This thesis examines the production and reception of discourses concerning religion in fictional broadcasting. It argues that the representation of religion in fictional broadcasting is a neglected area in the sociology of mass media and that this neglect contributes to a lack of understanding regarding the importance of religious identity. Production was investigated through interviewing broadcasters who were responsible for some of the most frequently mentioned programmes in the focus group interviews. A smaller number of broadcasters who were involved with religious broadcasting were also interviewed, with the intention of exploring the broadcasting ethos in relation to religion. Broadcasters confirmed that a secular ethos dominated but they also identified a number of constraints, which affected decisions to include or exclude religion from programmes. The elision of ethnicity with religion was also evident and much of this was related to broadcasting policy in relation to cultural diversity, which emphasised race as the most important factor. The relationship between religion and broadcasting since the start of broadcasting was examined through an analysis of letters and articles in The Radio Times and The Listener. This analysis demonstrated the increasingly secular attitudes on the part of both audiences and producers. It also provided an historical contextualisation for the contemporary part of the research. Academic arguments concerning secularization generally and its relationship to broadcasting, specifically, were examined. Although there are debates about the legitimacy of the secularization thesis, within academe, this study suggests that within broadcasting the argument has been won and religion is seen as far less relevant that race, gender or disability. The conclusion of the study is that representations of religion should be taken more seriously by academics and broadcasters because they do have an effect on attitudes that affect social inclusion and exclusion. Whilst this is problematic for Christians and Sikhs the findings of this study suggest that it is particularly problematic for Muslims.

In the autumn of 1997 it was announced that Radio 4's programmes were to be rescheduled and a commitment was given that disability would become a mainstream issue for the network. The new schedule and the mainstreaming initiative were implemented in April 1998. One of the immediate effects of rescheduling was the disappearance of Does He Take Sugar?, the network's weekly programme which presented in-depth treatment of general disability issues. By way of replacement, You and Yours, Radio 4's consumerist programme of longstanding, was given the remit to include regular coverage of disability issues in its content. It was intended that the outcome of these decisions would be that regular coverage of disability would emerge from a niche slot within the network and be positioned within the mainstream of the network's output. On the one hand, the implementation of the proposal to mainstream disability yielded the possibility of an increase in the coverage of disability issues on Radio 4 in an integrated way. On the other hand it could mean a loss of effective and focused treatment of disability issues and a qualitative shift in the nature of coverage. The proposal to mainstream disability issues on Radio 4 thus touched on central issues concerning the treatment of socially disadvantaged groups and the quest for equality. Its implementation took place at a time when the UK disability movement was growing in political power, and disabled people in Britain were becoming aware of the promise of potentially beneficial socio-cultural changes reflected by developments such as the introduction of the Disability Discrimination Act CDDA 1995). This thesis examines three aspects of the introduction of the mainstreaming initiative and the early years of its implementation: a) it draws on interviews with key players, conversations with others involved, participant observation reports and documentary evidence to examine the rationale behind the mainstream initiative and, in the light of the decision to drop the network's programme which focussed on general disability issues (Does He Take Sugar?), it examines the decision to retain In Touch, the network's niche programme for blind or visually impaired listeners; b) it presents a quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis of the network's pre and post-mainstreaming treatment of disability issues. This includes analysis of ten editions of Does He Take Sugar? the disability issues covered in You and Yours during the months of September 1998, 1999, 2000 and analysis of the series No Triumph, No Tragedy. presented by a former member of the Does He Take Sugar? team in the summer of 2000.

This thesis describes and analyses aspects of the social organisation of British news interview interaction. After a review of the sociological literature on the British news interview in Chapter 1, and a discussion of the evolution of news interviewing in Britain in Chapter 2, Chapter 3 argues that conversation analysis provides the appropriate analytical framework for the study of all forms of naturally occurring interaction. Using the techniques of conversation analysis, the next three chapters then focus on thtee central domains of news interview conduct: the organisation of turn-taking, the organisation of topic, and the organisation of disagreement. Chapter 4 proposes (i) that the news interview turn-taking system operates through a simple form of turn-type pre-allocation, and (ii) that this accounts for a range of systematic differences between news interviews and mundane conversation. Chapter 5 first explicates same of the types of work that interviewers accomplish through the production of questions which maintain or pursue the topical focus of preceding turns and sequences. It then examines same of the procedures which interviewees recurrently use in order to shift the focus of their talk away from the topical agendas which interviewers' questions establish for their turns. Chapter 6, describes how the patterning of disagreements in news interviews differs from that of disagreements in ordinary talk. In so doing, it argues that the fact that the organisation of disagreements in news interviews differs from that in conversation is largely a product of considerations which arise due to the turn-type pre-allocated character of news interview interaction. Finally, Chapter 7 explores the relationship of same of the features described in Chapters 4-6 to the background legal, institutional and other normative constraints on news interviewer/ee conduct.

This is a study of news production by eight major news organisations in the UK and Canada. Through observation of daily routines and semi-structured interviews, 124 journalists were included in the final sample. The overall aim of this research was to explore the interrelationships between new technologies, the potential autonomy accessible by journalists and the structure of constraints under which they operate. The news marketplace has become congested while audiences have fragmented and public news-producing behaviours have soared, facilitated through the ubiquity of new media. These developments were crucial to the analysis of mainstream news production within a media environment that has left news organisations struggling to retain audiences and their own credibility. New technologies adopted by news organisations have altered routines both within newsrooms and out in the field. News values have shifted towards ‘live’ coverage while workflow has been improved and convergence become the norm. At the same time, new media available within the public realm – including the internet, online publishing tools and advanced mobile phone technologies – are also available to individual journalists. However, it is those journalists already familiar with technology who are more likely to incorporate them into their own daily routines, along with the wider range of sources now available within the information producing strata of society. Research findings relate to the specific locations in the news production process at which new technologies, journalistic autonomy and constraining factors have the most impact. For this purpose, a model was developed along with an autonomy-constraint ratio. Key findings are that the transmission phase of news production presents the least amount of autonomy for journalists while the newsgathering phase offers the greatest amount of autonomy. Due to the temporal and theoretical limits of previous research frameworks, an autonomy-centred approach is proposed as a means of complementing the existing constraints-based approaches that have tended to dominate news production studies.

This is a case study in the microsociology of knowledge conducted in the London-based News Division of the British Broadcasting Corporation during 1972-3. The data was gathered by fieldwork in Broadcasting House and Television Centre. The study falls into two parts. The first, after a review of relevant literature, presents a detailed account of those dimensions of the organisational milieu necessary for an understanding of broadcast news production. These are: the hierarchical control structure which determines policy for news coverage; the everyday production routines which structure “news” as an organisational product; the system of advanced planning through which news stories are identified. This section also locates the legitimising role played by the BBC’s editorial philosophy and power structure, and considers implications of the broadcaster’s conventional distinction between “news” and “current affairs”. The second part of the study develops the idea of news producers as constituting and epistemic community whose work skills, organisational location, and occupational knowledge give them a distinctive cognitive orientation. Newsmen’s characterisation of their thought and practice as “professional” is analysed as a mode of conferring authority upon the production process, and the product “news”. It is then argued that newsmen’s primary framework of reference is the organisation within which they assert their complete autonomy from the audience, while at the same time asserting their unique capacity to determine its needs for news. Next, “impartiality” is analysed as a distinctive corporate conceptions drawn from a model of the political consensus represented by the major Parliamentary political parties, and is presented as illus-trating the BBC’s accommodation to the realities of State power. Newsmen’s claim to be accurate is next considered. It is shown how they support their claim by pointing to empiricist methods of authentication. The specific character of these is demonstrated by showing how news production is heavily condition-ed by the temporal imperatives of the daily news cycle. The study then concludes after considering newsmen’s time-conscious-ness; their professionalism in this context is analysed as being in control of the pace of often unpredictable work.

THE TELEVISION MESSAGE AS SOCIAL OBJECT: A comparative study of the structure and content of television programmes in Britain (excluding public affairs, children's television and shorts). The thesis will be both a theoretical and empirical examination of the applicability of the varieties of analysis of symbolic orders which have been advanced by such writers as Levi-Strauss and Foucault. The thesis is an exploration, through the study of the narrative structure of a series of television drama programmes, of the relationship between television, myths and folktales. Following upon work done principally by Claude Levi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp, but also others writing in the field of semiological and structural analysis, a detailed examination of the video-recorded texts of a thirteen part drama series is presented. It is argued in the context of an examination of, respectively, television and language, television and the mythic, and of the nature of narrative, that the television drama preserves the forms which otherwise might be thought of as particular to oral culture and communication. Television, in its preservation of these forms, and in its generally mythic character, gains its effectiveness thereby and must be understood sociologically in such terns. The effect of such an understanding, it is argued, will be to challenge any comprehension of the medium simply as the particular product of a particular historical period and/or an imposition in culture of one world view on an other. The television message is both a collective product and a transhistorical one. It is argued that on both counts it needs to be understood as a genuine expression of a social need, though in its expression of that need it does not necessarily simply act to preserve existing social and cultural conditions.

This thesis examines the process of mass communication from media strategies to audience belief in relation to the conflict in Ireland. It documents the media strategies used by the various actors and participants in the conflict, from the Northern Ireland Office, Royal Ulster Constabulary, Foreign Office and Army to Sinn Fén and the Irish Republican Army, via the Ulster Defence Association, other political parties, Civil liberties and human rights organisations and many others. It reveals the continuing disinformation efforts of the British government, examines how source organisations interact with journalistsw, how journalists and their editors operate and looks at the outcome of their endeavours by analysing international coverage of the Northern Ireland conflict. Finally, the research examines the reception of media information amongst people living in Northern Ireland and Britain. Key questions here included the extent to which `violence' acted as a key organising category in British perceptions of the conflict and the effectiveness of propaganda in structuring public (mis)understandings.