Media Representation of Social and Educational Research: the Case of a Review of Ethnic

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MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH: THE CASE OF A REVIEW OF ETHNIC MINORITY EDUCATION[1]

Martyn Hammersley

Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Cardiff University, September 7-10 2000

The dissemination of research findings has been given increasing emphasis in recent years, particularly in the wake of critiques of educational research for failing to have an impact on policymaking and practice. One way in which research findings can be disseminated to a wide audience is via the mass media. However, coverage of educational research in the media is very limited. Furthermore, when it is covered researchers often complain that their work has been distorted. This paper examines some of the media coverage of the OFSTED-commissioned review of research on the education of ethnic minority children; a review authored by David Gillborn and Caroline Gipps, and published in 1996. Analysis of this media coverage will be used as a basis for addressing questions about what is involved in media representation of research, how it should be evaluated, and what meaning can be given to the concept of distortion.

Key words: dissemination of research findings, the mass media, media bias.

The way in which the results of social and educational research are represented in the media has long been of interest to social scientists. However, it has acquired particular importance in recent years because of growing demands that research findings be widely disseminated and have an impact. Indeed, increasingly, the proposal has been that the value of research should be judged by its practical payoff - this being the other side of the requirement that policymaking and practice ought to become research or evidence-based (see, for example, Blunkett 2000). Coverage by the mass media is one of the most effective means of disseminating research to a wide audience, and thereby maximising its impact.

In Britain, relatively little social and educational research gets media attention; as compared with natural science research, or with social and educational research in the United States (Fenton et al 1998). Occasionally, however, such research is given substantial media coverage. My focus here is a case in point: the Review of Research on the Achievements of Ethnic Minority Pupils, commissioned by OFSTED, authored by David Gillborn and Caroline Gipps, and published in 1996 (Gillborn and Gipps 1996). This Review was widely reported in both the broadcast and print media. The day after it was published it was one of the top stories in the early morning Today Programme on BBC Radio 4. In addition, items dealing with it appeared on all the BBC television news programmes, and it was also included in at least two ITN news broadcasts. Furthermore, it was covered in most of the main national daily newspapers, and in some regional ones as well.

Of course, even when research is reported in the media, researchers are sometimes dissatisfied with the way in which it is represented. This was certainly true in the case I am concerned with here. One of the authors of the Review, David Gillborn, has described much of the newspaper coverage as striking ‘a particularly alarmist and/or depressing note, casting Black children as “failures” and even presenting “underclass” analyses as if they were quoting an official source’. He notes that such accounts ran ‘directly contrary to the review which, while highlighting inequalities in attainment, explicitly critiqued the notion of “under-achievement” [...]’ (Gillborn 1998:5). He concludes that: ‘Much of the coverage bears only passing resemblance to the review: some is misleading, some is nothing more than an excuse to repeat chosen racist myths’ (Gillborn 1998:7).

Social scientists’ complaints about media treatment of research are not uncommon (Cohen and Young 1973:20; Rubin 1980; Haslam and Bryman 1994).[2] Dunning, for example, has commented on the difficulties that social scientists face in ‘getting their message across’, this stemming from the reliance of many parts of the media on ‘sensation and sentiment as news values’ (Dunning 1994:59) And, in the field of educational research, Alexander has argued that the media treatment of what came to be called the ‘three wise men report’ was distorted by the ‘political and media myth’ of ‘plummeting educational standards in primary schools caused by decades of mindless progressivism’ (Alexander 1997:226-7). He claims that the media set out to sustain and develop this myth, using his work to do so.[3]

These complaints about distortion link to a broader tradition of sociological research on the media, much of which has been concerned with bias.[4] However, in that literature, the notion of media distortion or bias has been poorly conceptualised, generally speaking; and inadequate attention has been given to the complex judgements involved in coming to conclusions about the existence and operation of bias (Anderson and Sharrock 1979; Harrison 1985). In several respects, the case I am examining is ideal for exploring these issues. As already noted, it attracted considerable media coverage, and it relates to a controversial topic. Most important of all, it allows detailed comparison of media reports with what they claim to be reporting; whereas this is much more difficult with reports focusing on situations or events, and/or which draw on sources of information that are not publicly available.

In the investigation on which this paper is based, I have looked in detail at how reporting of the Review of Research on the Achievements of Ethnic Minority Pupils relates to its content, and to the Press Release announcing its publication. Here, I will try to identify some of the processes of selection and reformulation involved in media representation. Later, I will consider the implications of these processes for complaints about distortion.

The Review and the Press Release

The Review is 91 pages long (including references), and is broken down into 7 sections. It begins with an ‘executive summary’ and ends with a section entitled ‘Conclusions’, whose sub-heading is ‘Ways forward: policy and practice’. Between the opening summary and the conclusion, there is an introduction and five separate chapters. These cover:

1) the context of the Review;

2) evidence about the achievement levels of different ethnic groups;

3) research dealing with the relative educational progress of these groups, and the significance of school effectiveness as a factor in this;

4) the findings of qualitative research on multi-ethnic schools; and

5) evidence about the situation in post-compulsory education.

There is a short summary of the main findings in the Conclusion of the Review, and a slightly different one on its back cover. A further summary is to be found in the Press Release, and since this is likely to be the first place that journalists would go for information about the content of the Review, I will concentrate on it here.

The Press Release is headed: ‘“COLOUR BLIND” SCHOOL POLICIES DO NOT HELP ETHNIC MINORITY PUPILS SAYS OFSTED REPORT’, and the summary of the Review’s findings reads as follows:

The report found encouraging developments over the last ten years. These include:

* improving levels of attainment among ethnic minority groups in many areas of the country;

* dramatic increases in examination performance in certain minority groups experiencing economic disadvantage such as Bangladeshi pupils in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets;

* in higher education, people of ethnic minority background are generally well represented among those continuing education to degree level, although there are significantly different university admission rates between the ethnic groups.

However over these same ten years the report also finds that:

* the gap is growing between the highest and lowest achieving ethnic groups in many LEAs, for example, in the London Borough of Brent between Asian and African Caribbean pupils respectively;

* African Caribbean young people, especially boys, have not shared equally in the increasing rates of achievement;

* a disproportionately high number of black pupils have been excluded from school.

The structure of this summary is what is sometimes referred to as a good news/bad news format; with three separate, though related, points under each of the two headings.

The next part of the Press Release is a summary of the policy implications of the Review, derived largely from the ‘Ways forward’ section of the Conclusion. It reads as follows:

The report calls for:

* greater monitoring of educational achievements and experiences of ethnic minority pupils;

*schools to address ethnicity;

*a research agenda to address gaps in data;

*systematic studies of teaching and learning in multi-ethnic schools; and

*research into exclusions at school level.

Having outlined the content of the Review and of how it was presented to the media via the Press Release, in the next section I will focus on the media coverage itself.

Media Coverage

I will discuss just two brief examples of media coverage.[5] The first is the opening part of the Today programme’s treatment.

BBC Today Programme News Headline and Bulletin

Here are the opening headlines from the 6.30am news on the morning after the Review was published:

Good morning from Sue McGregor and James Naughtie. Thursday the 5th of September.

The headlines this morning:

Iraq has protested to the United Nations about the American cruise missile attacks which have split the international community.

Research on the educational achievements of ethnic minorities suggest Asian pupils are outshining their classmates. We talk to two headteachers.

British and Irish ministers meet today to discuss how recent violence is affecting the inter-party talks.

And direct from a Dentist's waiting room we assess the latest revival of Punch.

Today's newsreader is Corrie Corfield.

CC: Iraq has made a formal protest to the United Nations about America's cruise missile attacks in Southern Iraq. The military operation has divided the international community. Iraq claims that missiles were fired on Baghdad last night but this has been denied by the United States.

Research published by the Schools Inspectorate says that pupils from some Asian groups are out-performing their classmates. The study, comparing the academic achievement of ethnic minority pupils, also suggests that Afro-Caribbean students are under-achieving.

Six further news items followed this, including ones dealing with the conflict in Ireland and the Conservative campaign against Labour over tax, involving demon eyes in a purse.

From this we can see that news about the Review was given relatively high priority, and it more or less maintained its position in the Today Programme news reports through to the end of the programme at 9.00am. Moreover, there were also two more detailed items dealing with the Review. In the first, BBC education correspondent Sue Littlemore was interviewed about it by James Naughtie. Then, later, as advertised in the opening headlines, there was a discussion led by James Naughtie with two headteachers. For the purposes of this paper, however, I will focus solely on the news headline and bulletin item I have already quoted. There are a number of points to be made about these.

First of all, while in the opening headline the research is not specifically attributed to anyone, in the News Bulletin item and in later coverage it is attributed to ‘the Schools’ Inspectorate’. It is noticeable that no reference is made to the fact that the study was produced by independent, academic researchers. This attribution of the Review to OFSTED, or to School Inspectors, is a common feature of the media coverage. It probably reflects not just OFSTED’s commissioning of the Review, and the salience of its name on the cover, but also the headline of the Press Release and the fact that the Review was launched at an OFSTED press conference. Probably even more important, it reflects this organisation’s high media profile: journalists are much more likely to have heard of it than of the authors of the Review. At the same time, it is striking that the OFSTED acronym is not used by the BBC; ‘the Schools Inspectorate’ was presumably judged to be more informative to a wider audience.

It is a commonly noted feature of media coverage that a great deal of it concerns the sayings and doings of official agencies. So, we might also suspect that the Review was attributed to OFSTED because this signifies its importance; in other words, its newsworthiness. For the media, especially, the significance of what is said often depends a good deal on who said it. Indeed, it seems very likely that the extent of media coverage of the Review arises to a considerable degree from the link with OFSTED. This conclusion is supported by the fact that the Review deals with research which, for the most part, had been published over the previous ten years; and none of these individual studies had received much media coverage.[6]

A second point to be made about the content of the BBC headline and bulletin item is that they focus on the findings of the Review, rather than on its practical recommendations. There is no mention at all of the latter; though they are mentioned in the education correspondent’s account later on in the Today Programme. This is perhaps surprising, given that we might expect the media to be concerned with the policy implications of research, rather than with its findings per se.

A third point is that there are differences between how the Review’s findings are represented in the headline and news bulletin and how they were presented in the Press Release and in the two short summaries that can be found in the Review. It is significant, first of all, that the BBC’s two accounts of the Review’s findings are much shorter even than the summary in the Press Release. This no doubt reflects the pressure on ‘space’ within news reports. However, whatever the explanation, the result was that BBC journalists had to select points to be covered, not just from the material in the Review but even from that in the Press Release summary. And, as we shall see, there was also some reformulation of these selected points.

Given this process of selection and reformulation, I want to look fairly closely at the account of the Review provided by the headline and news bulletin item. The opening headline offers a comparison between the performance of Asian pupils and ‘their classmates’, summarised in the description that they are ‘outshining’ them. Even if we accept that this selection of just one item from the findings of the Review was technically unavoidable, we can still ask why this particular point was selected. After all, various other headlines were possible on the basis of the Review, at least in principle. These include: that there were improving levels of attainment among ethnic minority groups in many areas of the country; that, in higher education, ethnic minorities are generally well represented; and/or that a disproportionately high number of black pupils continue to be excluded from school.

We can assume that the selection of headlines about the Review would have reflected, in part, a concern on the part of journalists to represent its content accurately. On this basis,one reason for the selection of this item may have been that it was taken to capture the main focus of the Review, as implied by the title. In other words, the latter’s emphasis on the achievements of ethnic minority pupils may have led to selection of the high achievement levels of many Asian pupils as the key finding. However, journalists are also likely to be concerned with the relative newsworthiness of what could be reported about the Review. And we must remember that journalists are competing with one another to get a slot for their stories, and a slot as high up the priority list of news items as possible.[7] So, this particular item from the Review was probably also selected because it was taken to have intrinsic news value: that some Asian groups are achieving at higher levels than ethnic majority pupils was perhaps judged to be not widely known. In these terms, the Review could be seen as newsworthy not just in being the pronouncement of an official agency but also because it offered some striking new information.

It is also worth noticing that the headline identifies a specific ethnic group as doing better than others, whereas for the most part the Press Release summary does not; and nor do the short summaries in the Review. The only exception is the first item of the ‘bad news’ in the Press Release summary, where the example is given that in the London Borough of Brent the gap is growing between the highest achieving ethnic group - Asian pupils - and the lowest achieving ethnic group - African Caribbean pupils.

Of course, the point about the relatively high achievement levels of some Asian groups can also be found within the Review itself, and may have been drawn from there rather than from the Press Release. For example, in the executive summary there are the following statements: ‘Indian pupils achieve higher average rates of success than their white counterparts in some (but not all) urban areas’ and ‘In secondary schools Asian pupils make rather better progress than whites of the same social class background’. It should be noted, though, that these are two among 68 bullet points; and the second of these is sandwiched by the findings that whites ‘tend to make greater progress than ethnic minority pupils in primary schools’ and that ‘despite the greater progress made by some ethnic minority groups, studies outside London tend to show white pupils leaving school with the highest average achievements’.