RESULTS:

This article investigates the methods of hegemonic framing of the NSA/GCHQ surveillance scandal in a television interview of the journalist Glenn Greenwald on the flagship BBC Television news magazine Newsnight. Having uncovered the greatest mass surveillance project in human history much of the mainstream media and indeed many academic studies have focused on the debates over the ethics and responsibilities of the journalists and news organizations involved. This research investigates how a television news interviewer inflects the story and directs attention to a series of ‘public concerns’ articulated primarily by those who caused the scandal and mediated through the journalistic voice. The main focus for this article is how a television news interviewer fails to articulate a set of concerns instead being led by the newspaper mediation of those in authority.

This article analyses BBC News Online's reporting of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela using a sample from a broader selection of 304 articles published on BBC News Online between 1998 and 2008. Against the BBC's stated commitment to professional values we find that the BBC's organizational culture is underpinned by a liberal nationalist worldview which limits its interpretive capacities. The analysis notes that the liberal nationalism underpinning BBC News Online's reporting limits the interpretive capacities of journalists. The ideologically dominant national history of Venezuela (the exceptionalism thesis) forms an interpretive framework which synchs with the BBC's general conceptualization of the forms and function of a nation state and thus prevents adequate understanding of the present. Consequently the coverage of contemporary Venezuelan politics masks the underlying class conflict instead identifying Chavez who has emerged seemingly from nowhere as the key agent of political crisis. The BBC's reliance on a narrative of the disruption of national unity allows it to take sides in the conflict whilst apparently remaining neutral.

Fifty-one years ago the UK government passed the Misuse of Drugs Act establishing the three-tier drugs classification system that remains largely unchanged to this day. Since that time representations of drugs and drug users in the media have fuelled (if not entirely fabricated) moral panics to which political actors are happy to respond rather than engaging with more evidence-based yet publicly controversial solutions. The result is a link between drug policy and media representation that is characterized by ‘moral panic’ public outrage and knee-jerk government responses that are resistant to scientific evidence and the testimony of drug users. This article focuses on the ways in which some filmmakers have developed practices that aim to undermine the dominant hegemonic representation of drugs and drug users through airing discourses that are grounded in harm reduction rather than criminality. We highlight the ways in which harm reduction discourses can be represented to verify and justify normalized policy positions centred on crime and punishment or can be promoted through a selection of pedagogical filmmaking strategies that facilitate the testimony of drug users. We argue that certain filmmaking strategies confer possibilities for breaking the link between harmful drugs policy and simplified media representations of drugs and drug users.