Abstract
There is currently a crisis of institutions in the United Kingdom. This is associated with a number of recent events, including corruption and the failure of regulatory oversight in the banking industry, media malpractice in the wake of the phone-hacking by journalists at News International (currently subject to the Leveson Inquiry), and the scandal over inflated and illegal expenses claims by MPs.
Malcolm Dean’s book on the reporting of policy issues just misses the opportunity to reflect on these events. On the one hand, it is timely; on the other, it is premature, published prior to the Leveson Inquiry hearings. But the book is disappointing on other grounds, too. It does not present a very analytical approach to the issues and is largely a descriptive account that is not much more than a chronological account of events and personalities. The book is arranged into ten chapters, with seven of them being specific areas of social policy (law and order, drugs, asylum, child poverty, vocational education, health and social care, and housing). The topics are important, but the themes are the same. Each is a tale of “spin,” distortion, and venality. In consequence the book manages to be both highly detailed and repetitive.
Dean, until his recent retirement, had been a journalist with the Guardian, special correspondent on social policy matters and initiator of its weekly “society” supplement (which along with other supplements, such as “education” and “media” became necessary reading for people working in those areas and provided important revenue for the newspaper with its regular supplements attracting core readership and advertising revenue for job adverts). The supplements are also a vehicle for academics to publish news about their research without the loss of editorial control over a story typical of other reporting on such issues. However, it has given rise to a perception of the typical Guardian reader as social worker, university teacher, or other public sector professional, reinforcing the appearance of segmented publics.
The undermining of public trust is also happening at a time of severe budget cuts following the financial crisis, with major initiatives to transform welfare policy and significant impacts upon disadvantaged groups. Indeed, the government is also complicit in the manufacture of distrust, since its policies of the marketization of the public functions of government—from the health service, through prisons and higher education—also depend on “spinning” the idea of failures in public provision and governance to which the market is offered as a solution.
How these developments are reported and how the media are managed are issues of supreme importance for democracy in an age of austerity. They have also become important for academics in the United Kingdom, as the government increasingly argues that any research that is publicly funded—whether directly through the Research Councils, or indirectly through the Research Excellence Framework (previously known under the acronym RAE)—should have demonstrable “impact.” This impact is measured in terms of direct influence upon a “user group” (in the social sciences, usually policy-makers, including NGOs, or practitioner groups) involving exhortation to the co-production of research and the involvement of users at an early stage in research design. In this way, research is pressed down the direction of “mode 2” applied knowledge, with the internal disciplinary audience diminished in favor of external audiences (usually representing particular organized interests). The marketization of knowledge is then continuous with the marketization of everything else, and academics are to be complicit in it.
Equally, many academics and university press offices believe that press coverage is an indication of impact and academics are increasingly exhorted to the use of social media (twitter, facebook, blogs, and the ubiquitous project website) to promote research to wider publics. The consequence is a series of increasingly segmented audiences, often of like-minded publics, with increased “hyping” of findings in order to break out of narrow boundaries and achieve coverage in national media, both print and broadcast. Of course, the means necessary to achieve such coverage include the adoption of the framings of issues already presented within the media and by media-oriented “Think-Tanks” promoting radical policy solutions, usually of a market-oriented kind. The emerging neo-liberal knowledge regime meets a neo-liberal regime of knowledge dissemination.
Dean provides little address of these wider contexts and purveys a relatively simple model of media distortion brought about by concentration of ownership, especially via News International, politicians’ fear of media influence, and market-driven journalists seeking revenues in a declining market for print media. Each of his different areas of social policy is subject to the same besetting “sins” of “reptilian” (his own characterization) reporting. These are the sins of distortion, of dumbing down, of a greater interest in politics than policy, of group think, of being too adversarial, of being too readily duped, and of concentrating on the negative.
Underlying the list (and I am not unsympathetic to his characterizations) is a view that reporting might serve rational debate, through the discussion of facts bearing upon public policy. His “solution” in an afterword is equally traditional—perhaps the Inquiry under Lord Leveson will recommend radical reform to the structure of media ownership, regulation, and transparency in the relations between media owners and government ministers.
In this way, Dean is aligned with a particular kind of mantra in U.K. social policy about the possibility and value of social scientific knowledge. This is the mantra of “evidence-based policy” and the idea that the social science community might serve politics at a distance from the fray of the “warring gods” of politics. The U.K. Academy of Social Sciences (representing professional associations, learned societies, and individual fellows) for example, is currently pursuing a Campaign for the Social Sciences, to make it “better understood within policy making circles and the public at large. In short … [to make it] widely understood as a necessary core ingredient of a successful economy and society” ( http://www.campaignforsocialscience.org.uk/about-CfSS ).
What is missing from the campaign (and from Dean’s book) is an understanding of the politics of knowledge production, including the politics of the social sciences themselves, and the changing nature of the university. We can no longer assume the university to be a neutral space (if we ever could) with a broadly ameliorative orientation to social issues and thus, to be a space in which social policies can be evaluated on behalf of an unspecified “public.” The neo-liberal knowledge regime places the university as an integral part of a global knowledge economy. That economy has contributed to widening inequalities on an unprecedented scale and has been associated with the reorganization of employment and welfare to suit corporate interests. In short, the university has become an international education corporation contributing to the expansion and reproduction of inequalities.
At this point, I should declare an interest as co-founder of a different campaign, the Campaign for the Public University ( www.publicuniversity.org ). The corporate form of universities is not neutral in their relation to knowledge production and the types of public that are served by them. The marketization of higher education that is proceeding at an unprecedented pace in England will transform relations among the social sciences and their social functions. The instrumental conception of the university has no vision of education and knowledge as serving democracy and social justice, and in this absence, no place for the critical sensibility that has underpinned much sociology.
Malcolm Dean is correct to regard democracy as under attack, but it is not the media that is the primary problem. The very rational knowledge that he seeks to promote and the conditions of its production are under attack. The threat to democracy comes from government itself, and its direct capture by corporate international elites. The media may distort policy and politics, but what is necessary is a more robust account of structures of power and the politics of our present.
Let it be hoped that these are parochial concerns. Dean’s book does not look up from the local problems of a small provincial country, but the wider issues of the politics of knowledge may be compelling elsewhere … let it not be de te fabula narratur!