Generating news: Agenda setting in radio broadcast news

GENERATING NEWS :

AGENDA SETTING

IN RADIO BROADCAST NEWS

Richard Fitzgerald

University of Queensland

Adam Jaworski

Cardiff University

William Housley

Cardiff University

INTRODUCTION

The news broadcast is a highly familiar institutional event inwhich the latest ‘news’ is presented through routine discursive struc-tures that provide a newsworthy framework for events to be reportedinto (Clayman and Heritage, 2002). However, as has been emphasisedby many authors, news is not only concerned with reporting ‘events’.Rather, media organisations are in the business of news production.‘They construct it, they construct facts, they construct statements andthey construct context in which these facts make sense. Theyconstruct “a” reality’ (Vasterman, 1995, quoted in Harcup andO’Neill, 2001 : 265 ; see also Tuchman, 1978). Or, as Schudson putsit : ‘To ask “Is this news ?” is not to ask only “Did it just happen ?” Itis to ask “Does this mean something ?”’ (Schudson, 1987 : 84). Thus,while ‘breaking’ news, i.e. reporting on unanticipated major events,may still be the top priority among newsmakers, the work of newjournalists has been likened to the work on the assembly line withnews being searched for, gathered, selected, and eventually turnedinto stories in a routinized process of news-making (e.g. Gans, 1980 ;Cook, 1998).

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Reporting and presenting stories gathered by a programme,however, creates a possible site of tension where usual editorial valuesmay be passed over in favour of carrying a story the programme hassourced through its own investigative journalism. We explore thisblurring by focusing upon the discursive placement of news and thecreation of a news agenda through an examination of two examplestaken from the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. Using the ethnome-thodological approach of membership category analysis, we suggestthat the presenters are seen to engage in complex categorial work inthe process of creating a topical context for an issue to appear in thenews programme as well as the subsequent development of the issueas a relevant news agenda during the programme.

The data analysed in this paper is taken from a corpus of recor-dings of BBC Radio 4 news programmemes collected over the courseof four weeks between 21st May and 15th June 2001, and forms partof a larger research project focusing upon the genre of radio newslanguage and in particular on the issues of temporality in BBC radionews broadcasts (see Jaworski et al., 2004). Within news broad-casting, the Today programmeme enjoys a high profile within politi-cal and media circles as a bedrock for quality news interviews, chal-lenging, questioning and setting the day’s political agenda. Broadcaston weekdays between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., and on Saturdays between7 a.m. and 9 a.m., the programmeme attracts prominent political andsocial commentators as well as influencing to a lesser or greaterextent the order of political discourse (Fairclough, 1998).

NEWS VALUES AND NEWS PRODUCTION

The Today programmeme is organised around cyclical slots fornews, finance, sport, review of the morning papers and news bulletinsbut is also progressively oriented towards major news interviews oc-curring in the later parts of the programme. This orientation involvesa common practice of reporting a story in the early part of theprogramme and then following up or developing the story through aninterview towards the end of the programme. Whilst introducing andreturning to a story over the course of the programme is a routine oc-currence in the data collected, there were also a number of instanceswhere the stories were based around an event or item sourced by theprogramme itself. What became apparent in these instances was thatthe presenters would work to build a newsworthy context for the itemsto appear into, and that following the initial reporting, the storieswould then be paced through various stages including characterappearances towards a major interview later on in the programme.

2 L’analyse linguistique des discours des médias


In our data sample, we have identified four instances of thispractice and we build our argument around two randomly selected buttypical examples. Our two case ‘stories’ are referred to as ‘law andorder’ and ‘transport and the environment’. The law and order exam-ple involves a previously high profile and controversial legal casewhere in 1999 the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin shot dead a burglar(and injured another one), for which he was sentenced for five yearsin prison (he was released after three years). The programmemereturns to the case after two years and interviews Tony Martin by wayof introducing a broader debate on law and order, as part of anongoing election campaign. The second example involves the Todayprogrammeme’s presenters and correspondents producing and dis-cussing a report on transport and environmental issues also in thecontext of the election campaign.

As has been mentioned, we are interested here in examining thediscursive processes of what can be referred as the ‘manufacturing’ ofnews (cf. Cohen and Stanley, 1973). With our focus on close textualanalysis of the data extracts, we offer an insight into how discourse(here : radio talk) works towards establishing the newsworthiness ofthe target item (the interview of the day with a prominent politician).As the interview is not a ‘real-life’ event to be reported on as news buta media event to be presented as news, the discursive processespreceding the main event are geared towards enhancing what Bell(1991 : 158-160) has referred to as the ‘values in the news process’such as continuity (making the interview part of an on-going story),competition (scooping one’s rivals with an ‘exclusive’), co-option(presenting lesser news items in relation to a high-profile story oritem), composition (presenting a mixture of different kinds of news),predictability (pre-scheduling of events), prefabrication (the exis-tence of ready-made text which can be transformed into a ‘story’).Bell distinguishes these procedural news values from Galtung andRuge’s (1965) news values concerned predominantly with thecontents of news and status of news actors (see also Harcup andO’Neill, 2001). As will be clear in our discussion below, the identityof the main interviewees in our examples (Home Office Minister,Shadow Home Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister) is also impor-tant for the newsworthiness of the interviews ; after all, they are elitepoliticians – members of the UK cabinet or shadow cabinet. However,it appears that even with such high-profile news actors, the BBCneeds to establish a newsworthy context to justify their presence in alive, prestigious media slot.

To restate, it is the decision-making and active negotiation bet-ween editors, journalists, lawyers and presenters where the news is

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made (Molotch and Lester, 1974). The routine everyday work ofturning ‘stories’ into ‘news’ involves the constraints of balance, neu-trality and objectivity together with the news values of time, accessand appeal within a news frame that serves to order the events as astory in the world, as well as presenting the story to the world, or theimagined audience (van Dijk, 1998 ; Fowler, 1991). However, theselection, ordering and presenting of news events through the creationof a news frame involves imposing familiar structures for novelevents and in so doing renders the representation of the ‘new’ or‘unusual’ as ‘ordinary’ (Bell, 1991). Indeed, it is the very ordinarinessof the presentation of events, the very ordinariness of the structureand appearance of the events and characters, which goes some way toneutralize the possible reflection upon the events as ideologicallyinformed (Allen, 1999). This ordinariness is also at the heart of whatFairclough (1995a) refers to as the ‘conversationalization’ of medialanguage. In Fairclough’s (1998) analysis of a radio news programme,also applied to the Today programmeme, he identifies the added newsvalue of the programmeme, the possibility of influencing the politicalorder of discourse, as located in the presenters’ ability to emulate thelanguage of ‘ordinary discourse’, or ‘the man propping up the loungebar on a Sunday lunchtime’ (Fairclough, 1998 : 157). He also noteshow this programmeme is able to assemble a large number of promi-nent commentators and interviewees and how it repeatedly returns toa story throughout the three hour programme. However, althoughidentifying these characters as central to the unfolding of a story, inFairclough’s analysis they remain largely unexamined as to how,where, when and why they appear (Fairclough, 1995b). Thus, intreating the different appearances of the news and characters asweighted equally, Fairclough neglects the construction of a particularissue as a progressive series of news events that build upon each otherand develop over the course of the programme.

The organisation of topical characters in news stories is notsimply a matter of them appearing, but that these voices or charactersappear at temporally relevant times doing relevant actions during theprogression of the story in such a way as to provide a particularstructure to the story. With this in mind, it is important to trace notonly the evolution of a story over the course of a programme orthrough the series of broadcasts on the issue but also through theunfolding organization of the appearance of relevant characters(Nekvapil and Leuder, 2002). This involves paying attention to theuse of familiar discursive structures of presentation and re-presentation through which content becomes organised and made intonews in any particular instance.



TOWARDS A MEMBERSHIP CATEGORY ANALYSIS OF NEWS DISCOURSE

Our analysis of the data draws upon the methodology of mem-bership category analysis (MCA) embedded within a sequentialorganisation (Sacks, 1995 ; Watson, 1997 ; Hester and Eglin, 1997a,1997b ; Housley and Fitzgerald, 2002 ; Fitzgerald and Housley,2002). This method involves paying analytic attention to the use ofdescription in conversation based upon methodical appearance ofsequentially relevant categories. The methodological approachinitially developed by Sacks (1974) in his example ‘The baby cried.The mommy picked it up.’ demonstrates how deliberate categorialconsiderations are illuminated by an analytical process of how wemake sense of this story. We understand the story in terms of the‘mommy’ picking up her ‘baby’ in response to baby crying. ForSacks, we understand this story in this way because we associate thecategories of ‘baby’ and ‘mommy’, with the membership categorisa-tion device ‘the family’. Of course, both ‘baby’ and ‘mommy’ may becategories of further collections such as the ‘stage of life device’. Inaddition, this framework was complemented by the notion of categorybound activities (CBA’s) which were used to describe how certainactivities were commonsensically tied to specific categories anddevices (e.g. the tying of the activity of crying to the category ‘baby’)(cf. Housley and Fitzgerald, 2002). For Sacks, such categorisationsand their devices formed part of the commonsensical framework ofmembers’ methods and recognisable capacities of practical sensemaking. Whilst Sacks for the most part talked of categories anddevices as referring to personal social categories, subsequentdevelopments have extended category analysis to non-personal refe-rences such as buildings (McHoul and Watson, 1984), social structure(Coulter, 1983), as well as a broadcast news story (Hester, 2002).

The method of MCA enables close analysis of language use butalso allows an analytic flexibility through which differing levels ofcategory and sequential work are made visible. In the analysis below,we suggest that the categorial organisation works on (at least) twolevels. Firstly, the overall story operates as a category of ‘news story’in the device of ‘news programme’, and, secondly, as the storyunfolds, it uses the sequential appearance of relevant ‘characters’, atspecific stages as part of the internal development of the story, i.e.they ‘appear-on-cue’ (Sacks, 1995 : Fall 1965, lecture 9 ; Spring1966, lecture 20). In his discussions of the ‘appearance of characters’within a story, Sacks refers to both ‘character’ and ‘category’ :

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[B]ack in the beginning of the course when considering ‘Thebaby cried. The mommy picked it up,’ one of the things I wasremarking there was that when a character who has someproper grounds for occurring and some proper thing to do,has its cue, then there is no need to account for how theyhappened to have come on the scene. (Sacks, 1995 Fall1965, lecture 9 : 183).

Whilst not fully interchangeable, the notions of ‘characters’ and‘categories’ have similar properties in the way categories of personsappear as characters in the telling of a story such that a ‘character’ isheard as the individual representation of a ‘membership category’.Following this methodology, we examine the way the two news storiesselected are developed through distinct, temporally separatedepisodes which act retrospectively and prospectively drawing uponpast discussions in order to premise and direct subsequent discus-sions, and which are organised around the placement of topicalcharacters strategically placed to structure and guide the developmentof the story.

Example 1. ‘ Law and Order’

Analysis of the language of broadcast news provides an answerto why a story appears, why the story is newsworthy now. As Clayman(1991) points out, news interviewers work to situate the newsinterview within a sequence of newsworthy events and so create animmediate, and hence newsworthy, context for an upcominginterview.

The opening is plainly designed to convey an agenda for theforthcoming interview and to situate it within an ongoingstream of newsworthy happenings. In this way, the occasionof talk is portrayed as a response to events and processes inthe larger social world. Establishing this connection is abasic means of displaying the interview’s ‘newsworthiness’,for it is through such discursive practices that the interviewis linked to public occurrences in the wider society (Lester1980). (Clayman, 1991 : 55)

What Clayman outlines is that newsworthiness is not only a matter ofreporting on events that happen in the world or reporting on eventsthat are selected through the editorial process but involves the methodof presentation where the presenter discursively creates a context fora current event to appear into. Whereas Clayman identifies this



discursive practice as synchronous with the interview locating it in its‘opening’, what is of interest in our data is the way the process ofpreparation can occur diachronically through a series of discreteevents, sometimes apparently unconnected, and spread over thecourse of a programme. Overall, such processes of generating news-worthiness can be linked to the notion of news values (see above) andthe legitimising of news topics or social actors participating in newsand other broadcast formats (cf. Thornborrow, 2001).

In exploring how this process of presentation unfolds in our firstexample, it is important to examine the initial reporting of the item inthe early part of the programme to show how the presenter works tobuild a newsworthy context establishing the item as ‘news’ for furtherdiscussion.

EXTRACT 1

Law and Order. Today, 24.05.2001, 07 :32 a.m.

JH : the Home Secretary Jack Straw told senior police officersyesterday that recorded crime is on the way down. last week hewas booed and jeered by rank and file officers of the PoliceFederation. law and order is an issue in this election campaign,if there is one thing during the last Parliament .hhh thatcrystallised the whole debate about law and order .hhh it was theconviction of Tony Martin. for murdering a teenager who triedto burgle his remote farmhouse in Norfolk. .hhh theConservatives promised to tighten up the law on self-defence.Labour accused them of jumping on a bandwagon. Tony Martinhimself became a national figure whether praised orcondemned. .hhh we’ve obtained an interview with Mister withuh Tony Martin recorded on the phone from Gartree Prison inLeicestershire. our reporter, Dominic Arkwright, asked himwhether he felt that levels of policing especially in rural areaswas encouraging people to take the law into their own hands.

In this extract, events are assembled and presented through thefamiliar introductory structure identified by Clayman (1991) thatpulls together a number of events in order to generate topicalrelevance. A speech by British Home Secretary Jack Straw on law andorder is topically linked to a previous event the week before of Strawbeing ‘booed and jeered’ by an audience of police officers (line 3).From this, the programme introduces the ‘issue’ of law and order inthe election campaign (line 4). An example of this ‘issue’ is thenpresented as the ‘Tony Martin’ case prominent a while back (line 7).This temporal shift to the past is then brought back to the present withthe announcement of an upcoming interview the programme has‘obtained’ with Tony Martin from the prison where he is still serving

Generating news 7


his sentence (line 12). Thus the ‘case’ of Tony Martin provides anexample for the current ‘issue’ of law and order and in doing so pro-vides temporal relevance to the interview sourced by the programmewith him about to be broadcast.

Thus, the interview with Tony Martin is discursively situated asnewsworthy through the selection of this item in conjunction withother ‘current’ newsworthy agendas and topics. As indicated earlier,Clayman (1991) documents the way news items are routinelyorganised and introduced following a collection of related events andthen situating them within that ‘created’ newsworthy context. Viewedthrough a categorial organisation, the events are offered as a collec-tion of related events which together form a topical collection. Theintroduction, then, invokes events as membership categories collectedas part of a newsworthy topical device into which the next item, thenext category, can be seen as belonging, i.e., the interview with TonyMartin. The initial collection once established as a newsworthy devicethen provides the topical basis through which to engage the story,laying out the issues through a further layer of category work whichprogressively organises the internal structure of the story. For exam-ple, starting with Tony Martin, a number of relevant characters, orcategories, are introduced at progressively and sequentially relevanttimes in the next extract that follows immediately after the interviewwith Martin.

EXTRACT 2

Law and Order. Today, 24.05.2001, 7 :45 a.m.

JH : well unfortunately er the phone card that Tony Martin had beenusing ran out and we were we couldn’t ask him about FredBarret we didn’t have time that the boy who died. .hhh we didcontact uh Fred Barret’s family we offered them the right toreply to that interview but they and the family of the othervictim the other person who was shot, Brendon Fearen both uhdeclined to comment .hhh on the line now though i:sSuperintendent Kevin Morris who is the President of the PoliceSuperintendents’ Association, .hhh of England and Wales, .hhher it’s it’s a bit unusual I grant you Mister Morris to be asking aPolice Officer to comment on something that a man who’s beenconvicted of murder has had to say uh but what do you make ofthat ?

KM : erm well I’ve you know obviously he’s entitled to his ownopinions, but I think there’s there’s always going to be a dangerwhen people take the law into their own hands, um I mean eventoday, I’ve read a newspaper article where somebody wasconvicted of manslaughter for tackling a youth who was stealing



his car, you you’ve got rights everyone has rights to defend theirown properties but there’s a limit and I think if you exceed thelimit you expect to be punished.

JH : yes I mean in that case you just mentioned, th- the a boy wasbattered to death wasn’t he ? in effect, I mean that’s absolutelyunacceptable under any circumstances so your not defending

[

KM : yes

JH : that in any way, right fine let’s talk about police numbers this

[

KM : no no no

JH : was Martin’s uh principle complaint a complaint of course ofmany other people as well that there simply aren’t enough policeofficers to do the job that is needed to be done.

After playing the pre-recorded tape of Tony Martin, the presentermakes reference to the families of Martin’s victims who had beenoffered the right to reply but declined. Thus although the victims’families did not wish to take part in the programme, the presentermakes their absence as ‘noticeably absent’. This reference to absentcategories suggests that there is a sequentially relevant slot for themto appear into, and if they do not then their absence may be accountedfor (cf. lines 3-7). The sequential orientation to relevant categories iscontinued in the introduction of the next character. After Tony Martinand the (absent) families of victims, JH introduces SuperintendentKevin Morris (line 8). The way the Superintendent is introducedsuggests that he is oriented to as the next sequentially relevantcharacter as no preamble or contextual background for his appearancein the programme is provided. However, JH’s hedging of his initialquestion for KM (‘er it’s it’s a bit unusual I grant you MisterMorris…’ ; line 7), signals that Kevin Morris’s presence on the pro-gramme is not ‘naturally’ linked to the Tony Martin case itself.Evidently, once the idea Tony Martin’s right to defend himself hasbeen dealt with by KM (lines 14–21), JH gets an opening into thesequentially more relevant and unproblematic topical category of ‘lawand order’ he has been waiting for (‘right fine let’s talk about policenumbers’ ; line 27). Note here the two discourse markers ‘right fine’signalling a shift to a new, preferred topic. Thus, JH moves on fromthe particular (Tony Martin) to the general (police numbers) whichnow makes KM’s category appropriate for the unfolding story.

Up to this point the introduction and development of the storycan be seen as part of the programmeme’s current affairs remit toexplore issues of public interest, although in its next incarnation the

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story appears in a news bulletin thereby imbuing it with wider newscredibility by being reported back to the programme as ‘headlinenews’ (Extract 3). Moreover, the news bulletin recontextualises partof the interview with Tony Martin, and the sound bite selected for thenews bulletin summarises and re-focuses on Tony Martin’s complaintabout insufficient police numbers in rural areas in the UK.

EXTRACT 3

Law and Order. Today, 24.05.2001, 8 a.m. (news bulletin)

RM : Tony Martin the Norfolk farmer who was jailed for life forshooting dead a sixteen year old intruder at his remote farm, hascriticised both Labour and Conservative policies towards lawand order. .hhh in an interview for this programme from GartreePrison in Leicestershire .hhh Martin said they amounted tonothing more than rhetoric. he was also critical of rural policefor failing to act against criminals.

TM : when you want help .hhh from the police suddenly there isn’tany help. .hhh and I mean in my own particular case, I mean I’vegone down the road over several years, .hhh of giving them lotsof information. but they won’t, they won’t do anything sobasically (.) you’re on your own (.) well I’m afraid with thepolice you are on your own aren’t you ?

24-hour news broadcasting orientates to hourly time cycles inwhich regular features and news updates appear in rigidly time-tabledslots within the 60-minute unit (Richardson and Meinhof, 1999). Theaudience, it is assumed, do not watch or consume news 24 hours a daybut will (barring major news events such as ‘disaster marathons’, cf.Liebes, 1998 ; Jaworski, Fitzgerald, Constantinou, 2005) dip in, catchup and move on. In this cycle, the headlines in a news bulletin providea punctuation point where the ‘news’ is summarised and also, as in thethree-hour long Today programmeme, edited to move on with theprogrammeme’s daily agenda. What is especially noticeable in Extract3 is that the focus of the reporting shifts from his personal case andthe ‘local’ issue of rural crime to Martin’s criticism of the country’spoliticians (cf. ‘[Tony Martin] has criticised both Labour andConservative policies towards law and order’ ; lines 2-4). Thus, froman interview that covered a wide range of topics mostly around TonyMartin’s own plight and lack of remorse (not transcribed here), thesound bite selected is one that invokes the wider national politicalissue of ‘law and order’ as part of the programmeme’s agenda to makeit part of the discussion of the election campaign and to prepare theground for an upcoming interview with a Home Office Minister andthe Shadow Home Secretary. Moreover, although the programmeme’s



agency in assembling the interview in the first place is clearly statedin the initial introduction of the story (cf. ‘we’ve obtained an inter-view’ ; Extract 1, line 12), it is entirely eclipsed in Extract 3. Rather,in Extract 3, the issue of law and order is seen to emerge sponta-neously, through the use of non-transactive language (Hodge andKress, 1993) (cf. ‘in an interview for this programme’ ; Extract 3, line4).

To re-cap, by reporting the issue as headline news, the summaryacts as a punctuation mark, a topical bridge by which the issue istransformed from the ‘local’ issue of rural crime (cf. Extract 1), to theissue of national policy presented as headline news (Extract 3). Oneheadline news in Extract 3 mention the two main UK political parties,this inevitably makes allows the representatives of each party to bebrought in in the final hour of the programmeme.

EXTRACT 4

Law and Order. Today, 24.05.2001, 8–9 a.m.

JH : when a couple of young men broke into an isolated farm houselast year, the farmer Tony Martin was waiting for them with aloaded shotgun. he shot at them and killed one of them and hewas convicted of murder. .hhh that conviction divided thenation, and the politicians, and it continues to do so to this day.as law and order is discussed in the election campaign .hhh thecase of Tony Martin is still there in the background. we spoke tohim on this programme earlier. .hhh it raised some importantissues. the right of a homeowner to defend himself as he thinksbest, to take the law into his own hands, the level of crime andpolicing, in rural Britain. .hhh Mister Martin Tony Martin saidthat people in areas such as he once lived in simply did not feelsafe. so let us discus law and order with the Home OfficeMinister Charles Clarke, and with Ann Widdecombe, theShadow Home Secretary. .hhh er M:ister Clarke there[interviews continue]

Extract 4 comes from a broadcast approximately one hour afterthe introduction of the ‘law and order’ issue (cf. Extract 1) andfollows immediately after the news bulletin at 8 a.m. (Extract 3). Increating a topical context for the newsworthiness of this item, themain interview slot of the day, an assemblage of relevant categoriestogether with predicated actions are invoked. The introduction isinitially structured around a summary of the controversy surroundingthe Tony Martin case. Into this topical context or device are nowplaced the categories of ‘criminal’, ‘victim’ and ‘convicted murderer’as well as the categories of the ‘nation’ and ‘politicians’ through their

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action of ‘taking sides’. The invocation of both the public and politicians acts to move the

categorial relevance on and begins to orientate to the upcomingdebate between Clarke and Widdecombe. By this point, the case ofTony Martin and the earlier interview with him become mere ‘back-ground’ (Extract 4, line 7). The presenter uses the interview to intro-duce a number of new issues through the categories of ‘homeowners’,‘self-defence’, and ‘people in rural areas’. It is the latter that is finallytransformed into the category ‘victim’ or ‘potential victim’ (‘peoplein areas such as he once lived in simply did not feel safe’ ; lines12–13), which legitimises the subsequent interview with the twopoliticians (‘so let us discuss law and order’ ; line 13).

Note that in Extract 4, not unlike in Extract 1, law and order isintroduced as part of the ongoing election campaign (cf. Extract 1,line 4 ; Extract 4, line 6), but apart from the recent speech by JackStraw mentioned at the beginning of Extract 1, the issue seems not tobe particularly live in either of the main political parties’ campaigns.Therefore, the programmeme seems to source a controversialinterview with Tony Martin as a catalyst in staging the media debateon a particular topic and relies on the construction of the topic asnewsworthy through careful categorial work in order to build up andlegitimate the main interview of the morning.

The categories made relevant in the context of this pre-interviewcan be seen as forming part of the sequential flow and categorialdevelopment of the topical issue over the course of the programme.The introduction of Clarke and Widdecombe is the ultimaterealisation of the trajectory of the ‘issue’ of law and order raisedthrough the Tony Martin interview an hour earlier. Apparent then is aprogressive pacing of the issue over the course of the programmethrough the appearance of relevant characters at sequentially relevanttimes as the story is unfolded by the presenter. In the next example, asimilarly orchestrated trajectory is apparent where a topical issue israised in the early part of the programme in order to provide alegitimate vehicle for an interview the programme has obtained witha prominent and newsworthy character.

Example 2. ‘Transport and the Environment’

In a similar way to the discussion of the Tony Martin story above,a progressive trajectory is present in the development of the‘forgotten’ issue of transport and the environment. However, whatbecomes apparent here is that the newsworthy aspect is not so muchthe ongoing discussion of transport and environment policies during



an election campaign, but that the programmeme has obtained thefirst interview with John Prescott – the Deputy Prime Minister andMinister for Transport and the Environment – after an incident inwhich he punched a member of the public who had thrown an egg athim.

The topical issue is introduced in the first hour of the programmeduring which the presenter, James Naughtie, poses the question oftransport and the environment being ‘forgotten issues’ :

EXTRACT 5

Transport and the Environment. Today, 29.05.2001, 06 :35 a.m.

JN : are transport and the environment the forgotten issues of thiscampaign ? our correspondent Roger Harrobin is here, we’regonna look at transport a little bit this morning Roger, andindeed talk to John Prescott after eight o’clock. .hhh what arethe issues that the parties should be having a squabble about intransport ?

RH : well if you remember when Labour came to power, it was in thewake of Swampy inspired road protests [interview continues]

Here JN introduces the item by posing a question based on theabsence of the issue of transport and the environment in the electioncampaign before identifying that the programmeme is about to focuson it today (cf. line 3). That is to say, the introduction does not thenpremise a newsworthy issue but indeed a non-newsworthy issue thataccording to the programmeme should be news. Into this non-newsvacuum the correspondent is brought in in order to report on whatapparently are the newsworthy issues (cf. lines 5–6). The subsequentreport (not transcribed) focuses upon the reported disquiet amongst‘civil servants’ with the current government’s apparently misleadingstatements and counter action concerning environmental protectionand future road building. The report includes taped interviews withparents outside schools, animated readings of selected parts of theLabour Party manifesto and its paraphrases by unidentified ‘civilservants’. As yet, no official voices from the government are heard inthe report.

Forty minutes later Roger Harrobin’s report is repeated but it isalso recycled as a party political and, consequently, election issue(Extract 6). This is a rather dramatic shift from the script on Extract5, where transport and the environment were presented as ‘theforgotten issues of this campaign’ ; Extract 5, lines 2–3).

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EXTRACT 6


JH : Labour has been accused of misleading the public over what itsays about Transport, in its manifesto, it says road schemes thatdamage the environment have been scrapped, .hhh but civilservants have told this programme that that’s the case with onlytwo such schemes many more have been approved and more stillare expected if Labour wins the election. .hhh well thisprogramme has learnt that in spite of public denials governmentconsultants are urging a motorway style box a sort of ring ofmotorway roads, through green belt land right around theBirmingham conurbation. .hhh our environment correspondentRoger Harrobin is with me: Roger

RH : when Labour came to power, it was in the wake of Swampyinspired road protests [Repeat of the report by Roger Harrobinfirst broadcast at 6 :35AM]

JH : Roger Harrobin reporting and on the line now is Alan Francis ofthe Green Party, er goes without saying that you’re opposed to:what to all road schemes ? or just most, Mister Francis.

AF : um to all road schemes, and certainly those that have been listedso far this morning,

In this the second outing for the story presented in Extract 6, theagency for introducing the ‘issue’ of transport into news is shiftedfrom the programmeme itself to an unattributed and temporallydislocated accusation of the Labour Party ‘misleading the public’(line 1). JH subsequently claims knowledge of further inconsistenciesbetween the Labour Party manifesto for re-election to governmentand the current Labour Government’s actions. However, he removesthe agency of the programmeme in bringing up the issue by assem-bling the relevant categories of ‘civil servants’ and ‘governmentconsultants’ who are identified as the sources of news. The recontex-tualisation of RH’s report in Extract 6 from Extract 5 positions it as aresponse to the criticisms voiced against the government rather thanits source. Subsequently, the next character brought in by the pro-gramme is a spokesperson for the Green Party Alan Francis. His‘natural’ presence in this slot is discursively signalled by JH’s amplifi-cation ‘goes without saying’ (line 16) preceding his questioning ofAF.

An hour later (Extract 7), the issue is returned to and againpresented as one the programmeme is reporting on without any refe-rence to its own agency in creating the agenda in the first instance.



EXTRACT 7


JN : one of Labour’s claims when it was elected was that it wouldgive us a better transport system, it would be (.) integrated it wasthe great word of the day, there would be a better balance inparticular, .hhh between road, and rail. well the railways havebeen in chaos, as we know, and on road building as we reportedearlier this morning it does seem as if the government mayalready have broken, its last manifesto pledge. the ministerwhose vast Department of Transport Environment and theRegions was to deliver the changes, is of course the DeputyPrime Minister himself, John Prescott, he joins us now, morningMister Prescott

JP : Hello Jim

During the course of the morning, the programme has dedicatedtwo separate slots to the story (cf. Extracts 5 and 6), the interviewwith John Prescott being the third (Extract 7). The two slots prior tothe interview with Prescott assembled a list of relevant named andunnamed categories creating a build up or relevant context for thefinal slot. In the third outing for the story, however, there is nomention of any of these specific voices. Instead, they are collectivelyturned into ‘current news’ of the government which ‘may alreadyhave broken, its last manifesto pledge’ (lines 6-7). The role of theprogrammeme is presented not as in sourcing news but merelyreporting it (‘as we reported earlier this morning’ ; lines 5-6). Then,during the twenty minute interview that follows (not transcribedhere), John Prescott answers a wide range of questions about theincident with the demonstrator, transport and the environment, hisgeneral job of Deputy Prime Minister, and progress of the electioncampaign.

Shortly after the Prescott interview is over, it is recycled in anews headline spot without any reference to the former key theme oftransport and environment.

EXTRACT 8

Transport and the Environment. Today, 29.05.2001, 08 :30 a.m. (Newsheadlines)

NR : the Shadow Chancellor Michael Portillo has repeated demandsfor Tony Blair to spell out to voters what the question in anyreferendum on the Euro should be. .hhh the Deputy PrimeMinister John Prescott told this programme a more importantissue was Conservative spending cuts.

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The absence of the issue of transport from subsequent headlinenews (Extract 8) suggests that it was not, then, the main news topic ofthe day but rather a topical device created to provide a newsworthycontext into which the interview with Prescott could be placed.

In the final part of the programme, the topical issue is returnedto for one last outing, the issue being not reported any further in thesubsequent news programmemes of the day. The interviewees in thisslot are from the two major opposition parties active in the ongoingelection campaign.

EXTRACT 9

Transport and the Environment. Today 29 :05 :2001. 08 :50 a.m.

JH : does any of the parties have the answer to Britain’s transportproblems ? Labour promises to spend a fortune, but not to allowany road schemes that would damage the environment, thoughthis programme has been told by civil servants that that’s exactlywhat is happening, >JOHN PRESCOTT< told us earlier that it’snot. well what about the other parties Bernard Jenkin is theConservative’s transport spokesman Don Foster is the LiberalDemocrats’

In the last ten minutes of the programme (introduced inExtract 9), JH brings in two more relevant characters identified as res-ponsible for the topical issue of transport in their respective parties.Again, however, the appearance of the Conservative and LiberalDemocrat politicians does not seem to hinge so much on the news-worthiness of their recent activities but rather they bring to an end thecycle of ‘naturally’ appearing categories in a media-generated story.As the Today programme routinely aims to provide and be seen toprovide balanced coverage of the three main political parties duringan election campaign, the Conservative and Liberal Democratpoliticians introduced in Extract 9 complete the device of relevantequal representation.

In sum, the presenters create news from non-news through areport about what they deem should be a newsworthy issue, whichthen forms the context for further discussion during the programme.However, what is revealed in our analysis is that whilst the presentersassemble various relevant characters to discuss the issue, the mainagenda for the issue is to legitimately place an interview with JohnPrescott. The gestalt shift between the two agendas of discussingtransport and obtaining an interview with Prescott is revealed in thenews bulletin where the headlines ignore the apparently topical issueto report Prescott’s criticism of Conservative spending cuts, and



where the categorial balance of the opposition parties is not given airtime to debate with Prescott but is placed at the end of theprogramme.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, we have highlighted the way in which the temporalordering and ‘placing’ of news items has become a central feature ofnews management. Following Clayman’s (1991) observation of thediscursive structures creating newsworthiness for interviews inbroadcast talk, we demonstrate that these legitimising practices maywell exceed the moment of the introduction of the interview. Instead,a major interview during a news programme may be legitimated overthe course of the programme in a sequence of subsidiary reports,commentaries and pre-interviews. This is especially clear in the caseswhen the newsworthiness of the main interview is in question, i.e.when its news value (Galtung and Ruge, 1965) does not pertain somuch to the nature of ongoing events or the news actors (although ithelps when they fulfil the criterion of eliteness). It is then that newsbroadcasters may turn to the values of the news process (cf. Bell,1991, discussed above) to legitimise the interview. We have demons-trated how the Today programme creates these values in our twoexamples of self-generated news/interviews : continuity (anchoring‘news items’ in past events, e.g. the conviction of Tony Martin,protests against Labour transport policy) ; competition (claimingexclusivity to the interviews) ; co-option (ongoing election campaignas backdrop) ; composition (giving fair coverage to the three mainpolitical parties) ; predictability (working towards a planned mediaevent) ; prefabrication (recontextualising of interviews and reports tolegitimate the programme’s own agenda).

As our analysis demonstrates, despite its apparent focus on the‘real world out there’, news, and especially media-generated news, isto a great extent self-referential and circular. What we find within theconfines of one programme, for example, is not only the setting of itsown agenda, to which politicians are held accountable in a series ofinterviews, but also the programme’s own reports and interviewsfeeding into the ongoing development of the ‘story’ and makingheadline news as if they originally appeared independent of theprogramme’s agency (cf. Bourdieu’s 1998 : 28 notion of ‘informationabout information’). Moreover, through the MCA-informed approachto our data, we have demonstrated how the programme exploitscharacters, or categories, ‘appearing on cue’ relying on their actionsand/or institutional status, to give the unfolding stories the legitimacy

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of a naturally occurring, linearly progressing chains of events. Thetwo stories are structured around a succession of relevant charactersappearing ; around a series of people as embodied categories talkingabout aspects of the topic, which serves to structure the developmentof the topic as they appear at relevant times in order to perform somekind of expected category action. In so doing each appearancebecomes a developmental step mediated by the presenters towards aparticular goal.

As Scollon (1998) observes, social interaction that is broadcasttalk takes place between journalists, politicians and other publicfigures as a spectacle for the watching and listening public (cf. Bell,1991 ; Bourdieu, 1998). Following Goffman, Scollon also notes thatnews discourse ‘is carried on with the same fundamental ritualpractices for establishing the grounds for interaction (the channel),establishing the identities and social positioning of the participants,and establishing topics as found in other forms of social interactionsuch as telephone calls and face-to-face withs (Goffman, 1963, 1974,1981)’ (Scollon, 1998 : 189). The meta-discursive strategies inbroadcast talk that have been our focus here attest further to its‘everydayness’ and the conversationalisation of public discourse.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This paper arises from the research project ‘Back to the Future’ :Reporting of the Future in Broadcast News Programmes funded bythe Leverhulme Trust (F/00407B).

CHARACTERS APPEARING IN THE EXTRACTS

AF = Alan Francis, Green Party JH = John Humphrys, PresenterJN = James Naughtie, PresenterJP = John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister (Labour)KM = Kevin Morris, President of the Police Superintendents’ AssociationNR = unidentified News ReaderRH = Roger Harrobin, ReporterRM = Rory Morrison, News ReaderTM = Tony Martin, Farmer



TRANSCRIPTION NOTATION

under[yes overlapping speech. falling intonation, fall-rise intonation? rising intonation(.) brief pause under 1 secondone emphasis.hhh hearable in breath >John Prescott< increased paceJOHN PRESCOTT increased loudness[INTERVIEW CONTINUES] ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT

THE EXTRACT

Generating news 19


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Generating news: Agenda setting in radio broadcast news

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