One of the unwritten newsroom rules identified by Davies as determining the content of the news (see F7 above) is: ‘always give both sides of the story’. The UK news media – certainly television and quality press – are generally serious about practising a degree of internal pluralism and giving space to a reasonably diverse range of different viewpoints. Rather than an absence of an internal pluralism of at least mainstream debate in the UK news media, criticism has always focused on the marginalization of minority and ‘alternative’ perspectives (Harcup 2007). Recently, there has been criticism of the transformation of newspapers into ‘viewspapers’, a trend towards blurring of the line between news and views (House of Lords 2008a: 18). Further, there is a concern about a trend towards a ‘softer news agenda’ (for a consummate critical academic study on this theme, see Franklin 1997).
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