Despite news outlets often covering identical stories, the packaging of news and its impact can vary drastically. This will be demonstrated through a comparison of Mark Easton’s “Jamaica flight: Priti Patel criticises anti-deportation campaign” and Christy Cooney’s “SENT EM PACKING Priti Patel defeats ‘do-gooding’ celebs as 1,100 criminals including killers & rapists are booted out of UK”. Through analysing what was written (newsworthiness and quality), how it was written (objectivity, sources, and format), and why it was written (institution, context, and ethics), the argument will be made that the BBC article complies with journalistic conventions and media regulations to a greater extent than The Sun, which is largely imbalanced and reflects an increasing demand for entertainment in news.
Easton and Cooney detail the response of British home secretary, Priti Patel, to protests against the deportation of criminal immigrants to Jamaica. Both articles can be understood as bad news, defined by Tony Harcup and Deirdre O’Neill as “stories with particularly negatives overtones, such as conflict or tragedy” and generally fulfil consensus news values. The stories feature conflict over immigration laws and bare relevance on readers who may have safety concerns over the rise of crime in the UK. They are timely, geographically proximate, comprising entirely of British public figures and debates surrounding nationality, and are of immense human interest, evoking emotion in line with the reader’s political alignment.
Despite this shared newsworthiness, the extent in which both articles can be considered quality news is contestable, as The Sun’s framing of this story compromises diversity and impartiality. Generally, both journalist’s first level agenda-setting is compatible as they identify similar subjects of interest, but major inconsistencies exist in their second level agenda-setting, the main being their narrative. According to UNESCO, framing involves “selecting particular aspect and angles of reality and privileging them in the description, the definition, the interpretation and the moral evaluation” of a story. The BBC’S media frame reflects the spectrum of the deportation debate, featuring input from Windrush immigrants, campaigners, Labour and Conservative politicians, as well as lawyers. It proportionately emphasizes multiple viewpoints, generally distributing its focus amongst the political and legal proceedings that have occurred, referencing prior events such as the 2018 Windrush scandal as part of the wider debate and loosely mentioning the role of celebrities. As focus appears proportionate, the article facilitates a balanced response from the reader, enabling them to weigh up the data and quotes provided in generating an opinion. Conversely, The Sun gives disproportionate emphasis to Priti Patel’s angle, reiterating the criminal background of the deportees (with the heinous crimes of rape and murder being consistently stressed) and framing campaigners as threats to national security; “among those who escaped deportation were two people convicted of rape and one convicted of murder”. Despite the negligible involvement of celebrities in this story, the narrative is also further scandalised as images of A-list celebrities are used throughout. Framing is thus diagnostic and conforms to Vladimir Propp’s master myths, as the piece posits immigrants and campaigners as villains who pose as direct and indirect threats to the British public, and Conservative politicians as heroes in their efforts to enforce deportation.
Objectivity can therefore be scrutinised, which some academics assert is impossible to achieve on account of news being a “construction of reality”, and not necessarily desirable as neutrality can cause journalists to appear “disinterested”. Contrastingly, Stephen Ward advocates for methodical objectivity and argues journalism must be subject to objective controls to ensure accuracy, reliability, and fairness. The extent in which one adopts these viewpoints depends on their perception of the institutional role of journalists in society, which Wolfgang Donsbach proposes can be conceptualised through a theory-driven model with two analytical dimensions. The first dimension, which the BBC falls within, is the passive-active dimension whereby the journalist acts independently of those who have interests in the story, as demonstrated by Easton’s balanced, albeit “disinterested”, coverage of Priti Patel’s deportation of immigrants in which affiliations towards a specific ideology or political party are scarce. The Sun’s article operates within the second dimension, neutral-advocacy, to a greater extent as, although Cooney does not brazenly assert a stance on the issue, anti-immigration sentiments are implicit within The Sun’s second level agenda-setting, suggesting the publication did not act independently of external influence. It can subsequently be argued the piece constitutes advocacy journalism as it allusively champions Conservative immigration policy. The Sun’s lack of objectivity is further demonstrated in evidence of pack journalism, which is understood as the tendency of journalists to report stories homogenously. When reviewing previous stories from the BBC’s Easton about immigration policy, his journalism appears to be more chronological than ideological meaning that a focus on advancements in legal proceedings, protests, and societal attitudes towards immigration prevent an idiosyncratic viewpoint being projected. Cooney, on the other hand, has consistently released articles examining political stances on immigration, for example “ELECTION 2019 Immigration – Where do Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats stand?”. Whilst these do not include overt political bias, a theme of Conservativism offering the safest, most sensible policies is inherent.
The publications’ use of sources can also be analysed as, according to Leon V. Sigel, news is made up of “a sampling of sources’ portrayal of reality, mediated by news organisations”, with contributors serving as news makers or news shapers in accordance with their influence and ability to secure media space. Despite discrepancies in quality and objectivity, the BBC and The Sun utilise similar quotes from primary definers such as Priti Patel and Chris Philip, however the BBC also quotes alternative views from Labour politicians and the Bar Council, as well as unofficial source, Windrush victim, Glenda Caesar. This suggests the BBC endured a more rigorous newsgathering process in which a range of contributors were sought out, contrasted against The Sun who potentially identified contributors in support of a certain angle. Nonetheless, through featuring predominantly primary definers who possess specific expertise and are licensed to control how an event is reported depending on their representative status, both stories hold institutional authority and credibility as the primary nature of their sources insinuates insight and proximity.
Despite the impact of secondary definers appearing minimal in these stories, the influence of mass media would have shaped format and content drastically. Susan Sontag claims “industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies” whereby visibility and marketability are synonymous, and social media websites such as Twitter, where 6000 Tweets are posted per second, force journalists to innovate new methods of keeping their story in the news cycle. This is reflected on both webpages, which utilise bold headlines, subheadings, and images to maintain reader engagement. The BBC also concludes the story with a BBC Reality Check segment which serves as a fact-checker and provides further relevant data, distancing them from the partisan news outlets associated with the new media and tackling fake news spread by social media. In keeping with the sensationalised nature of tabloids, Cooney features multiple celebrity photos, colloquial dialect such as “booted out of UK” which trivialises deportation, and concludes with an interview clip of Priti Patel on right wing radio broadcaster, LBC. A certain readership would thus be more inclined to read The Sun’s story as its content is more linguistically accessible and visually graphic than the BBC’s story, which is dense in facts and offers little entertainment. Likewise, The Sun’s content reflects an increased adversarialism in political reporting and evokes the paranoid style of US politics, in which truths are decontextualised to create misleading world views, the view in this instance being that immigrants are criminals. This ties into Kwame Anthony Appiah’s conceptions of identity, whereby nationhood is conceptualised by nationalists who, in line with the essentialisation of ‘Western civilisation’, function within a national culture that immigrants cannot fully integrate into. The Sun’s article appeals to nationalist readership as it provides justification for this way of thinking through reporting selective, unrepresentative statistics that reinforce xenophobic rhetoric and frame immigrants as threats to national culture. Whilst Cooney balances this claim slightly by stating immigrant crime also related to forced labour and slavery, Easton exceeds this by actively giving campaigners media space.
To better understand the curation of these stories, news culture must be explored. The world’s oldest national broadcaster, the BBC, was established under a Royal Charter and operates in line with conditions set by the home secretary, receiving most of its funding through the television license. The organisation plays an integral role in British culture and serves as the main source of news for UK audiences, as evidenced by figures from the London bombings that indicate on the 7th of July 2005 BBC Online recorded one billion hits, amounting to 40,000-page requests per second. In part due to its reliance on public funding and historically credible position, the BBC generally assumes a neutral or liberal stance, refraining from blatant alignment with a political party. The nature of critique towards this organisation reflects this lack of bias, as Conservatives such as Margaret Thatcher have historically branded the BBC left-wing whilst The Guardian columnist, Owen Jones, claims “the BBC is stacked full of right-wingers”. This lack of consensus implies a balance which is carried through into Easton’s story, constraining him from using propagandist discourse. Conversely, The Sun is a tabloid newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, who has been accused of operating his corporation in favour of his political allies and business interests. As a result of its private ownership, The Sun can be held accountable to the British public to a lesser extent and is under less obligation to practice objectivity, as indicated by columnist, Katie Hopkins, once referring to immigrants as “cockroaches” and “feral humans”. This potentially suggests Cooney’s story is evocative of ‘battery hen’ journalism whereby immigration, which has served as a trending topic in the light of Brexit, continues to be repackaged in multiple negative lights to incite moral panic and appease certain political actors. Further evidencing this claim is the fact that as of February 2020, The Sun’s profits had fallen by 8%, reinforcing the need for journalists to report scandalous, often polarised stories, as reflected in the Priti Patel article. Further influencing these stories is the context in which they were created. Assuming a pluralist approach in Robert Putnam’s two-level games theory, the media operates independently of government constraints and at the core of democracy, which is exemplified in Easton’s article. The Sun, on the other hand, embodies the elite model as Cooney’s story reflects a subservience to the Conservative government which would have been essential in maintaining relations between Murdoch and powerful state actors. Supporting this is the fact that throughout December 2020, post-Brexit trade agreements were frequently reported as being disadvantageous to the UK, suggesting The Sun released this article to shift attention off unsuccessful negotiations and back onto the minority group that were at the core of the 2016 Leave campaign. This tactic would have been equally advantageous given the economy during December 2020 which, following COVID-19 lockdowns, saw unemployment at a five year high of 5.1% and 726,000 jobs cut since February. A deflection from the socioeconomic turmoil that had emerged under the Conservative government onto the opposition’s disregard of seemingly dangerous immigrants would have thus been mutually beneficial.
Finally, the extent in which these stories conform to media ethical codes can be considered. Whilst Easton has generally complied with codes outlined by the Ethical Journalism Network, Cooney’s failure to contextualise the number of immigrants who have committed crime within broader data, like the BBC did through the Reality Check segment, constructs a distorted reality which is exacerbated by an absence of competing perspectives. Principles of humanity are therefore compromised as vulnerable immigrants are put at risk of further hostility from the British public, who are inclined to see them as merely perpetrators of violent crime. This misrepresentation is discussed by Avshalom Ginosar and Igor Konovalov, who claim patriotism in journalism fails to expose readers to critiques of their government and multiple perspectives on conflict. Cooney’s unbalanced portrayal of Conservative immigration policy, influenced heavily by institutional constraints and The Sun’s news culture, subsequently censors alternative viewpoints, such as those advanced by the Bar Council and Windrush victims, and deters political discontent amongst its audience.
To conclude, the BBC article embodies a higher standard of journalism than The Sun. Less restrained by the political arena and incentivised to act impartiality due to the BBC’s public source of funding and credible reputation, Easton employs accuracy and objectivity throughout, featuring a spectrum of sources and formatted modestly, with the intention of informing, not swaying, public opinion on issues of immigration. Despite Cooney’s article also being accurate, her selectivity of information and limited use of sources is indicative of the political bias institutionalised within The Sun. The BBC is therefore not only superior in terms of quality, but also ethically favourable.
