Glasgow Media Group
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Glasgow Media Group (also referred to as the Glasgow University Media Group, the GUMG, and the Glasgow Media Unit), is a group of researchers formed at the University of Glasgow in 1974, which pioneered the analysis of television news in a series of studies. Operating under the GUMG banner, academics including its founders Brian Winston, Greg Philo and John Eldridge have consistently postulated that television news is biased in favour of powerful forces such as governments, transnational corporations and the rich over issues like climate change, conflicts such as Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, welfare benefits, economics and refugees.
Impact
In 1982, Really Bad News, the sequel to the Group's earlier books Bad News and More Bad News, reached number five on the Glasgow Evening Times best sellers list and other GUMG titles have remained popular on social science courses at universities.
In 1985, BBC Two made an eponymous programme based on War and Peace News as part of their Open Space series but before broadcast it removed certain aspects of the programme, including minutes leaked from their own editorial meetings. As a result, the GUMG secured a screen-card reading CENSORED and another suggesting that viewers write and complain to the BBC's Director General. The resulting publicity led to the editor of ITN, David Nicholas, attacking the book and to The Observer describing the GUMG as 'academic hit men stalking television's newscasters'.
In 2011, Emma Briant, Greg Philo and Nick Watson from the Strathclyde Centre for Disability Research published Bad News for Disabled People, which was discussed in the UK and Scottish parliaments and used in evidence in the Leveson Inquiry into the British Press. On 14 November 2011, the report was directly cited by Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson in a welfare reform debate in the UK House of Lords as evidence of widespread misrepresentation of disabled people and disability benefits. Also in November 2011, the Shadow Minister for Disability Issues Kate Green MP referred directly to the findings in a UK House of Commons debate on disability hate crime.
In 2012, Catherine Happer and Greg Philo published a collaborative research report with Antony Froggatt of Chatham House examining public beliefs and behaviours on climate change and energy security.
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This entry incorporates text from “Glasgow Media Group” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.