspapers election reporting, combined with detailed interviews with journalists, editors, politicians and their agents, we argue that news management strategies enacted at a local level were characterised by an exchange relationship in which, although parties traded information for editorial space, the local news media retained a dominant role. Thus, although parties were, to differing degrees, successful in securing coverage of their candidates and policies, this success was always achieved in the context of local newspapers setting the broader agenda.

Kingmaking in the Labour leadership contest

unconfirmed reports that John Smith had suffered a severe heart attack. By 9.10 am, Barts hospital confirmed that the Labour leader had been admitted. A live link to Barts was established by 9.23 am, and the politician’s death was confirmed by 9.40. At 9.45 a news flash interrupted the Good Morning programme to announce the death of the Labour leader. To their chagrin, and despite their best efforts, the BBC came second to SkyNews in breaking this major story. But journalistic grief proved short-lived. Leaderships, it seems, figure more prominently in the construction of news agendas than particular leaders. By 10.50 Lord Healey was speculating on BBC’s Radio 4 about Smith’s successor. Blair and Prescott were offered as the peer’s portentous &dquo;dream ticket&dquo;.

How local papers hold the ring

IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT was the Tory tabloid’s post-election headline. For once, the paper had expressed a view wholeheartedly endorsed by Neil Kinnock. But national press support for the Conservative Party, so evident in tabloid election coverage, stands in stark contrast to local journalists’ efforts to strike a political balance during the 1992 election campaign. The task is increasingly difficult. Local journalists are subject to constituency parties’ growing enthusiasm for the news management techniques so beloved by the parties nationally. Parties also complain more regularly and forcefully about what they consider to be unfair or &dquo;biased&dquo;

Education...education and, please, less prejudice

On 21 July 1998 the Daily Mirrori front-page story was about the death of a six months old child who had been killed by his child minder, Helen Stacey Stacey had lied to the local authority in her application for registration as a child minder. In the Mirrorf view, the authority’s oversight in failing to spot the lie was no less serious a crime than the act of shaking the child to death. The Mirrori headline was explicit. &dquo;NO EXCUSES&dquo; it said &dquo;Norfolk