Accessing

The practice of including verbal quotations and film/ tape interviews or statements (in news/current affairs coverage) which originate from people or groups not directly employed by the media organization itself.
Accessing is a curious term in use, since it surfaces as a significant issue only when it is absent. So you’ll come across demands for access much more frequently than analyses of accessing.
Demands for access are based on a reflection theory of the media – that is, that the media ought to reflect the plurality of different groups, politics or lifestyles that can be identified outside the media in social life. Many groups argue that their access to television is blocked and that as a result they are unable to establish their point of view in the public mind. The assumption often is that the blockage is caused by a more or less deliberate conspiracy by the media to exclude them.
Even when access is achieved, ‘minority groups’ are often disappointed with the coverage they get. This is because the media, as industrial organizations with an extensive division of labour and an occupational ideology of professionalism, won’t let you simply appear on television or radio and state your case or tell your story. What you say is mediated by the professionals, and whether you get as far as the studio at all may depend on your own professional or representative status. But the professional mediation of accessed voices goes even further than this. It extends to the message itself. Even when you have your say on television, you won’t speak for yourself. What you say becomes what television says, and television discourse has its own peculiarities. When a newsreader quotes you or an interviewer questions you, your utterance becomes a discursive element which is subordinate to the narrative flow and visual codes of the item as a whole.
Its meaning is not self-contained, but depends on what is said and seen before and afterwards. You become, in effect, one actor in a drama, and even if you’re lucky enough to be playing the lead it is still the case that what you say is significant only in the context of what all the others say, and of what the drama is about. Further, one aspect of your role is entirely at odds with your own purposes. For simply by accessing you, the institutional discourse is able to claim authenticity and credibility for itself. You become the means through which the legitimacy of media representations can be established – whatever it is that you actually say.

There is, then, a conflict of interest between professional media discourses and the demands for access that various groups express. The way this has been handled in practice takes two forms. First, news and current affairs subscribe to the principle of impartiality, thereby ensuring that a (narrow and ‘balanced’) range of voices is accessed on any one topic.
Second, specialist ‘access programmes’ have been established on many networks. In these off-peak slots media professionals may relinquish control of the programme content, but retain control of the production process. Unfortunately, both these well-intentioned practices have negative consequences.
Impartiality legitimates the mainstream bipartisan form of politics at the expense of the various single-issue groups (environmental campaigns and so on), ethnic ‘minority’ groups, socialist or feminist groups, and community groups that tend to end up having to make do with the marginal access slots. For such groups, the very fact of winning access results in representations that seem ‘naturally’ to confirm their marginal status.

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