A scribbling tribe: Reporting political scandal in Britain and Spain
Abstract
Comparative research is uniquely able to address theoretical questions about the relationship between journalism and political and cultural contexts. This study takes the reporting of political scandal as the entry-point to an analysis of the practice of investigative reporting in Britain and Spain in the 1990s and its status as a litmus test for a Fourth Estate understanding of the press’ role. Using interview and documentary data, the research explores journalists’ backgrounds, their assumptions about methods, relationships to sources and their perception of the public, political and peer response to their work. Journalists’ views of the rationale for reporting political scandal are also explored. The analysis shows that there are a number of differences between the two groups of journalists but also that they are bound far more by common assumptions about the practices and purposes of reporting political scandal, which, taken together, provide a challenge to certain aspects of the production study research tradition and also evidence for the enduring influence of Fourth Estate understandings of the role of journalism across national contexts.
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1 Gunther et al.’s (2000: 54-5) reader survey found that El Mundo’s readership did not consider that the paper favoured any particular party. Its readership was found to be left of centre, although less inclined to vote PSOE than the Spanish electorate as a whole. The authors, however, considered that El Mundo’s bias wasn’t shown by support for any party but by ‘its aggressively hostile stance toward González and his PSOE government’ (2000: 55).
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2 The two newspapers were also business partners and their editors knew and respected each other (personal interview, Preston, 2000).
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3 García Abadillo preferred not to disclose to us whether the ‘internal’ source was a bank official or member of the Socialist Party.
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4 The Guardian came under heavy attack from Conservative-supporting journalists such as Paul Johnson who accused it of unfairly hounding Neil Hamilton.
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