Howarth, Anita
(2012)
Discursive intersections of newspapers and policy elites:
a case study of genetically modified food in Britain, 1996-2000.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
This thesis explores the under-researched terrain of policy elite-newspaper engagements
and in so doing makes a substantive contribution in formulating an original conceptual
framework for understanding how the interactional dynamics of the political-media
complex work. This framework is then applied to the GM food row in Britain by asking how
contestation emerged, was sustained then subsided in the political-media complex. This
reconstructs the processes by which the pro-GM government consensus was challenged
by newspapers, conflict escalated to fever pitch, threatening policy elite agenda and was
finally negotiated through key compromises.
Drawing on a theoretical framework that combines participatory politics, the political-media
complex and new risks, the thesis conceptualises interactional dynamics as ‘discursive
intersections’. These are shifts in claims and counter-claims that emerge during
engagement at the interface of different sets of knowledge, cultures and agenda in the
political-media complex. However there is an element of unpredictability in discursive
intersections that arises from the paradoxical interdependence-independence of the
relationship in the political-media complex; the elective and episodic nature of
engagement on particular issues; and the variable form this may take with potential for
conflict, negotiation or consensus. Historical and wider argumentative contexts are crucial
to how and what form engagement takes place but do not define it. Thus, the trajectory of
discursive intersections needs to be explored empirically rather than predetermined
theoretically. This is done using a hybrid methodology that draws attention to the
dialogical, persuasive nature of discursive intersections. The substantive contribution of
the research is the formulating of this alternative framework for the analysis of
interactional dynamics and its application to the GM food row in Britain.
It does this by exploring how – that is the process in which - engagement emerged,
escalated into contestation, was negotiated and then subsided. What emerged were the
following findings.
(1) Parallel, sustained and conflictual systems of argumentation about risk were
developed between media and political elites despite elite consensus, abstract
debates and short news cycles.
(2) Newspaper contestation was constructed around a deeply ambivalent suspended
certainty based on claims that there was no evidence of risk or benefit, harm or
safety and demands for elite responsiveness to acute public anxiety over this.
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