Lee Salter

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...

Grounded in intersubjective participatory action research, the people and dancefloors project has sought to produce a space for the co-creation of knowledge about dancefloors and drug taking, building a platform for developing insights from the positionality of current drug users. Through film, it provides hermeneutic insight while legitimising the...

This article considers how media production is framed by class experience, and how this framing mediates exclusion. Drawing on research on ‘poverty porn’ the article presents an analysis of how experimental exclusion is operationalized in media representations before moving the analysis to consider the framing of an additional exclusion that afflic...

2016-17 saw the worst prison riots in decades. Across the country the prisons estate exploded as warned by campaigners and prisoners. The flames of the riots cast a light on the so-called prison crisis. Look hard and you’ll see it’s not that prisons are in crisis, prisons are the crisis. Injustice investigates the crisis, and delves into the worl...

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 ha...

This study analyses the discursive framing of the British government’s economic policies by BBC News Online. Specifically, it focuses on the coverage of the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review in 2010, in which the details of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s broader ‘austerity’ agenda were released. Using frame analysis informed by critical...

Understanding the Liberal State Corporate Media, Hegemony, and Counter-Hegemony Maintaining Order: A Tale of Two Rebellions Producing Alternative Spaces The Liberal Paradox: Media Freedom as Constraint Conclusion Note References

‘The most comprehensive book I've read on the issues facing online journalism in the UK. Digital Journalism manages to combine an understanding of technological and cultural developments with a commercial and political awareness that prevents it falling into the trap of technological determinism. Essential reading for journalism students’ - Paul Br...

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 wor...

This profile looks at how students at the University of the West of England (UWE) undertook direct action in protest against the British government's cuts to educational funding in the higher education sector. Situating the in the broader context of the struggle against cuts to education, the authors observed the organisation of students, interview...

This article considers the truth value of the BBC's reporting of the invasion of Iraq in the context of Hannah Arendt's consideration of the US invasion of Vietnam. Arendt theorized that the `Pentagon Papers' exposed a new approach to truth and lies - the `modern political lie' at the heart of modern politics. In this article, Arendt's concept of t...

This paper considers the question of whether journalism can be considered to be a social practice. After considering some of the goods of journalism the paper moves to investigate how external goods can corrupt the practice and make it somewhat ineffective. The paper therefore looks to consider ways in which the goods claimed have been better serve...

Social life is mediated in numerous ways. Ideas, social interaction and practical activity are all mediated in part by communication or media technologies. Whilst it would be folly to suggest that media technologies mediate most people’s entire experience of political and intellectual life, it is the case that the presence of these technologies in...

This thesis examines the potential of and limits to the use of the Internet as a public sphere. To this end it considers the claim that the Internet is or can be a public sphere. To do this there are two related spheres of enquiry: the 'public sphere' and 'the Internet'. The enquiry into the concept of the public sphere is based on an engagement wi...

While many studies of the web and related technologies of communication have focused on its use, there has been little engagement with the structural properties of the web and related technologies from a broadly social theoretic point of view. This article analyses pressures on the technological development of the web from the perspective of the Ha...

This article seeks to analyze the communication structures of journalism and public relations, using the communication ethics of Jürgen Habermas. The intention is to use this analysis to draw attention to the differences between journalism and public relations in the interests of good journalism and in the interests of democracy. I do not deny that...

This article seeks to analyze the communication structures of journalism and public relations, using the communication ethics of Jürgen Habermas. The intention is to use this analysis to draw attention to the differences between journalism and public relations in the interests of good journalism and in the interests of democracy. I do not deny that...

A good deal of discourse relating to the 'democratic potential' of the Internet has tended to simplify the question of technology. Whilst it is true that the structure of the Internet may well facilitate certain 'democratic' forms of use, this is not a necessary fact. This paper argues that the Internet is not passive, but is shaped by the ways in...