UNIONS-2

When the screen went dim

BILL GRUNDY A couple of weeks ago I heard a radio inter- view with D. A. N. Jones, one of the con- tributors to the book The Press We Deserve which I talked about last week. He was asked what he thought as wrong with the press in this country. One of his complaints was that the reporting of industrial disputes is always unfair, always loaded on the side of the employers against the workers. This, he said, was because the press is capitalist owned. The causes of any dispute are never made clear. We are never told what the men really want. Instead we are given a lot of sensational rubbish about 'Reds', about in- timidation, and so on, all designed to preju- dice us against the strikers.

He was particularly talking about the recent Pilkington strike, but there's another one on at the moment which gives us a chance to check his allegations. I'm referring to the dispute at Granada Television in Man- chester, which resulted in the studios shut- ting down just over a week ago, thus depriv- ing millions of people all over the country of the familiar delights of Coronation Street, the lengthy nostalgia of Family at War, and the subtle pleasures of Brian Inglis's presen- tation of All Our Yesterdays.

If Mr Jones is right, the facts in this case will have been deliberately distorted in re- porting the dispute in the papers. Further- more they will have been distorted in one direction, putting the employers' case more favourably than that of the strikers. But just how easy is it to get at the facts, let alone distort them? I have copies of the statements released by both sides, I have talked with members of the union and representatives of the Granada management. I am myself a member of the union, although not of that part of it which is on strike, and yet I'll be damned if I know what the facts are. I know what the management thinks they are, I know what the union thinks they are. The only obvious fact (if I may dare to use the word) seems to be that their views are sub-

stantially different. This would seem to me to make it rather more difficult for the press to get at the truth than D. A. N. Jones seems to think. He, however, would probably dis- agree since he himself doesn't seem to find it hard to decide what the facts really are in any industrial dispute.

Bearing all this in mind I've read every- thing I could find in the papers about the strike and I must say that the reports don't seem to have distorted the issues much, at least as far as I understand them. Nor do they seem to have dealt with the manage- ment's side of the case only. Rather the opposite, if anything. I have seen no state- ments that it's all caused by Reds, although Vic Feather came very near to it in a speech at Liverpool over the weekend. And obvious propaganda opportunities haven't been picked up.

For example, a report appeared in the northern editions of Thursday's Daily Mail about strike pay of between £20 and £30 a week for those union members who are

actually out. The figure was wrong, arrived at through mistaking what the union would like to happen for what is likely to. It would, however, have made a good propaganda point, for though £20 to £30 isn't exactly the plushest of living, it happens to be more than a lot of people get for actually work- ing. It could have been a useful figure to bandy about to rouse prejudice against the strikers. In fact I actually heard one union

member make. a bet that it would appear in the southern editions, too, to arouse resent-

ment in the breasts of 'all those little men on

the Surbiton train', as he put it. Well, he was wrong. The Mail didn't print it in their

southern editions, and no other paper I saw gave it a mention even though it was con- cerned with a strike which (though northern) has ramifications which can be seen, or rather not seen, on pe6ple's Tv screens every night all over the country.

It's a small point but does perhaps indi- cate that the reporting of industrial disputes is not quite as black and white as Mr Jones seems to think. I admit that the press com- presses the details of a dispute, and that

must inevitably produce an element of acci- dental distortion. After all, a potted Readers' Digest version isn't quite the same thing as War and Peace in all its original sprawling glory.

But compression is essential. Which ordin- ary reader wants to know all the details of a dispute like this, always assuming the two sides can agree what the truth is? And that assumption. I repeat, is a major one. For instance, the union says negotiations have been going on for three years. Granada say four months. The union says it is quite will- ing to accept a new working pattern for certain technicians (which is what the strike is superficially about) if the management will admit that it is really a productivity arrange- ment. Granada say it isn't, since nobody will be working longer or harder under the new schedules. The union says the strike was brought on by the action of the management in publishing 'unilaterally' these new schedules, knowing they wouldn't be accept- able to the union. Granada say on the con- trary the schedules have beed agreed, and the union are reneging by demanding a 12 per cent increase in advance after earlier agreeing to work the schedules for a reason- able trial period and then coming back with a claim for more money if the trial period shows it to be justified. Granada point to the

fact that the technicians the strike is about are a pretty well paid lot. The union replies that it is through the efforts of its members that members of the Bernstein family and other major shareholders in the company are now extremely well-heeled, and please can we now share in the loot a lot more, thank you very much.

It is, in other words, an entirely typical industrial dispute. Now that the strike has actually started, of course, attitudes have hardened. There seems, at the moment of writing, little hope that the two sides are going to talk again in the near future (barr- ing a well-timed government intervention, of course; or another visit to the good offices of Victor Grayson Hardie Feather, that well- known mediator). Yet it is clear that most of the matters in contention are matters of interpretation, which might have been thrashed out during negotiations, whether they lasted three years, as the union says, or four months according to the management's version. But they weren't. And if they can't be cleared up during all that time, what hope is there for the press to nip in and get it right first time?

I'm not, of course, suggesting that the press is always perfect (God forbid). But I am suggesting, for the reasons I've put for- ward, that it isn't as deliberately imperfect as Mr Jones tries to make out.