Glasgow Media Group

The Glasgow Media Group (GMG) was formed in 1974, as six media researchers within the sociology department of Glasgow University got together to produce the book Bad News. John Eldridge, Jean Hart, Alison McNaughton, Greg Philo, Paul Walton, and Brian Winston measured bias and ideology in television news coverage through content analysis, complemented by some interviewing and covert participant observation. The book argued that both the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and News Independent Television News (ITN), important news providers in the United Kingdom, editorialized and fell short of their legal obligation to present political and industrial news in a balanced and neutral fashion. The group argued that television news did not reflect the full range of views, was undemocratic in its choice of sources, and that broadcasters defied notions of accuracy and impartiality. All these led to a legitimization of the dominant ideology and to false consciousness among the masses. Journalists, even if well intended, often held unconscious political assumptions that affected news selection and distorted reality.

While many acclaimed the GMG research, some academics challenged the way it defined and measured ideology and the way the data was gathered, while others argued that unconscious political assumptions and media effects cannot be measured with content analysis. The book also met hostility from BBC and ITN, which complained to the university officials and tried to limit the freedom of the researchers.

Follow-up books, More Bad News in 1980 and Really Bad News in 1982, completed a trilogy based on the same content analysis of news programs. The GMG came to mean all those people who wrote with the initial team to produce the series of books on media bias. It included journalists working on the production side of news media who conducted their own content and audience studies. At the same time they also set up the Glasgow University Media (GUM) Unit, which applied for research grants and won many research awards. War and Peace News, with funds from UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), highlighted in 1985 the wholesale abandonment of impartiality in both print and broadcast media. With their work on subjects such as the miners' strike, the group gained a reputation for not shying away from difficult social and political issues.

Getting the Message in 1993 investigated media treatments of areas such as food panics, health scares, AIDS in the media, and mental health.

In 1998, Cultural Compliance underlined the political failure of media and cultural studies as they were taught in Britain's universities. The “cultural compliance” concept refers to postmodern writers who have lost the ability to engage critically with the society in which they exist and thus have drifted into irrelevance. The postmodern focus on the text and the negotiation of meaning has reduced the ability to study the real and often brutal relations of power that form our culture. Message Received (1999) focused on race, migration and media, disaster and crisis reporting, mental illness and suicide.

A more recent GMG work, Bad News From Israel, analyzes the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian war and its impact on public opinion.

...