Brian McNair

PR must die: Spin, anti-spin and political public relations in the UK, 1997 - 2004

This essay critically assesses the “demonology of spin” which has dominated British political journalism, and academic writing on public relations since the rise of New Labour in the 1990s. It reviews the history of British political public relations (PR), and traces the emergence of journalistic hostility to the professional communication practices of New Labour in government. This “demonology” is viewed in the context of the professional rivalry born of mutual interdependence between PR practitioners and political journalists, and assessed as an inevitable consequence of that competition. While arguing for ethical constraints on both PR and journalistic professionals, the article concludes that an adversarial relationship between both groups is an important safeguard against the excesses of either.

Journalism and Democracy: a millennial audit

This article challenges what it characterizes as the pervasive pessimism, and narratives of decline, which dominate current scholarly debates on the relationship between journalism and democracy. Drawing on original ESRC-funded research, and examples drawn from recent political news stories such as the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the article presents a more positive evaluation of contemporary political journalism and its contribution to the democratic process, and suggests an argument for the broadening and reinterpretation of normative standards in public communication. This argument is developed from the identification of key economic, technological and communicative trends in the political journalistic environment which, it is argued, change the terms on which traditional normative criteria have been based.

What is journalism

Aimed at the journalism student, this book chapter fouses on journalism as the timely reporting of events at the local, provincial, national and international levels. Reporting involves the gathering of information through interviewing and research, the results of which are turned into a fair and balanced story for publication or for television or radio broadcast.

WikiLeaks, journalism and the consequences of chaos

This article considers the impact of the WikiLeaks organisation in relation to debates around the defence of national security and free speech, global media citizenship and the emerging dynamics of the global public sphere. Building on the authors previous work on political communication, journalism and ‘cultural chaos’, it explores the implications of WikiLeaks for emerging conceptions and definitions of journalism, and for the changing structure of media–politics power relations at the global level, against the background of three trends: democratisation, declining deference and digitalisation.

After Objectivity?: Schudson’s sociology of journalism in the era of post-factuality

This essay takes Schudson’s pioneering work in the historical sociology of journalism as the starting point for an argument as to why the concept of objectivity can and must be re-evaluated in the digital era, if such a thing as a globalised public sphere, able to support further democratic progress in the decades ahead, is to be built from the “cultural chaos” of the internet. It explores the often ambivalent role a revised, more nuanced notion of objectivity plays in the legitimation of the proliferating journalisms and quasi-journalisms—what I will refer to collectively as the cultural form of factuality—now competing for users, market share and revenue on the internet. Finally, I will make some suggestions as to what objectivity could come to mean in the post-factual era.

Understanding the civic impact of journalism: A realistic evaluation perspective

The importance of journalism to civil society is constantly proclaimed, but empirical evidence on journalisms impact, and how this operates, is surprisingly thin. Indeed, there is confusion even about what is meant by the term “impact”. Meanwhile, the issue of the role of journalism is becoming increasingly urgent as a consequence of the rapid changes engulfing the news media, brought about by technological change and the flow-on effect to the traditional advertising-supported business model. Assessing the impact of journalism has recently been the topic of debate among practitioners and scholars particularly in the United States, where philanthropists have responded to the perceived crisis in investigative journalism by funding not-for-profit newsrooms, with resulting new pressures being placed on journalists and editors to quantify their impact on society. These recent attempts have so far failed to achieve clarity or a satisfactory conclusion, which is not surprising given the complex web of causation within which journalism operates. In this paper, the authors propose a stratified definition of journalistic impact and function. They propose a methodology for studying impact drawing on realistic evaluation—a theory-based approach developed primarily to assess large social programmes occurring in open systems. The authors argue this could allow a conceptual and methodological advance on the question of media impacts, leading to research capable of usefully informing responses at a time of worrying change.

From Control to Chaos, and Back Again: Journalism and the politics of populist authoritarianism

With the advent of the internet it had appeared to many that the traditional, normative, pro-democratic functions of journalism as critical scrutineer, Fourth Estate and source of common knowledge for the public sphere would be strengthened. Today, however, digital platforms are being utilized with great effect by the opponents of liberal democracy, whether extreme factions within Islam, reactionaries and populists within the democratic countries, or in authoritarian polities such as Russia and China. This article considers if cultural chaos and the digital tools which fuel it have now emerged as drivers of ideological conflict in addition, or opposition, to cultural democratization.

The Interview: Schnarking, Knob Jokes and the Right to Cause Gross Offence

Discussion of censorship and media freedom in the context of The Interview. A few weeks before the murderous attack by Islamic extremists on the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo, the Hollywood dream factory had its own encounter with would-be censors. The Interview (Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, 2014), as everyone with an interest in culture and current affairs cannot fail to be aware of by now, is a comedy in the “grossout” tradition exemplified by commercially successful movies such as Ted (Seth MacFarlane, 2012) and Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011). Their humour is a combination of slapstick, physical comedy, and scatological jokes involving body fluids and the like— hence the “gross”. The best of them have been very funny, as well as bordering on the offensive (see Ted’s scene involving prostitutes, a foul-mouthed teddy bear and the entertainment value of someone taking a dump on the living room floor). They have often been controversial, as in the Farrelly brothers’ Me, Myself and Irene (2000), starring Jim Carrey as a schizophrenic police officer. At their most outrageous they have pushed the boundaries of political correctness to the limit.

From Cinema to TV: Still the same old stories about journalism

Television drama used to be the poor relation of the full length feature film made for cinema. No self-respecting movie star would be seen dead in the former, and successful TV actors rarely sustained careers of comparable brilliance in the film industry. Those days are gone, if a series such as House of Cards is any indicator of the trends.

The Rise of the Fifth Estate

In Journalists in Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), I highlighted Billy Ray’s 2003 movie Shattered Glass as a significant work, not only for its qualities as cinematic art but because it dramatizes that moment in the history of American (and western) journalism when credibility and influence were shifting from the old medium of print to the internet. The film deals with the true story of Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen), a hot shot young features writer for the prestigious New Republic periodical in the United States—“in-flight reading on Air Force One”, as he describes its influence to a class of awestruck journalism students. Unfortunately, as the online-only Forbes Digital Tool revealed in 1998, Glass was a fabricator and a fantasist; a professional liar, whose dozens of published articles turned out to contain largely made-up interviews, facts and events. In one case, “Hack Heaven”, Glass constructed from little more than a fertile imagination the hugely entertaining, indeed jaw-dropping story of a teenage computer prodigy who had been hired for vast sums by an internet company to protect it from teenagers exactly like him. It was while fact checking this article that investigative journalists working for Forbes Digital Tool were alerted to the possibility of fabrication, and the rest is history. There have always been fakers in the journalistic profession, including those working for the most esteemed news organizations such as the BBC, Channel 4, the Guardian and the New York Times. But the Stephen Glass affair came at a time when traditional print and broadcast media were still asserting their unquestioned dominance as information sources over an upstart internet. In those days—the late 1990s—a majority of journalism practitioners, and many scholars in journalism studies, still rejected the idea that online content could be regarded as “proper” journalism. The online sector was argued to be populated by untrained amateurs who couldn’t tell good information from bad, who spread rumours and gossip irresponsibly; who lacked the skills and insights to match the quality of “real” journalism as presented in newspapers and broadcasting. The rise of digital news, analysis and commentary was perceived as a threat by those schooled in the analogue era, who feared their professional roles being eroded by a new generation of bloggers and online producers. The Glass story dramatically challenged that paradigm, revealing the fragility of journalistic “truth”, even in tough editorial environments such as that of The New Republic where systems were supposedly in place to check and double check every fact contained in a journalist’s piece. One of the best scenes in the movie has Glass explaining this system to some journalism students, and then pointing out that there was a “hole” in it. In many cases, he explained, the only source for the story was the notes taken by the reporter. If that reporter was in a position of trust with his editor, as Glass was, and if he invented facts, as Glass did, then he could easily subvert the fact checking, or quality control system upon which publications such as The New Republic based their reputations. He himself was living proof of that suggestion. We might reasonably ask why it was that editors at The New Republic did not detect Glass’ fraud, if indeed their fact-checking system was so great. After all, he perpetrated it