News and Journalism in the UK, Book Review.

News and Journalism in the UK

By Brian McNair               

Published By Routledge - 2003

ISBN: 0-415-30706-6

Amazingly Factual!

News and journalism in the UK is an easily accessible and comprehensive introduction to the political, economic and regulatory environments of press and broadcast journalism in Britain. Brian McNair gives and interesting insight into the main trends in journalistic media over the past few decades. The first half of this book manly covers why journalism matters in today’s society, explaining its vast economic importance. He then goes onto explain how much journalism has grown since the 1980’s from just two organisations providing news for about two hours a day, to 3 news providers transmitting on 5 terrestrial channels and a vast number of other satellite and cable channels. And how some of these providers now have 24 hour news services, overall I found the first part of this book to be very informative and a rather interesting read. It wasn’t too technical, and everything was explained clearly so really anyone could understand it.

The second part of this book covers the issues facing broadcast journalism, the author goes into great detail about the relations between certain broadcasters like the BBC and the government. He explains how they’ve tried to regulate the content of their journalism, he explains how this feud was at its height during the reign of the Thatcher government, and although this was an interesting piece of history, I did find it a bit tedious and it could have been covered slightly quicker instead of trying to draw it out longer than it should have been. The rest of the book starts to cover other subjects such as radio and how they believed it was a dying form of media, but they got that horribly wrong. There were several other subjects covered and although these were nice and factual it didn’t really grab my attention in all honesty as much as the first part did, I found this was slightly disappointing.

So overall, is the book worth £15.99? If you’re a journalism student just looking for the facts and nothing more then I say yes. This book is probably well suited to you. However if you’re just an ordinary person looking for an interesting read, I probably wouldn’t recommend it for that price.

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