GENERATING NEWS : AGENDA SETTING IN ...

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GENERATING NEWS : AGENDA SETTING IN RADIO BROADCAST NEWS Richard Fitzgerald University of Queensland

Adam Jaworski Cardiff University

William Housley Cardiff University

INTRODUCTION The news broadcast is a highly familiar institutional event in which the latest ‘news’ is presented through routine discursive structures that provide a newsworthy framework for events to be reported into (Clayman and Heritage, 2002). However, as has been emphasised by many authors, news is not only concerned with reporting ‘events’. Rather, media organisations are in the business of news production. ‘They construct it, they construct facts, they construct statements and they construct context in which these facts make sense. They construct “a” reality’ (Vasterman, 1995, quoted in Harcup and O’Neill, 2001 : 265 ; see also Tuchman, 1978). Or, as Schudson puts it : ‘To ask “Is this news ?” is not to ask only “Did it just happen ?” It is to ask “Does this mean something ?”’ (Schudson, 1987 : 84). Thus, while ‘breaking’ news, i.e. reporting on unanticipated major events, may still be the top priority among newsmakers, the work of new journalists has been likened to the work on the assembly line with news being searched for, gathered, selected, and eventually turned into stories in a routinized process of news-making (e.g. Gans, 1980 ; Cook, 1998).

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L’analyse linguistique des discours des médias

Reporting and presenting stories gathered by a programme, however, creates a possible site of tension where usual editorial values may be passed over in favour of carrying a story the programme has sourced through its own investigative journalism. We explore this blurring by focusing upon the discursive placement of news and the creation of a news agenda through an examination of two examples taken from the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. Using the ethnomethodological approach of membership category analysis, we suggest that the presenters are seen to engage in complex categorial work in the process of creating a topical context for an issue to appear in the news programme as well as the subsequent development of the issue as a relevant news agenda during the programme. The data analysed in this paper is taken from a corpus of recordings of BBC Radio 4 news programmemes collected over the course of four weeks between 21st May and 15th June 2001, and forms part of a larger research project focusing upon the genre of radio news language and in particular on the issues of temporality in BBC radio news broadcasts (see Jaworski et al., 2004). Within news broadcasting, the Today programmeme enjoys a high profile within political and media circles as a bedrock for quality news interviews, challenging, questioning and setting the day’s political agenda. Broadcast on weekdays between 6 a.m. and 9 a.m., and on Saturdays between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m., the programmeme attracts prominent political and social commentators as well as influencing to a lesser or greater extent the order of political discourse (Fairclough, 1998). NEWS VALUES AND NEWS PRODUCTION The Today programmeme is organised around cyclical slots for news, finance, sport, review of the morning papers and news bulletins but is also progressively oriented towards major news interviews occurring in the later parts of the programme. This orientation involves a common practice of reporting a story in the early part of the programme and then following up or developing the story through an interview towards the end of the programme. Whilst introducing and returning to a story over the course of the programme is a routine occurrence in the data collected, there were also a number of instances where the stories were based around an event or item sourced by the programme itself. What became apparent in these instances was that the presenters would work to build a newsworthy context for the items to appear into, and that following the initial reporting, the stories would then be paced through various stages including character appearances towards a major interview later on in the programme.

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In our data sample, we have identified four instances of this practice and we build our argument around two randomly selected but typical examples. Our two case ‘stories’ are referred to as ‘law and order’ and ‘transport and the environment’. The law and order example involves a previously high profile and controversial legal case where in 1999 the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin shot dead a burglar (and injured another one), for which he was sentenced for five years in prison (he was released after three years). The programmeme returns to the case after two years and interviews Tony Martin by way of introducing a broader debate on law and order, as part of an ongoing election campaign. The second example involves the Today programmeme’s presenters and correspondents producing and discussing a report on transport and environmental issues also in the context of the election campaign. As has been mentioned, we are interested here in examining the discursive processes of what can be referred as the ‘manufacturing’ of news (cf. Cohen and Stanley, 1973). With our focus on close textual analysis of the data extracts, we offer an insight into how discourse (here : radio talk) works towards establishing the newsworthiness of the target item (the interview of the day with a prominent politician). As the interview is not a ‘real-life’ event to be reported on as news but a media event to be presented as news, the discursive processes preceding the main event are geared towards enhancing what Bell (1991 : 158-160) has referred to as the ‘values in the news process’ such as continuity (making the interview part of an on-going story), competition (scooping one’s rivals with an ‘exclusive’), co-option (presenting lesser news items in relation to a high-profile story or item), composition (presenting a mixture of different kinds of news), predictability (pre-scheduling of events), prefabrication (the existence of ready-made text which can be transformed into a ‘story’). Bell distinguishes these procedural news values from Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) news values concerned predominantly with the contents of news and status of news actors (see also Harcup and O’Neill, 2001). As will be clear in our discussion below, the identity of the main interviewees in our examples (Home Office Minister, Shadow Home Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister) is also important for the newsworthiness of the interviews ; after all, they are elite politicians – members of the UK cabinet or shadow cabinet. However, it appears that even with such high-profile news actors, the BBC needs to establish a newsworthy context to justify their presence in a live, prestigious media slot. To restate, it is the decision-making and active negotiation between editors, journalists, lawyers and presenters where the news is

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made (Molotch and Lester, 1974). The routine everyday work of turning ‘stories’ into ‘news’ involves the constraints of balance, neutrality and objectivity together with the news values of time, access and appeal within a news frame that serves to order the events as a story in the world, as well as presenting the story to the world, or the imagined audience (van Dijk, 1998 ; Fowler, 1991). However, the selection, ordering and presenting of news events through the creation of a news frame involves imposing familiar structures for novel events and in so doing renders the representation of the ‘new’ or ‘unusual’ as ‘ordinary’ (Bell, 1991). Indeed, it is the very ordinariness of the presentation of events, the very ordinariness of the structure and appearance of the events and characters, which goes some way to neutralize the possible reflection upon the events as ideologically informed (Allen, 1999). This ordinariness is also at the heart of what Fairclough (1995a) refers to as the ‘conversationalization’ of media language. In Fairclough’s (1998) analysis of a radio news programme, also applied to the Today programmeme, he identifies the added news value of the programmeme, the possibility of influencing the political order of discourse, as located in the presenters’ ability to emulate the language of ‘ordinary discourse’, or ‘the man propping up the lounge bar on a Sunday lunchtime’ (Fairclough, 1998 : 157). He also notes how this programmeme is able to assemble a large number of prominent commentators and interviewees and how it repeatedly returns to a story throughout the three hour programme. However, although identifying these characters as central to the unfolding of a story, in Fairclough’s analysis they remain largely unexamined as to how, where, when and why they appear (Fairclough, 1995b). Thus, in treating the different appearances of the news and characters as weighted equally, Fairclough neglects the construction of a particular issue as a progressive series of news events that build upon each other and develop over the course of the programme. The organisation of topical characters in news stories is not simply a matter of them appearing, but that these voices or characters appear at temporally relevant times doing relevant actions during the progression of the story in such a way as to provide a particular structure to the story. With this in mind, it is important to trace not only the evolution of a story over the course of a programme or through the series of broadcasts on the issue but also through the unfolding organization of the appearance of relevant characters (Nekvapil and Leuder, 2002). This involves paying attention to the use of familiar discursive structures of presentation and representation through which content becomes organised and made into news in any particular instance.

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TOWARDS A MEMBERSHIP CATEGORY ANALYSIS OF NEWS DISCOURSE Our analysis of the data draws upon the methodology of membership category analysis (MCA) embedded within a sequential organisation (Sacks, 1995 ; Watson, 1997 ; Hester and Eglin, 1997a, 1997b ; Housley and Fitzgerald, 2002 ; Fitzgerald and Housley, 2002). This method involves paying analytic attention to the use of description in conversation based upon methodical appearance of sequentially relevant categories. The methodological approach initially developed by Sacks (1974) in his example ‘The baby cried. The mommy picked it up.’ demonstrates how deliberate categorial considerations are illuminated by an analytical process of how we make sense of this story. We understand the story in terms of the ‘mommy’ picking up her ‘baby’ in response to baby crying. For Sacks, we understand this story in this way because we associate the categories of ‘baby’ and ‘mommy’, with the membership categorisation device ‘the family’. Of course, both ‘baby’ and ‘mommy’ may be categories of further collections such as the ‘stage of life device’. In addition, this framework was complemented by the notion of category bound activities (CBA’s) which were used to describe how certain activities were commonsensically tied to specific categories and devices (e.g. the tying of the activity of crying to the category ‘baby’) (cf. Housley and Fitzgerald, 2002). For Sacks, such categorisations and their devices formed part of the commonsensical framework of members’ methods and recognisable capacities of practical sense making. Whilst Sacks for the most part talked of categories and devices as referring to personal social categories, subsequent developments have extended category analysis to non-personal references such as buildings (McHoul and Watson, 1984), social structure (Coulter, 1983), as well as a broadcast news story (Hester, 2002). The method of MCA enables close analysis of language use but also allows an analytic flexibility through which differing levels of category and sequential work are made visible. In the analysis below, we suggest that the categorial organisation works on (at least) two levels. Firstly, the overall story operates as a category of ‘news story’ in the device of ‘news programme’, and, secondly, as the story unfolds, it uses the sequential appearance of relevant ‘characters’, at specific stages as part of the internal development of the story, i.e. they ‘appear-on-cue’ (Sacks, 1995 : Fall 1965, lecture 9 ; Spring 1966, lecture 20). In his discussions of the ‘appearance of characters’ within a story, Sacks refers to both ‘character’ and ‘category’ :

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[B]ack in the beginning of the course when considering ‘The baby cried. The mommy picked it up,’ one of the things I was remarking there was that when a character who has some proper grounds for occurring and some proper thing to do, has its cue, then there is no need to account for how they happened to have come on the scene. (Sacks, 1995 Fall 1965, lecture 9 : 183). Whilst not fully interchangeable, the notions of ‘characters’ and ‘categories’ have similar properties in the way categories of persons appear as characters in the telling of a story such that a ‘character’ is heard as the individual representation of a ‘membership category’. Following this methodology, we examine the way the two news stories selected are developed through distinct, temporally separated episodes which act retrospectively and prospectively drawing upon past discussions in order to premise and direct subsequent discussions, and which are organised around the placement of topical characters strategically placed to structure and guide the development of the story. Example 1. ‘ Law and Order’ Analysis of the language of broadcast news provides an answer to why a story appears, why the story is newsworthy now. As Clayman (1991) points out, news interviewers work to situate the news interview within a sequence of newsworthy events and so create an immediate, and hence newsworthy, context for an upcoming interview. The opening is plainly designed to convey an agenda for the forthcoming interview and to situate it within an ongoing stream of newsworthy happenings. In this way, the occasion of talk is portrayed as a response to events and processes in the larger social world. Establishing this connection is a basic means of displaying the interview’s ‘newsworthiness’, for it is through such discursive practices that the interview is linked to public occurrences in the wider society (Lester 1980). (Clayman, 1991 : 55) What Clayman outlines is that newsworthiness is not only a matter of reporting on events that happen in the world or reporting on events that are selected through the editorial process but involves the method of presentation where the presenter discursively creates a context for a current event to appear into. Whereas Clayman identifies this

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discursive practice as synchronous with the interview locating it in its ‘opening’, what is of interest in our data is the way the process of preparation can occur diachronically through a series of discrete events, sometimes apparently unconnected, and spread over the course of a programme. Overall, such processes of generating newsworthiness can be linked to the notion of news values (see above) and the legitimising of news topics or social actors participating in news and other broadcast formats (cf. Thornborrow, 2001). In exploring how this process of presentation unfolds in our first example, it is important to examine the initial reporting of the item in the early part of the programme to show how the presenter works to build a newsworthy context establishing the item as ‘news’ for further discussion. EXTRACT 1 Law and Order. Today, 24.05.2001, 07 :32 a.m. JH :

the Home Secretary Jack Straw told senior police officers yesterday that recorded crime is on the way down. last week he was booed and jeered by rank and file officers of the Police Federation. law and order is an issue in this election campaign, if there is one thing during the last Parliament .hhh that crystallised the whole debate about law and order .hhh it was the conviction of Tony Martin. for murdering a teenager who tried to burgle his remote farmhouse in Norfolk. .hhh the Conservatives promised to tighten up the law on self-defence. Labour accused them of jumping on a bandwagon. Tony Martin himself became a national figure whether praised or condemned. .hhh we’ve obtained an interview with Mister with uh Tony Martin recorded on the phone from Gartree Prison in Leicestershire. our reporter, Dominic Arkwright, asked him whether he felt that levels of policing especially in rural areas was encouraging people to take the law into their own hands.

In this extract, events are assembled and presented through the familiar introductory structure identified by Clayman (1991) that pulls together a number of events in order to generate topical relevance. A speech by British Home Secretary Jack Straw on law and order is topically linked to a previous event the week before of Straw being ‘booed and jeered’ by an audience of police officers (line 3). From this, the programme introduces the ‘issue’ of law and order in the election campaign (line 4). An example of this ‘issue’ is then presented as the ‘Tony Martin’ case prominent a while back (line 7). This temporal shift to the past is then brought back to the present with the announcement of an upcoming interview the programme has ‘obtained’ with Tony Martin from the prison where he is still serving

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his sentence (line 12). Thus the ‘case’ of Tony Martin provides an example for the current ‘issue’ of law and order and in doing so provides temporal relevance to the interview sourced by the programme with him about to be broadcast. Thus, the interview with Tony Martin is discursively situated as newsworthy through the selection of this item in conjunction with other ‘current’ newsworthy agendas and topics. As indicated earlier, Clayman (1991) documents the way news items are routinely organised and introduced following a collection of related events and then situating them within that ‘created’ newsworthy context. Viewed through a categorial organisation, the events are offered as a collection of related events which together form a topical collection. The introduction, then, invokes events as membership categories collected as part of a newsworthy topical device into which the next item, the next category, can be seen as belonging, i.e., the interview with Tony Martin. The initial collection once established as a newsworthy device then provides the topical basis through which to engage the story, laying out the issues through a further layer of category work which progressively organises the internal structure of the story. For example, starting with Tony Martin, a number of relevant characters, or categories, are introduced at progressively and sequentially relevant times in the next extract that follows immediately after the interview with Martin. EXTRACT 2 Law and Order. Today, 24.05.2001, 7 :45 a.m. JH :

well unfortunately er the phone card that Tony Martin had been using ran out and we were we couldn’t ask him about Fred Barret we didn’t have time that the boy who died. .hhh we did contact uh Fred Barret’s family we offered them the right to reply to that interview but they and the family of the other victim the other person who was shot, Brendon Fearen both uh declined to comment .hhh on the line now though i:s Superintendent Kevin Morris who is the President of the Police Superintendents’ Association, .hhh of England and Wales, .hhh er it’s it’s a bit unusual I grant you Mister Morris to be asking a Police Officer to comment on something that a man who’s been convicted of murder has had to say uh but what do you make of that ?

KM : erm well I’ve you know obviously he’s entitled to his own opinions, but I think there’s there’s always going to be a danger when people take the law into their own hands, um I mean even today, I’ve read a newspaper article where somebody was convicted of manslaughter for tackling a youth who was stealing

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his car, you you’ve got rights everyone has rights to defend their own properties but there’s a limit and I think if you exceed the limit you expect to be punished. JH :

yes I mean in that case you just mentioned, th- the a boy was battered to death wasn’t he ? in effect, I mean that’s absolutely unacceptable under any circumstances so your not defending [

KM : yes JH :

that in any way, right fine let’s talk about police numbers this [

KM : no no no JH :

was Martin’s uh principle complaint a complaint of course of many other people as well that there simply aren’t enough police officers to do the job that is needed to be done.

After playing the pre-recorded tape of Tony Martin, the presenter makes reference to the families of Martin’s victims who had been offered the right to reply but declined. Thus although the victims’ families did not wish to take part in the programme, the presenter makes their absence as ‘noticeably absent’. This reference to absent categories suggests that there is a sequentially relevant slot for them to appear into, and if they do not then their absence may be accounted for (cf. lines 3-7). The sequential orientation to relevant categories is continued in the introduction of the next character. After Tony Martin and the (absent) families of victims, JH introduces Superintendent Kevin Morris (line 8). The way the Superintendent is introduced suggests that he is oriented to as the next sequentially relevant character as no preamble or contextual background for his appearance in the programme is provided. However, JH’s hedging of his initial question for KM (‘er it’s it’s a bit unusual I grant you Mister Morris…’ ; line 7), signals that Kevin Morris’s presence on the programme is not ‘naturally’ linked to the Tony Martin case itself. Evidently, once the idea Tony Martin’s right to defend himself has been dealt with by KM (lines 14–21), JH gets an opening into the sequentially more relevant and unproblematic topical category of ‘law and order’ he has been waiting for (‘right fine let’s talk about police numbers’ ; line 27). Note here the two discourse markers ‘right fine’ signalling a shift to a new, preferred topic. Thus, JH moves on from the particular (Tony Martin) to the general (police numbers) which now makes KM’s category appropriate for the unfolding story. Up to this point the introduction and development of the story can be seen as part of the programmeme’s current affairs remit to explore issues of public interest, although in its next incarnation the

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story appears in a news bulletin thereby imbuing it with wider news credibility by being reported back to the programme as ‘headline news’ (Extract 3). Moreover, the news bulletin recontextualises part of the interview with Tony Martin, and the sound bite selected for the news bulletin summarises and re-focuses on Tony Martin’s complaint about insufficient police numbers in rural areas in the UK. EXTRACT 3 Law and Order. Today, 24.05.2001, 8 a.m. (news bulletin) RM : Tony Martin the Norfolk farmer who was jailed for life for shooting dead a sixteen year old intruder at his remote farm, has criticised both Labour and Conservative policies towards law and order. .hhh in an interview for this programme from Gartree Prison in Leicestershire .hhh Martin said they amounted to nothing more than rhetoric. he was also critical of rural police for failing to act against criminals. TM : when you want help .hhh from the police suddenly there isn’t any help. .hhh and I mean in my own particular case, I mean I’ve gone down the road over several years, .hhh of giving them lots of information. but they won’t, they won’t do anything so basically (.) you’re on your own (.) well I’m afraid with the police you are on your own aren’t you ?

24-hour news broadcasting orientates to hourly time cycles in which regular features and news updates appear in rigidly time-tabled slots within the 60-minute unit (Richardson and Meinhof, 1999). The audience, it is assumed, do not watch or consume news 24 hours a day but will (barring major news events such as ‘disaster marathons’, cf. Liebes, 1998 ; Jaworski, Fitzgerald, Constantinou, 2005) dip in, catch up and move on. In this cycle, the headlines in a news bulletin provide a punctuation point where the ‘news’ is summarised and also, as in the three-hour long Today programmeme, edited to move on with the programmeme’s daily agenda. What is especially noticeable in Extract 3 is that the focus of the reporting shifts from his personal case and the ‘local’ issue of rural crime to Martin’s criticism of the country’s politicians (cf. ‘[Tony Martin] has criticised both Labour and Conservative policies towards law and order’ ; lines 2-4). Thus, from an interview that covered a wide range of topics mostly around Tony Martin’s own plight and lack of remorse (not transcribed here), the sound bite selected is one that invokes the wider national political issue of ‘law and order’ as part of the programmeme’s agenda to make it part of the discussion of the election campaign and to prepare the ground for an upcoming interview with a Home Office Minister and the Shadow Home Secretary. Moreover, although the programmeme’s

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agency in assembling the interview in the first place is clearly stated in the initial introduction of the story (cf. ‘we’ve obtained an interview’ ; Extract 1, line 12), it is entirely eclipsed in Extract 3. Rather, in Extract 3, the issue of law and order is seen to emerge spontaneously, through the use of non-transactive language (Hodge and Kress, 1993) (cf. ‘in an interview for this programme’ ; Extract 3, line 4). To re-cap, by reporting the issue as headline news, the summary acts as a punctuation mark, a topical bridge by which the issue is transformed from the ‘local’ issue of rural crime (cf. Extract 1), to the issue of national policy presented as headline news (Extract 3). One headline news in Extract 3 mention the two main UK political parties, this inevitably makes allows the representatives of each party to be brought in in the final hour of the programmeme. EXTRACT 4 Law and Order. Today, 24.05.2001, 8–9 a.m. JH :

when a couple of young men broke into an isolated farm house last year, the farmer Tony Martin was waiting for them with a loaded shotgun. he shot at them and killed one of them and he was convicted of murder. .hhh that conviction divided the nation, and the politicians, and it continues to do so to this day. as law and order is discussed in the election campaign .hhh the case of Tony Martin is still there in the background. we spoke to him on this programme earlier. .hhh it raised some important issues. the right of a homeowner to defend himself as he thinks best, to take the law into his own hands, the level of crime and policing, in rural Britain. .hhh Mister Martin Tony Martin said that people in areas such as he once lived in simply did not feel safe. so let us discus law and order with the Home Office Minister Charles Clarke, and with Ann Widdecombe, the Shadow Home Secretary. .hhh er M:ister Clarke there [interviews continue]

Extract 4 comes from a broadcast approximately one hour after the introduction of the ‘law and order’ issue (cf. Extract 1) and follows immediately after the news bulletin at 8 a.m. (Extract 3). In creating a topical context for the newsworthiness of this item, the main interview slot of the day, an assemblage of relevant categories together with predicated actions are invoked. The introduction is initially structured around a summary of the controversy surrounding the Tony Martin case. Into this topical context or device are now placed the categories of ‘criminal’, ‘victim’ and ‘convicted murderer’ as well as the categories of the ‘nation’ and ‘politicians’ through their

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action of ‘taking sides’. The invocation of both the public and politicians acts to move the categorial relevance on and begins to orientate to the upcoming debate between Clarke and Widdecombe. By this point, the case of Tony Martin and the earlier interview with him become mere ‘background’ (Extract 4, line 7). The presenter uses the interview to introduce a number of new issues through the categories of ‘homeowners’, ‘self-defence’, and ‘people in rural areas’. It is the latter that is finally transformed into the category ‘victim’ or ‘potential victim’ (‘people in areas such as he once lived in simply did not feel safe’ ; lines 12–13), which legitimises the subsequent interview with the two politicians (‘so let us discuss law and order’ ; line 13). Note that in Extract 4, not unlike in Extract 1, law and order is introduced as part of the ongoing election campaign (cf. Extract 1, line 4 ; Extract 4, line 6), but apart from the recent speech by Jack Straw mentioned at the beginning of Extract 1, the issue seems not to be particularly live in either of the main political parties’ campaigns. Therefore, the programmeme seems to source a controversial interview with Tony Martin as a catalyst in staging the media debate on a particular topic and relies on the construction of the topic as newsworthy through careful categorial work in order to build up and legitimate the main interview of the morning. The categories made relevant in the context of this pre-interview can be seen as forming part of the sequential flow and categorial development of the topical issue over the course of the programme. The introduction of Clarke and Widdecombe is the ultimate realisation of the trajectory of the ‘issue’ of law and order raised through the Tony Martin interview an hour earlier. Apparent then is a progressive pacing of the issue over the course of the programme through the appearance of relevant characters at sequentially relevant times as the story is unfolded by the presenter. In the next example, a similarly orchestrated trajectory is apparent where a topical issue is raised in the early part of the programme in order to provide a legitimate vehicle for an interview the programme has obtained with a prominent and newsworthy character. Example 2. ‘Transport and the Environment’ In a similar way to the discussion of the Tony Martin story above, a progressive trajectory is present in the development of the ‘forgotten’ issue of transport and the environment. However, what becomes apparent here is that the newsworthy aspect is not so much the ongoing discussion of transport and environment policies during

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an election campaign, but that the programmeme has obtained the first interview with John Prescott – the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Transport and the Environment – after an incident in which he punched a member of the public who had thrown an egg at him. The topical issue is introduced in the first hour of the programme during which the presenter, James Naughtie, poses the question of transport and the environment being ‘forgotten issues’ : EXTRACT 5 Transport and the Environment. Today, 29.05.2001, 06 :35 a.m. JN :

are transport and the environment the forgotten issues of this campaign ? our correspondent Roger Harrobin is here, we’re gonna look at transport a little bit this morning Roger, and indeed talk to John Prescott after eight o’clock. .hhh what are the issues that the parties should be having a squabble about in transport ?

RH : well if you remember when Labour came to power, it was in the wake of Swampy inspired road protests [interview continues]

Here JN introduces the item by posing a question based on the absence of the issue of transport and the environment in the election campaign before identifying that the programmeme is about to focus on it today (cf. line 3). That is to say, the introduction does not then premise a newsworthy issue but indeed a non-newsworthy issue that according to the programmeme should be news. Into this non-news vacuum the correspondent is brought in in order to report on what apparently are the newsworthy issues (cf. lines 5–6). The subsequent report (not transcribed) focuses upon the reported disquiet amongst ‘civil servants’ with the current government’s apparently misleading statements and counter action concerning environmental protection and future road building. The report includes taped interviews with parents outside schools, animated readings of selected parts of the Labour Party manifesto and its paraphrases by unidentified ‘civil servants’. As yet, no official voices from the government are heard in the report. Forty minutes later Roger Harrobin’s report is repeated but it is also recycled as a party political and, consequently, election issue (Extract 6). This is a rather dramatic shift from the script on Extract 5, where transport and the environment were presented as ‘the forgotten issues of this campaign’ ; Extract 5, lines 2–3).

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EXTRACT 6 Transport and the Environment. Today, 29.05.2001, 7 :10 a.m. JH :

Labour has been accused of misleading the public over what it says about Transport, in its manifesto, it says road schemes that damage the environment have been scrapped, .hhh but civil servants have told this programme that that’s the case with only two such schemes many more have been approved and more still are expected if Labour wins the election. .hhh well this programme has learnt that in spite of public denials government consultants are urging a motorway style box a sort of ring of motorway roads, through green belt land right around the Birmingham conurbation. .hhh our environment correspondent Roger Harrobin is with me: Roger

RH : when Labour came to power, it was in the wake of Swampy inspired road protests [Repeat of the report by Roger Harrobin first broadcast at 6 :35AM] JH :

Roger Harrobin reporting and on the line now is Alan Francis of the Green Party, er goes without saying that you’re opposed to: what to all road schemes ? or just most, Mister Francis.

AF : um to all road schemes, and certainly those that have been listed so far this morning,

In this the second outing for the story presented in Extract 6, the agency for introducing the ‘issue’ of transport into news is shifted from the programmeme itself to an unattributed and temporally dislocated accusation of the Labour Party ‘misleading the public’ (line 1). JH subsequently claims knowledge of further inconsistencies between the Labour Party manifesto for re-election to government and the current Labour Government’s actions. However, he removes the agency of the programmeme in bringing up the issue by assembling the relevant categories of ‘civil servants’ and ‘government consultants’ who are identified as the sources of news. The recontextualisation of RH’s report in Extract 6 from Extract 5 positions it as a response to the criticisms voiced against the government rather than its source. Subsequently, the next character brought in by the programme is a spokesperson for the Green Party Alan Francis. His ‘natural’ presence in this slot is discursively signalled by JH’s amplification ‘goes without saying’ (line 16) preceding his questioning of AF. An hour later (Extract 7), the issue is returned to and again presented as one the programmeme is reporting on without any reference to its own agency in creating the agenda in the first instance.

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EXTRACT 7 Transport and the Environment. Today, 29.05.2001, 08 :10 a.m. JN :

one of Labour’s claims when it was elected was that it would give us a better transport system, it would be (.) integrated it was the great word of the day, there would be a better balance in particular, .hhh between road, and rail. well the railways have been in chaos, as we know, and on road building as we reported earlier this morning it does seem as if the government may already have broken, its last manifesto pledge. the minister whose vast Department of Transport Environment and the Regions was to deliver the changes, is of course the Deputy Prime Minister himself, John Prescott, he joins us now, morning Mister Prescott

JP :

Hello Jim

During the course of the morning, the programme has dedicated two separate slots to the story (cf. Extracts 5 and 6), the interview with John Prescott being the third (Extract 7). The two slots prior to the interview with Prescott assembled a list of relevant named and unnamed categories creating a build up or relevant context for the final slot. In the third outing for the story, however, there is no mention of any of these specific voices. Instead, they are collectively turned into ‘current news’ of the government which ‘may already have broken, its last manifesto pledge’ (lines 6-7). The role of the programmeme is presented not as in sourcing news but merely reporting it (‘as we reported earlier this morning’ ; lines 5-6). Then, during the twenty minute interview that follows (not transcribed here), John Prescott answers a wide range of questions about the incident with the demonstrator, transport and the environment, his general job of Deputy Prime Minister, and progress of the election campaign. Shortly after the Prescott interview is over, it is recycled in a news headline spot without any reference to the former key theme of transport and environment. EXTRACT 8 Transport and the Environment. Today, 29.05.2001, 08 :30 a.m. (News headlines) NR : the Shadow Chancellor Michael Portillo has repeated demands for Tony Blair to spell out to voters what the question in any referendum on the Euro should be. .hhh the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott told this programme a more important issue was Conservative spending cuts.

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The absence of the issue of transport from subsequent headline news (Extract 8) suggests that it was not, then, the main news topic of the day but rather a topical device created to provide a newsworthy context into which the interview with Prescott could be placed. In the final part of the programme, the topical issue is returned to for one last outing, the issue being not reported any further in the subsequent news programmemes of the day. The interviewees in this slot are from the two major opposition parties active in the ongoing election campaign. EXTRACT 9 Transport and the Environment. Today 29 :05 :2001. 08 :50 a.m. JH :

does any of the parties have the answer to Britain’s transport problems ? Labour promises to spend a fortune, but not to allow any road schemes that would damage the environment, though this programme has been told by civil servants that that’s exactly what is happening, >JOHN PRESCOTT< told us earlier that it’s not. well what about the other parties Bernard Jenkin is the Conservative’s transport spokesman Don Foster is the Liberal Democrats’

In the last ten minutes of the programme (introduced in Extract 9), JH brings in two more relevant characters identified as responsible for the topical issue of transport in their respective parties. Again, however, the appearance of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians does not seem to hinge so much on the newsworthiness of their recent activities but rather they bring to an end the cycle of ‘naturally’ appearing categories in a media-generated story. As the Today programme routinely aims to provide and be seen to provide balanced coverage of the three main political parties during an election campaign, the Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians introduced in Extract 9 complete the device of relevant equal representation. In sum, the presenters create news from non-news through a report about what they deem should be a newsworthy issue, which then forms the context for further discussion during the programme. However, what is revealed in our analysis is that whilst the presenters assemble various relevant characters to discuss the issue, the main agenda for the issue is to legitimately place an interview with John Prescott. The gestalt shift between the two agendas of discussing transport and obtaining an interview with Prescott is revealed in the news bulletin where the headlines ignore the apparently topical issue to report Prescott’s criticism of Conservative spending cuts, and

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where the categorial balance of the opposition parties is not given air time to debate with Prescott but is placed at the end of the programme. CONCLUSION In this paper, we have highlighted the way in which the temporal ordering and ‘placing’ of news items has become a central feature of news management. Following Clayman’s (1991) observation of the discursive structures creating newsworthiness for interviews in broadcast talk, we demonstrate that these legitimising practices may well exceed the moment of the introduction of the interview. Instead, a major interview during a news programme may be legitimated over the course of the programme in a sequence of subsidiary reports, commentaries and pre-interviews. This is especially clear in the cases when the newsworthiness of the main interview is in question, i.e. when its news value (Galtung and Ruge, 1965) does not pertain so much to the nature of ongoing events or the news actors (although it helps when they fulfil the criterion of eliteness). It is then that news broadcasters may turn to the values of the news process (cf. Bell, 1991, discussed above) to legitimise the interview. We have demonstrated how the Today programme creates these values in our two examples of self-generated news/interviews : continuity (anchoring ‘news items’ in past events, e.g. the conviction of Tony Martin, protests against Labour transport policy) ; competition (claiming exclusivity to the interviews) ; co-option (ongoing election campaign as backdrop) ; composition (giving fair coverage to the three main political parties) ; predictability (working towards a planned media event) ; prefabrication (recontextualising of interviews and reports to legitimate the programme’s own agenda). As our analysis demonstrates, despite its apparent focus on the ‘real world out there’, news, and especially media-generated news, is to a great extent self-referential and circular. What we find within the confines of one programme, for example, is not only the setting of its own agenda, to which politicians are held accountable in a series of interviews, but also the programme’s own reports and interviews feeding into the ongoing development of the ‘story’ and making headline news as if they originally appeared independent of the programme’s agency (cf. Bourdieu’s 1998 : 28 notion of ‘information about information’). Moreover, through the MCA-informed approach to our data, we have demonstrated how the programme exploits characters, or categories, ‘appearing on cue’ relying on their actions and/or institutional status, to give the unfolding stories the legitimacy

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of a naturally occurring, linearly progressing chains of events. The two stories are structured around a succession of relevant characters appearing ; around a series of people as embodied categories talking about aspects of the topic, which serves to structure the development of the topic as they appear at relevant times in order to perform some kind of expected category action. In so doing each appearance becomes a developmental step mediated by the presenters towards a particular goal. As Scollon (1998) observes, social interaction that is broadcast talk takes place between journalists, politicians and other public figures as a spectacle for the watching and listening public (cf. Bell, 1991 ; Bourdieu, 1998). Following Goffman, Scollon also notes that news discourse ‘is carried on with the same fundamental ritual practices for establishing the grounds for interaction (the channel), establishing the identities and social positioning of the participants, and establishing topics as found in other forms of social interaction such as telephone calls and face-to-face withs (Goffman, 1963, 1974, 1981)’ (Scollon, 1998 : 189). The meta-discursive strategies in broadcast talk that have been our focus here attest further to its ‘everydayness’ and the conversationalisation of public discourse. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This paper arises from the research project ‘Back to the Future’ : Reporting of the Future in Broadcast News Programmes funded by the Leverhulme Trust (F/00407B). CHARACTERS APPEARING IN THE EXTRACTS AF = Alan Francis, Green Party JH = John Humphrys, Presenter JN = James Naughtie, Presenter JP = John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister (Labour) KM = Kevin Morris, President of the Police Superintendents’ Association NR = unidentified News Reader RH = Roger Harrobin, Reporter RM = Rory Morrison, News Reader TM = Tony Martin, Farmer

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TRANSCRIPTION NOTATION under [ yes . , ? (.) one .hhh >John Prescott< JOHN PRESCOTT [INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

overlapping speech falling intonation fall-rise intonation rising intonation brief pause under 1 second emphasis hearable in breath increased pace increased loudness ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXTRACT

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