Material Which Never Made It To Publication

Material Which Never Made It.......

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	References to Rupert Murdoch from Investigating Mass Media (Collins Educational)
	Summary of the Lingard and Garrick's Social Justice Strategy from Education Policy: A Policy Sociology Approach

The Curious Case of the Missing Murdoch Commentary

What happens when a sociologist writes about manipulation of the mass media by media moguls for a publishing house owned by Rupert Murdoch? The answer to that question is not only interesting in itself but can provide insights into the debate between the manipulative and pluralist models of media `bias' and effects. Any suggestion of unwarranted cutting or editing of the text can provide evidence for the manipulative model which argues for the editorial influence of individuals like Murdoch, while the `fair' articulation of the debate through one of the media owned by him might itself undermine it.

I had just this experience in writing the second edition of Investigating Mass Media for Murdoch's Collins Educational (part of HarperCollins, itself part of Murdoch's News Corporation). I will set out the evidence I have, make a few comments about it but leave you to decide on its significance for this aspect of sociological theory.

Below italicised text is what was submitted in the manuscript, emboldened sections were edited out at HarperCollins. The rest remains in the book....

Chapter 1 Page 8

Satellite TV is best thought of as a medium in two parts; the satellite itself and the programmes which it broadcasts. The company which owns the satellite does not usually provide the services they transmit, it merely leases channels to a programme supplying company. BSkyB is the dominant service provider in the UK. It is 50% owned by Rupert Murdoch's News International. Many people, including the Observer's television critic John Naughton, think that satellite broadcasting heralds the coming of tabloid TV. Naughton quotes a BBC technician who calculated that sending a signal from Sky's headquarters at Osterley near Heathrow airport via satellite to a house in London involved a journey of 71,546 kilometres "which would make Murdoch-vision the longest garbage run in history".

Chapter 4 page 75:

Rupert Murdoch is well known for intervening in editorial policy. He sacked Harold Evans, editor of The Times, and Stafford Somerfield, editor of The News of the World after disagreements over policy. Frank Giles, former editor of the Sunday Times, has said that when Murdoch was in London he would make a point of dropping into his office on Saturday evenings just to check on the first copies of the paper as they were being delivered to Giles. Fred Emery, home editor of the Times in 1982 reported Murdoch as saying "I give instructions to my editors all round the world, why shouldn't I in London?" Emery tells how Murdoch had given an assurance to the British government that he would not interfere editorially in return for being allowed to buy the Times and Sunday Times without reference to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, but when Emery reminded of these assurances Murdoch said "They're not worth the paper they're printed on".

Chapter 4: p. 86

* Supporters of the manipulative model complain about the "synergy" that ownership of several media can bring. Hird argues, for example, that the Sun gives BSkyB favourable treatment and says:

"With his own publishing house, HarperCollins, producing books for serialisation and his own film studio producing films the consumer of the Murdoch channels will be allowed to see what they want to see, so long as it is what Murdoch decrees" (p334)

Chapter 4 p 87

* The fight between the TV companies for ever higher audience ratings and between the newspapers for higher circulations mean that both types of media have got to pander to popular tastes. They cannot afford to push a point of view on an unreceptive audience. Where vendettas are carried on by media proprietors, this is only to attract readers. Characters are chosen for vilification who are already unpopular with the public. Journalists have a keen sense of 'news values', that is, what the public will find interesting. These determine editorial content, nothing else. News Corporation found this out to its cost when it took over TV Guide and moved its editorial content downmarket. It lost sales of half a million copies in the first year of ownership. There had been a place in the market for serious journalism in a listings magazine. By removing this the 'Murdochians', as the new team were known internally, had made the magazine no different from and probably worse than numerous others on the magazine racks.

Chapter 4 p 89

* Also against the hegemonic model it is easy to find evidence of very different cultures among journalists and others involved in the media rather than the monolithic culture the hegemonic model implies. When Murdoch's News Corporation bought the Chicago Sun-Times, a successful quality paper, one of its columnists, Mike Royko wrote:

"We knew that there had been publications that he basically left alone, like the Village Voice, and we thought that he might do that here, since this was a very successful quality newspaper. But as soon as his people started coming in, it was clear that this wasn't their intention. They came in like a bunch of pirates. It's unusual for a Chicago newspper guy to view somebody coming in as a bunch of thugs - I mean, we're generally thought of as pretty hard-nosed newspaper people"

And yet some quite critical passages about Murdoch were not cut:

Chapter 1 p 9:

...but Andrew Neil, former chair of BSkyB, said that the satellite digital transmission could begin a year earlier and that by 1987 "satellite broadcasters in general and Rupert Murdoch in particular will have the whole market sewn up". (Guardian 11.8.95)

Chapter 1 p 13:

The character of the Times changed markedly when it was taken over by Rupert Murdoch's News International. Murdoch reportedly thought the Sunday Times was 'a nasty, left-wing radical organ, staffed for the most part by a bunch of left-wing layabouts' (Horrie and Clarke p 84) and after acquisition it became more pro-Conservative and moving down market.

Chapter 4 p 69:

"Rupert Murdoch was an enormous presence in my life. Even when he wasn't there he was this sort of looming presence....I think that's how he does control things. He leaves you in no doubt that if he's not there in person he's there in spirit and he's watching what you are up to and you've got to stick to the parameters. The idea that he doesn't interfere is nonsense" (Andrew Neil, former editor of the Sunday Times )

Chapter 4 p 73:

MP and ex-minister David Mellor says that Mrs Thatcher needed Murdoch's support and so let him dominate the press. Certainly legislation passed during Thatcher's permiership restricted the power of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission to stop his expansion across the British media. Labour has put a hold on its commitment to an equiry into Murdoch's media interests. Times editor Charles Douglas-Home said that Murdoch was seen as one of 'the main powers behind the Thatcher throne'. In 1984 he said:

'Rupert and Mrs Thatcher consult regularly on every important matter of policy, especially as they related to his economic and political interests. Around here he's jokingly referred to as 'Mr Prime Minister', except that it's no longer much of a joke. In many respects he is the phantom Prime Minister of the country' (Kiernan p 311)

Chapter 4 p 74:

In America is was the same story. Congressman Jack Kemp said at a dinner in 1981 that 'Rupert used the editorial page and every other page necessary to elect Ronald Reagan President' and Reagan sent Murdoch a presidential plaque thanking him for his help after he was inaugurated in 1981 (Hird et al p114)

Chapter 4 pp 74-5:

Chapter 4 page 75:

* A common feature of media content in parts of the media owned by media magnates is their lightweight content: girls, glitter, star prizes and celebrities is the usual diet. This is true of Berlusconi's channels in Italy and the News International newspapers and programmes in the UK. Even The Times has moved in this direction:

"Before Murdoch took over the Sunday Times, the journalists defined a good story as one that someone, somewhere does not want you to read. This approach is incromprehensible to Murdoch. His journalism is about pap, dressed up as sensationalism. Why try to interpret and understand the world, when a good piece of fiction, a well-turned headline or a carefully croped photo will do the trick?" (Hird et al p9)

Chapter 4 page 75:

The Murdoch team changed all this when they arrived after News Corporation's purchase of the magazine: 'They just wanted fluff' said one long-serving journalist. What had been critical and investigative journalism became advertorials: a platform for advertising.

How should we interpret all this? On the one hand it was very unusual for HarperCollins to significantly change my manuscript other than in the interests of clarity, brevity, correct English or good style. On the other one could say that all the edits here are of peripheral anecdotal material, yet the editor and I had agreed that such elements gave the book readability and provided the student with some interesting material to get their theoretical teeth into (against the advice, incidentally, of a reviewer who suggested that this gave the text a `current affairs' tone.) It is worth commenting that when I raised the question of the missing text with the editor concerned, her only comment was "no comment".

The Social Justice Strategy: A Policy Trajectory Study (Lingard and Garrick, 1997)

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Concept box: Policy trajectory studies
Ball makes the point that the analytical consequences of a dual understanding of policy, as both text and as discourse, is to conduct what he calls policy trajectory studies. By this he means ones which trace the progress of policy from its formulation stage (where struggles, interpretations and compromises are mapped) through to the recipients of policy at the ground level (where interpretations and implementation strategies are similarly mapped.) The policy trajectory research strategy holds out the prospect of a much fuller, more rounded, understanding of the processes and outcomes of educational policy-making and implementation, of the constraining effects of the environment as well as the power of actors. An example is given here in this case-study.
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Lingard and Garrick's study, conducted between 1994 and 1995, follows the development and implementation of Social Justice Strategy in Queensland, Australia. By researching both the formulation of the Strategy within Queensland's Department of Education and its implementation in a Brisbane secondary school, 'Brookridge State High School', they are able to trace the policy process through its various stages and identify the nature and sources of 'policy refraction.'

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Concept box: Policy refraction: refers to the distortion of policy which takes place as a result of the interaction of competing interests and sets of values. Policy becomes disjointed and less coherent as it goes through the 'encoding' and 'decoding' processes: it is refracted. (Taylor et al, 1997, p. 119.)
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Queensland's government had been influenced by 32 years of Conservative governments and, since 1989, by New Right thinking within a Labor administration. This had led to a conservative policy culture within the State's Department of Education.

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Concept box: Policy culture: 'the structures and policy goals, and dominant discourses and practices within public bureaucracies which frame the possibilities for policy.' (Lingard and Garrick, 1997, p. 2.)
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Within this unsympathetic environment the Social Justice Strategy was aimed at maximising access, participation and outcomes for disadvantaged students, including girls, some minority ethnic groups and the 'gifted and talented'. The impetus for the Strategy had come from the Commonwealth level of government. Thus the push for this policy development was one external to the agency centrally concerned with its detailed formulation, Queensland's Education Department.

'...equity concerns were largely funded by the Commonwealth, peripheral to its core business and bureaucratically buried in the bowels of the Department.' (Lingard and Garrick, 1997, p. 6.)

Clearly too there was a tension between managerialism and concerns for social justice in schooling within the Labor governments at both the Commonwealth and State (Queensland) levels. Lingard et al note that putting those committed to market liberal economic ideology in charge of social justice policies is like putting mice in charge of the cheese shop. As a result the notion of 'social justice' that was encoded into the Social Justice Strategy was 'distorted, reconstituted [and] reworked'. One of their respondents noted:

'social justice in Queensland is a poor third to efficiency and devolution,...because if it was important, if they felt it was something that really had to be done, they would do it. It would get a lot more response from the Department. They would be pushing it more, they would make sure they would have the money. Anything they really want to do, they do.' (quoted Lingard and Garrick, 1997, p. 11.)

Though the dice were loaded against the Strategy from the beginning the creation of an Equity Directorate with Queensland's Education Department and the appointment of a dynamic and nationally respected 'femocrat' as its director helped to put some dynamism behind this policy development. The importance of this to the policy process was recognised by participants, especially by those who had previously been frustrated by the policy culture in the Department:

'It just can't be underestimated [sic] how significant it is having the Equity Director on the Executive, both symbolically and materially. For example, there would hardly be a committee within this Department that would not have a representative from the Equity Directorate...I find it hard to summarise just what a huge improvement it is to get something moving...' (quoted Lingard and Garrick, 1997, p. 7)

The general aims of the Strategy were translated into twelve actions which schools and the Department of Education should take with expected outputs associated with each. Examples included a non-discriminatory language policy and the establishment of a database on access. The Strategy was distributed to all schools in September 1993 and Brookridge got three copies (for a staff of 45.) Less than half of the teachers at Brookridge read it throughout and those who did read it either because they agreed with its tenets or because they were considering applying for promotion (demonstration of a commitment to social justice was at that time a criterion of promotion.)

During this period the teachers at the school had been bombarded with policy-related materials:

'..you can't read it all and you can't internalise the whole thing...it gets filed - sometimes in the waste paper bin...Definitely, the volume of information you just can't take it all in.' (Teacher quoted in Lingard and Garrick, 1997, p. 10.)

As in the UK at the same period, teachers were being flooded with documents about a national curriculum, training reform, changes in assessment etc. which came from the local, regional and national levels. The Social Justice Strategy was simply one more policy development being thrown at them. Teachers found the document too wordy, they had difficulty getting access to it and they considered it to be the responsibility of others, primarily the school principal, to implement it. Moreover they tended to interpret social justice in terms of 'fairness', stressing the need for 'fair competition'. Many argued that the Social Justice Strategy made no difference because they had always operated fairly towards all students.

There were though some practical developments which resulted from the Strategy:

o two teachers were elected and trained as Sexual Harassment Referral Officers

o teachers formed a Special Needs and Social Justice Committee

o they discussed or were 'inserviced' on the Sexual Harassment Referral Process and the new Behaviour Management Program.

o equity issues were incorporated into the School Development Plan.

o beyond the school Regional Assistant Co-ordinators (Social Justice) were appointed as well as a Regional Contact Officer and regional workshops for teachers were organised.

However all this meant increased intensification of teachers' work and many of them were sceptical about the prospects for the Strategy's success: most had only minimal involvement with it and only two Brookridge teachers rated their interest in it as 'very high'. 10 to 15 percent were explicitly against taking action to develop equity, believing it to be 'a lot of hogwash' and 'social engineering'.

Lingard and Garrick do not attempt to evaluate the achievements of the Strategy, which would anyway only become apparent in the longer term. It seems likely, however, that any achievements would not meet the aspirations the Equity Directorate had for it given the following factors:

1. Much of the Strategy seemed tangential to the core concerns of the classroom teachers, particularly at a time when managerialism and efficiency were becoming the dominant concerns, as well as during a period of large curriculum, assessment and other pedagogic changes. Teachers were suffering from 'innovation fatigue'.

2. There was hostility to central policy machine, particularly at a time of reduced staffing, cuts to teacher release and to professional development as well as general job intensification.

3. An important factor in what engagement teachers had with the strategy was the fact that a demonstrable commitment to social justice was a criterion of appointment and promotion. When this was abolished an important incentive was removed. As Arnot et al (1996) point out, this kind of requirement is important in the success of equality strategy outcomes. Its abolition also sent important signals to teachers about the significance of the Strategy, as did the resignation of the Director of Equity who had steered the Strategy's development.

4. The Strategy had no clear implementation proposals incorporated into it. Policy makers had not learned the important lessons that ground level actors are important to the success of policy and that they need time, involvement in policy production, professional development and a material interest in its implementation. Simply sending the policy to schools is a long way from adequate for success in this respect. As Lingard and Garrick state: '...more energy is expended in the internal state micropolitics necessary to the production of a policy text than to its institutionalisation.' (Lingard and Garrick, 1997, p. 16.)

5. Related to this, policy-makers tended to treat teachers as ''empty vessels', waiting to be filled with ideas and approaches emanating from Central Office'. (p. 9.) They are not.

Commentary

This study illustrates well the complexity and contested nature of the 'encoding' process during policy formulation stage, with competing interests, values and ideas in a hostile environment working to achieve a 'settlement' around the Social Justice Strategy, but one which still left room for considerable interpretation about what the Strategy was about and how it should be implemented.

In addition it documents the considerable policy 'refraction' which occurred as policy was converted into practice at Brookridge State High School. It identifies too the local contextual factors which led to that refraction and conditioned the shape it took: the overwork of teachers, their attitudes towards the Strategy and its provenance and the competing discursive constructions of social justice.

The study also illustrates the mistakes that policy formulators often seem to make and repeat:

* they do not often take into account the need to support policy implementation, thinking that once the hard job of policy-making is done they can send out the finished documents and wait for results.

* they do not realise that the constant accumulation of educational policy leads to system overload.

* they develop an 'innovation bundle' and think of it as a single policy (in this case with the name Social Justice Strategy.) In a bundle of loosely defined and loosely-coupled innovations each strand is subject to competing interpretations and alternative viewpoints. Implementation in these circumstances becomes extremely complex.

Finally this study confirms Ball's point with which I introduced chapter 3:

'Policy is...an 'economy of power', a set of technologies and practices which are realized and struggled over in local settings. Policy is both text and action, words and deeds, it is what is enacted as well as what is intended. Policies are always incomplete in so far as they relate to or map on to the 'wild profusion' of local practice. Policies are crude and simple. Practice is sophisticated, contingent, complex and unstable.' (Ball, 1994, p. 10.)