Greg Philo: a tribute
JVL Introduction
Greg Philo, who died in May, was one of the most influential media analysts in the UK over many decades.
He was one of a group of eight researchers who produced Bad News in 1976, focusing on the TV coverage of industrial disputes.
It found that television news was not, as its practitioners claimed, politically neutral – a commonplace assumption today, but very radical at the time, running against the professional ideology of the broadcasting establishment, and all the more damning because backed-up with a vast amount of empirical research.
This volume was published under the auspices of the Glasgow University Media Group (which Greg headed from 1980 until 2021), and was the first of many more research projects deepening the analysis, as well as covering futher sectors of news reporting, generally in collaboration with others.
War and Peace News appeared in 1985 after the Falklands War, followed by Seeing and Believing (1990) about the miners’ strike, Bad News from Israel (2004) and More Bad News From Israel (2011) and of course, Bad News for Labour in 2019.
There was in Greg’s work a commitment to exactly the same values the broadcasters professed to follow but, as volume after volume demonstrated, these values were not in fact lived up to.
It was politically committed scholarship of a high order and Greg will be sorely missed.
RK
This article was originally published by Jacobin on Thu 6 Jun 2024. Read the original here.
Greg Philo Showed Us How Broadcast Media Really Works
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Big thanks to JVL and Tom Mills for this. I never met Greg Philo, but followed much of work by him and GUMG, and remain indebted for it.
Very sad.
Books that he was involved in producing were well worth reading. I have still got them somewhere.
One of the democratic greats. His work should have been at the centre of our political culture, never more so than now.