Language in the News

As readers of newspapers, and viewers of television, we readily assume that the Nine O'clock News, or the front page of the Daily

Express or the Guardian, consists of faithful reports of events thathappened «out there», in the world beyond our immediate experience. At a certain level, that is of course a realistic assumption: realevents do occur and are reported - a coach crashes on the autobahn, postman wins the pools, a cabinet minister resigns. But real even are subject to conventional processes of selection: they are not intrinsically newsworthy, but only become «news» when selected for ir elusion in news reports. The vast majority of events are not mentioned, and so selection immediately gives us a partial view of the world. We know also that different newspapers report differently, in both content and presentation.

The pools win is more likely to be reported in the Mirror than in The Times, whereas a crop failure in Meghalaya may be reported in The Times but almost certainly not in the Mirror. Selection is ac­companied by transformation, differential treatment in presentation] according to numerous political, social and economic factors.

As far as differences in presentation are concerned, most people would admit the possibility of «bias»: the Sun is known to be consis­tently hostile in its treatment of trades unions, and of what it call «the loony Left»; the Guardian is generous in its reporting of the at fairs of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Such disaffection and affiliations are obvious when you start reading carefully, and discussing the news media with other people. The world of the Pres is not the real world, but a world skewed and judged.

Now what attitude might one take towards the «bias»? There is. an argument to the effect that biases do exist, but not everywhere. The Daily Express is biased, the Socialist Worker is not (or the other way round). In a good world, all newspapers and television channel would report the unmediated truth. This view seems to me to be drastically and dangerously false. It allows a person to believe, and to assert, complacently, that their newspaper is unbiased, whereas all the others are in the pockets of the Tories or the Trotskyites; or that newspapers biased, while TV news is not (because “the camera cannot lie”).

The danger with this position is that it assumes the possibility of genuine neutrality, of some news medium being a clear undistorting window. And that can never be.

Match the following words with their meanings as used in the