Abstract
Situated in the context of the production and reception of television news in Canada, Debra M. Clarke’s book presents the results of a specific study of news publics and their news usage in Canada in the early years of the 21st century. Based on a critical discussion of news production, and a large-scale, multi-method empirical study of community activists’ household reception of Canadian television news, this book is concerned with attempting to address the following set of research questions: What are those (production) processes that confine the frame of television’s ‘window on the world’? And what are the differential social foundations of wide open access to that window as opposed to exclusion from it? Further, what differentiates the television news experience of those social groups with the means to participate in a ‘public sphere’ from those of social groups who experience political exclusion? Finally, what is the nature and extent of journalism’s contribution to these processes of political inclusion and exclusion? (pp. 46–47)
In attempting to both address these questions and contextualise the results of the specific study that underpins the discussion, this book offers some useful contributions to the literature, albeit with some limitations. A key problem of this book is one of structure, with significant tensions within chapters as this book moves between broader conceptual and theoretical issues, historical material, methodological design justifications and the empirical results of the specific study under consideration, sometimes all within the same chapter. The attempts to draw threads through a wide range of eclectic conceptual material, from reception theory such as Radway, through Habermasian debates around public spheres, then through concepts of hegemony, encoding and decoding, with critiques of the potential of new media thrown into the mix as well, all really strain those threads to near breaking point. While they do not break as such – in fact, some significant skill is evident in managing this variety of theory in the round – there are weaknesses that emerge as a result. One problem is a tendency to review historical, canonical theoretical material at much greater length than more recent literature, which in places seems to have been added in to provide a sense of currency of the issues and debates being discussed but without the often concomitant developments of theoretical and empirical ideas that go along with that more recent material. While in terms of audience research that overview of phases through the current era is more thorough, in terms of literature on professional journalism practice, for instance, it is literature from the 1970s and 1980s that is discussed in detail while data from the 2000s and 2010s is mentioned largely only to claim affirmation of earlier studies’ claims (e.g. pp. 85–87). This leaves the sections concentrating on the constraints of production, while offering broadly valid arguments, somewhat lacking the conceptual and empirical weight and currency of the reception side of this book which is arguably more timely. Perhaps more problematic though is how absolutely central concepts to the book are not substantially featured within the otherwise wide-ranging grounding discussion of the early chapters. Most notable here is the concept of exclusion, which does not really come to the front of discussion until the later chapters and then is not really unpacked or critiqued to the extent that other, arguably less relevant, conceptual debates are discussed at length earlier in this book. Given that a central claim in this book that emerges from its research is that there is clear evidence of sustained political exclusion of certain groups through the social conditioning of their reception to news and in turn the social conditioning of news production due to the highly concentrated and commercially driven news environment in Canada, offering no more than a couple of brief pages on the concept of exclusion (pp. 46–47) before returning to the topic only towards the end of this book in the context of debates about participation, engagement (pp. 242–244) and social capital (pp. 248–250) seems something of a key omission.
Similarly, the interweaving in early chapters of justifications for the approaches taken in terms of methodological design amid the theoretical debates is rather disorienting and mixes up some very strong rationales for some aspects of the project, while other parts are barely discussed. There is a sustained effort to provide a rationale for the locus of the project on the household in a section of Chapter 3, for example, and similar efforts are made to justify a concentration on television news over other media, with several sections of early chapters, intermixed with theoretical sections, demonstrating the dominance of television in Canada over other forms of news (pp. 125–129, for instance), accompanied by sustained critiques of the potential of new media as news sources as well in more than one section of early chapters. A lengthy historical section in Chapter 2, on the origins of the Canadian broadcasting system, is also offered ostensibly to underpin a particular positioning of Canadian television news’ contemporary context as used within the project; a position which is re-asserted in the first section of Chapter 4. Perhaps, more of a concentration on the specific contextual circumstances of Canadian broadcasting production and consumption at the time of the empirical data gathering would have been a more focused way of highlighting the importance of the social conditions of production (alongside more of a consideration of news production conceptual literature pertaining to the early 2000s as well). The very deliberate selection of community activists is mentioned relatively early on (p. 55), alternatively, but does not receive the same detailed discussion despite that decision’s importance both in terms of relevant theoretical issues pertaining to activism or community participation and in terms of implications for the research findings. This book makes a clear and valid case for the value of audience research regardless of issues of generalisability and representativeness but does not offer any real explanation of the decision to select a set of people who are overtly politically or socially participatory in the first place. Without any real discussion of attending conceptual and theoretical issues around activism, community participation and activists’ media use at the outset, this is another curious omission given the close attention paid to other parts of the project’s rationale. It is noted (p. 135) how news reception might inform their activities but not the other way around. Given the common critical, if highly bounded reception of the news as outlined in the later chapters, the possibility that community activism might contribute to that critical stance over and above people who are not active is not really sufficiently addressed and then only in the final chapter.
As this book progresses into the later chapters, the results of the specific study underpinning this book are rather gradually introduced, again amid long overview discussions of literature. Chapter 4 offers a reasonable balance between consideration of structural constraints on Canadian television news production and reception data on awareness of and responses to those constraints. Chapter 5 concentrates far more heavily on a discussion of conceptual literature around news and class, with very little of the original data being presented. This discussion is good and polemical, but it is largely contextualising material, rather than developing a distinctive position in relation to the original data gathered. It is almost as if there is an over-emphasis on situating and validating the position this book wants to offer, and as suggested, in some ways that takes away from important discussion of core concepts but also it takes away somewhat from an extensive and detailed discussion of the news reception study results themselves. In Chapter 6, this continues, although here there are glimpses of the rationale behind the conceptual and design issues not fully discussed earlier in this book. There is mention of how the activists’ tended to place their organisational activities as distinct from politically situated social problems (pp. 240–241), and later, that community organisations are seen as ‘inadequate outlets for women who are otherwise excluded from the public sphere’ (p. 255), indicating a reason why that activist context is not a central conceptual framework (although not, therefore, why such a group were specifically selected). The chapter also discusses issues of engagement, participation and exclusion but with surprisingly few references to the actual original data to demonstrate the concerns under consideration.
Overall then, this book makes some useful, interesting and in places important contributions to the research literature regarding news publics, and news reception, particularly with regard to the distinctive Canadian media landscape. Arguably it would have benefitted from a different organisational structure, signalling that rather than a sustained and detailed discussion of a specific large-scale piece of news reception research, its goals are more about providing a positional overview of relevant and canonical literature on news production and reception, analytically positioning Canada within such debates and occasionally drawing on that original data to underpin that discussion. It is those areas that this book is most successful.