This a ti le e plo es the ise of itize jou alis and considers its implications for the policing and news media reporting of public protests in the 21 st Century. Our research focuses on the use and impact of multi-media technologies during the 2009 G20 Summit Protests in London, and evaluates their role in shaping the subsequent representation of p otest as news . The lassi o epts of i fe e tial st u tu e La g a d La g, a dhie a h of edi ilit Be ke , a e e-situated within the context of the 24-7 news mediasphere to a al se the t a sitio i e s edia fo us at G f o p oteste iole eto poli e iole e . This transition is understood in terms of three key issues: the capacity of technologically empowered citizen journalists to produce information that challenges the offi ial e sio of e e ts; the inclination of professional and citizen journalists to actively seek out and use that information; and the existence of an information-communications marketplace that sustains the commodification and mass consumption of adversarial, antiestablishment news.
This is the unspecified version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. unprecedented official UK inquiries into press misconduct and criminality.
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This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Savile was also a prolific sexual predator who for decades had exploited his BBC status to abuse teenage girls. As we demonstrate, this incendiary documentary triggered a news media feeding frenzy that in less than one week destroyed Savile's reputation and thrust the BBC -the institution that made him a star -into a multi-faceted, globally reported CSA scandal. This study has four purposes. First, we propose a model of institutional CSA scandals that can account for critical transitions between key phases in the scandal process.
Permanent repository linkSecond, we apply this model to analyse the transition between the 'latent' and 'activated' phases of the Savile scandal. This transition corresponded with a dramatic transformation in the inferential structuring of Savile from 'national treasure', who had devoted decades to working with children, to 'prolific sexual predator', who spent decades abusing them. Third, we demonstrate how the BBC's denial of responsibility for Savile's sexual offending and its subsequent institutional cover-up triggered a 'trial by media' which in turn initiated the next phase in the scandal's development -'amplification'. Finally, we consider the significance of our analysis of the Sir Jimmy Savile scandal for understanding the activation and development of scandals more generally.
This article analyses the changing nature of news media—police chief relations. Building on previous research (Greer and McLaughlin, 2010), we use the concepts of ‘inferential structure’ (Lang and Lang, 1955) and ‘hierarchy of credibility’ (Becker, 1967) to examine former Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) Commissioner Sir Ian Blair’s ‘trial by media’. We focus on the collective and overwhelmingly hostile journalistic reaction to Blair’s declaration in 2005 that: (a) the news media are guilty of ‘institutional racism’ in their coverage of murders; and (b) the murders of two 10-year-olds in Soham, 2001, received undue levels of media attention. A sustained period of symbolic media annihilation in the British mainstream press established a dominant ‘inferential structure’ that defined Blair as the ‘gaffe-prone Commissioner’: his position in the ‘hierarchy of credibility’ was shredded, and his Commissionership de-legitimized. The unprecedented resignation of an MPS Commissioner is situated within the wider context of ‘attack journalism’ and the rising news media ‘politics of outrage’.
This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. of interviewing a particular public policy-making elite and examines how a particular 'public trauma' -that is, the damaging political fall-out of extremely negative news media coverage of the Parekh Report -inflected our research encounters. We argue that the openness with which many of the participants spoke about this traumatic experience suggests that the production of policy documents can constitute highly emotional labour for participants. We extend this argument by examining how this openness also reveals the instabilities and uncertainties of power within the research interviewee/interviewer relationship. In this way the article seeks to contribute to debates about the problems of defining the category 'elites' in both public policy and social research worlds. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
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