Glasgow Media Group

GUMG edited by John Eldridge (1993, Routledge)

This is a study of TV new coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of how this coverage relates to the understanding, beliefs and attitudes of the television audience. The work was undertaken with support from the Economic and Social Research Council whose help we would like to acknowledge. In producing this study out intention was not to ‘monitor’ the media or to criticise individual journalists. Our intention was to discuss the pressures and structures within which they work to show the effects of those on new content and to examine the role of the media in the construction of public knowledge. It is a very extensive study with an audience sample of over 800 people and a detailed analysis of TV news over a two-year period. This work also raises a series of important theoretical issues in mass communications. The main focus of the book is on giving a clear exposition of our methods and results, but the theoretical concerns are latent and there is a more detailed discussion of them in other work by the Media Group. (For a discussion of issues in popular culture and audience response, including the active audience, resistance and post-modern accounts see Philo, G. and Miller, D. Market Killing Pearson / Longman. 2001).

This book brings together the key research findings of the Glasgow Media Group over the last 10 years. It examines the production, content and reception of media messages across a range of substantive areas - from public understanding of mental illness and child abuse through to media portrayals of 'race', migration and violence. The research within it shares common methodologies, and an approach which is empirically based and critical. By this is meant that a key purpose of our studies is to reveal the social consequences of the structures and processes which are analysed. We have shown in our research how the production of media messages is a battle ground for powerful interests. To reveal how social ideas are produced and developed and who benefits or is damaged by the dominance of some systems of belief is a key element in a critical approach to the study of media.