Philip Schlesinger

Reporting crime : the media politics of criminal justice

Every day we watch, read, and hear stories about crime and justice. This book reveals how policy-makers, criminal justice professionals, pressure groups, and the police compete in self-promoting struggles to shape their own images and the policy agenda. In a series of case studies, the authors pose a number of important questions. Does coverage of crime statistics promote fear of crime, or is the debate about the figures really about something else? By focusing on fear of crime hhave we therefore underplayed public fear of authority? Does the coverage of sexual crime encourage voyeurism? And finally, is televisions growing obsession with showing us stories of real crime more about entertaining the audience than about helping the police with their enquiries?

Creativity and the experts: New Labour, think tanks, and the policy process

This article explores the role of expertise in public debate on creative industries policy in the United Kingdom. The first section gives an overview of the emergence of expertise in government and the rise of think tanks, locating this within a wider sociology of the intellectuals. It discusses the development of New Labour expertise in response to that of Thatcherite Conservatism in the battle to dominate public policy agendas. The second section illustrates the growth of the New Labour “policy generation” and the emergence of a cohort of experts in the fields of media, communications, and culture and discusses routes taken by them into government. The final section, based on interviews, discusses the power plays behind New Labour policy making in the creative industries field. It considers the impact of ministerial changes on the policy process, illustrates how interdepartmental rivalries introduce complexity and demonstrates how civil service expertise may be mobilised to neutralise that of outside experts. The conclusion addresses the implications of this analysis.

‘Europeanness’ ‐ a new cultural battlefield?

The nation‐state is par excellence a product of ‘modernity’ in Europe. Its supercession has been trumpeted of late, hard on the heels of the fashion for post‐modernity. However, the self‐service conceptions of political identity that pertained until the end of the Cold War now need to be discarded as ethnicity and nationhood evidently become the predominant obsessions of the 1990s. Consequently, ‘Europeanness’ has become a cultural battlefield for sharply divergent views.

From organizational crisis to multi-platform salvation? Creative destruction and the recomposition of news media

Schumpeter’s trope of ‘creative destruction’ aptly describes current transformations of news media whose business models are adjusting to the twin challenges of digitization and the Internet. While most production studies focus on the journalistic labour process, based on current empirical research in the UK press and access to key decision-makers, this article presents case studies of the strategies pursued by the Financial Times and The Telegraph in migrating from print to digital. It shows how new conceptions of the news business are being articulated by managements and how production is being reshaped and increasingly driven by data analytics, and poses questions about the impact of these changes on journalistic practices.

Political Roof and Sacred Canopy? Religion and the EU Constitution

Debate over the place of Christianity in European politics and society has made an important come-back. The Convention on the Future of Europe’s deliberations over the EU Constitution has thrown into relief the role of religion in defining ‘Europeanness’. In the context of a secularized Europe, Christianity is fighting for its institutional recognition and space in the public sphere. Religion may offer a cultural identity and work both to resist and to accommodate change. However, the Christian mobilization has been challenged by those who defend the secular order. The debate over whether Christianity should be seen as constitutive of European identity has been framed by wider concerns about collective identities and memories in Europe.

Expertise, the academy and the governance of cultural policy

My research into British cultural policy-making and the so-called creative economy has led me to consider the role of experts in producing the discourse of creativity (Schlesinger, 2007, 2009a).1 To date, the efforts of critics to deconstruct the creative economy have had little effect on its salience as a focus of policy-making (Bustamante, 2011). Moreover, research on the topic is growing and it is increasingly institutionalized in learning and teaching. One long-standing advocate of the cause, Stuart Cunningham (2009: 375), sees the depth of opposition to the creative economy among critical scholars as ‘a textbook case of the disabling gap between policy and critique’. However, rather than academics constituting two opposed camps – those of ‘policy’ and ‘critique’ – in reality, a much more nuanced situation prevails. The polemical context that dogs the creative economy makes it a particularly apt case for a discussion of the role of academics in ‘cultural governance’. Tony Bennett (2007: 12) has characterized one key feature of this practice as that of ‘producing work that might have an impact on actually existing cultural policies’. Although favouring such interventions by academics, Bennett emphasizes that they not should cease ‘to be critical of such policies’ where criticism is merited. To be a critic as well as a kind of insider raises hard questions about whether one can actually ride two horses at once. Contemporaneous criticism may be limited by the rules of the game into which one has entered – for instance, by observing official secrecy laws or confidentiality agreements. Or – much more subtly – by accepting the trade-offs that arise between obtaining access and exercising the discretion that keeps the field open.

A Cosmopolitan Temptation

■ For some, the transnationalization of political action and communicative space in the European Union heralds an emergent cosmopolitan order. Need that be so? There are supranational institutions in the EU as well as transnational political and cultural spaces and cross-border communicative flows. However, the Unions member states remain key controllers of citizenship rights and purveyors of collective identities. And for many purposes they still maintain strongly bounded national public spheres. Because the EUs overall character as a polity remains unresolved, this has consequences for the organization of communicative spaces. The EU is a field of tensions and contradictions that is inescapably rooted in institutional realities. Wishful thinking about cosmopolitanism can get in the way of clear analysis. ■

'Terrorism' and the state: a case study of the discourses of television

The legitimacy of the liberal-democratic state is no settled question. At the best of times, when peace and prosperity might appear to be the natural order of things, the state seems unshakeable, and the mobilization of popular consent through the medium of representative institutions to be an adequate expression of its solid foundations in civil society. This smooth functioning, however, is sustained by a considerable and continuous process of ideological labour-one which is thrown into relief as we enter a period of crisis. In the present period of profound economic dislocation dating from the early 1970s, Western capitalist democracies are undergoing complex and manifold processes of recomposition of the state and civil society. The question of how ideological processes work to sustain the legitimacy of the social order is now of especial interest. Within liberal-democratic political thought, the state is usually understood to derive its legitimacy from its constitutionality, from fair and free elections, its foundations in rational-legal norms respecting individual rights, and an adherence

Copyright and cultural work: an exploration

This article first discusses the contemporary debate on cultural “creativity” and the economy. Second, it considers the current state of UK copyright law and how it relates to cultural work. Third, based on empirical research on British dancers and musicians, an analysis of precarious cultural work is presented. A major focus is how those who follow their art by way of “portfolio” work handle their rights in ways that diverge significantly from the current simplistic assumptions of law and cultural policy. Our conclusions underline the distance between present top-down conceptions of what drives production in the cultural field and the actual practice of dancers and musicians.

International media research : a critical survey

J.C. Burgelman, Peter Dahlgren, Elizabeth Fox, Daniel C. Hallin, Joke Hermes, Sonia Livingstone, Vincent Mosco, Vanda Rideout, Colin Sparks