News, truth, and the recognition of corporate crime.

• Author: McMullan, John L.
• Position: Canada

Introduction

At 5:20 a.m. on 9 May 1992, an explosion ripped through a coal mine in Plymouth, Nova Scotia, killing 26 miners, 11 of whom remain buried there to this day. According to the report of the Westray Mine Public Inquiry, sparks from the cutting head of a continuous mining machine ignited methane gas, creating a fire and explosion that then stirred up coal particles, creating a coal-dust explosion. The explosions were so strong that they blew the top off the mine entrance, more than a mile above the blast centre (Richard 1997). Every year on that day the families and friends of those killed gather at Their Lights Shall Always Shine Memorial Park to remember the dreadful deaths. This day remains a symbolic signifier of loss, a time when the deeply private becomes public again. It brings together not only the bereaved but, as well, the print and broadcast media who report the remembering to regional and national audiences.

Westray is now an event etched in popular culture. Films, stage dramas, museum exhibits, radio shows, documentaries, poems, and fiction have memorialized it. Among the public, Westray connotes a range of emotions: sorrow, anger, and shame are arguably the most common. Yet 12 years afterward the "truth" of Westray remains a highly contested matter. Regulatory agencies filed 52 violations of the Occupational Health and Safety Act against Curragh Resources and their mine managers but then dropped them in favour of criminal charges of manslaughter and criminal negligence (Jobb 1994, 1999). The criminal trial, which cost an estimated $4.5 million, ended in a mistrial and a staying of all charges against the Westray accused (Beveridge and Duncan 2000). The public inquiry, which cost a further $4.8 million, concluded that the disaster "was a complex mosaic of actions, omissions, mistakes, incompetence, apathy, cynicism, stupidity, and neglect," but criminal blame was never allocated (Richard 1997: viii). Nor have civil actions fared any better. The Supreme Court of Canada concluded that the Nova Scotia government could not be held accountable for the Westray deaths, even if it was negligent in licensing and administering an unsafe mine. The families of the bereaved and miners remain convinced that answers to the questions What happened? Who is responsible? have not been satisfied (Comish and Comish 1999; Dodd 1999). Fully 85% of 52 relatives recently interviewed felt that blame had not been adequately attributed for the loss of life, and 58% felt that justice still had not been done (Davis 2003: 6).

This article is part of a larger study of truth-telling institutions surrounding the Westray disaster: the medical examinations, the criminal trial, the public inquiry, and the delivery of justice. Here I focus on how the print media registered and re-registered news as truth about the explosion from 1992 to 2002. Using Michel Foucault's (1980a, 1980b, 1991b, 1991c) concept of the "politics of truth" and Stanley Cohen's (2001) ideas about cultural denial, I analyse the shifting media discourses about Westray and study how "regimes of truth" were produced and reproduced. I argue that news production was a contested site of cultural production (Ewick and Silbey 1995: 206-209). On the one hand, the press constituted Westray within several media frames, and news development evinced a plurality of messages at odds with preferred readings of the powerful. On the other hand, the press closed off a discourse of political economy and imagined crime from their reporting, even though there was ample evidence of criminal conduct involving manslaughter for failing to keep coal dust in the mine in check and negligence in operating an unsafe mine: inadequate equipment, poorly trained employees, no proper methane-control or stone-dusting plans, and tampering with the mine's design without proper approval.

In what follows, I first discuss the relationship between truth, power, and representation in the news-making process; second, I outline the methodology of the study; third, I describe the findings of the research - the discursive connotations, absences, and registrations of news-truth; and, finally, I analyse the transformation of truth regimes and draw out the implications of the print media on witnessing and accounting for Westray's "truth" and "justice" when corporate and state institutions stand accused.

Power, discourse, and news

It is important to consider the process of the production of truth and the exercise of power. Truth is a difficult concept. Its definition, identification, and verification are rarely uncomplicated and almost always implicated in complex political and communicative processes involving perception, representation, and interpretation (Arendt 1971, 1972; B. Williams 2002). Yet medical, legal, and media institutions all claim, at least in theory, to offer mechanisms and procedures by which "truth" can be evaluated, confirmed, or denied (Gilligan and Pratt 2004; Rotberg and Thompson 2000). But the evidence-bound character of these truth-seeking agencies is not separate from the political context of the production of truth. The balancing of personal rights and freedoms, the entanglements of complicated laws, and the forgetfulness of "official memories" expose the myth of any simple truth and confirm that establishing "the facts" is not without controversy. Indeed, truth construction is increasingly about manipulating information so as "to hide a presence from awareness" and avoid confronting "anomalous information" (Cohen 1993: 104).

The press functions as an important site for the production and dissemination of "truth." Mediated knowledge, whereby lived experience is transmitted to news narrative, is usually accomplished via routine electronic or print-based media systems and depends on a number of distinct but interrelated factors that are extrinsic to an event's seriousness: geopolitical interests, market needs, advertising policies, organizational budgets, access to and control of information sources, cultural priorities and newsworthiness, and dominant discourses that enable, guide, and sustain news coverage. On the one side are investments, markets, conglomerates, and monopolies; on the other side are lobby groups, political agendas, and the power to censure (Barak 1994, 2003; Herman and Chomsky 1988; Iyengar 1991; Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and Roberts 1978; McQuail 1992; Rock 1973; Surette 1998). Moreover, news making is also guided by intrinsic factors: editorial politics, story screening, the rhythms of the newsroom, the subculture of journalism, and cognitive conceptions of "audience interest" are all designed to shape the discursive content of the sayable. Reporters typically over-represent the harm and criminality of those most vulnerable to authoritative labelling (Chibnall 1977; Ericson, Baranek, and Chan 1989, 1991; Kappeler, Blumberg, and Potter 2000) and under-represent the harms caused by the powerful (Burns and Orrick 2002; Lofquist 1997; Lynch, Stretesky, and Hammond 2000; McMullan and Hinze 1999; Randall, Lee-Sammons, and Hagner 1988; Wright, Cullen, and Blankenship 1995). As Sandra Evans and Richard Lundman observed two decades ago, "newspapers protect corporate reputations by failing to provide frequent, prominent and criminally oriented coverage of common corporate crimes" (1983: 539). When business crime is reported, it tends to be concentrated in up-market newspapers or on specialist pages and to be framed in ways that demarcate it from "real" crime (Barak 1994, 2003; Tombs and Whyte 2001).

Notwithstanding the volume of potential stories, the diversity of media forms, and the number of presentational styles, the press remains rather conventional in its representation of the news (Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, and Sasson 1992; Reiner 2002).

The news media, as an institution of social control, reproduce order in the process of representing it (Ericson et al. 1991: 74). The rules for the production of statements emphasize importance (what the public must know), immediacy (the present), interest (audience support), personalities, (individuals), credibility (authoritative sources), sensationalism (binary categories), and recollection and retelling (Fleras and Lock Kunz 2001: 70; Tumber 1993). As Raymond Williams observes, the communicative relationship is about power, "that deep sense of priority and legitimacy which is assigned both authority and responsibility to certain public sources of news and interpretation" (1989: 117).

The "media beast," to borrow Cohen's (2001) phrase, proclaims and confers legitimacy on truth. "We are subjected to the production of truth through power and ... power never ceases its interrogation, its inquisition, its registration of truth; it institutionalizes, professionalizes and rewards its pursuit" (Foucault 1980a: 131). Like power, truth is a phenomenon that flows through the mechanisms, practices, and rituals through which it is deployed. As Foucault notes, there are four questions about truth telling that are of vital importance: "who is able to tell the truth, about what, with what consequences, and with what relation to power" (2001: 151). For the most part, the press is involved in the production of official discourses that form part of a society's "general politics of truth": the appropriate political technologies of truth discovery, the enunciations that a society deems acceptable or not, the mechanisms it uses to judge true and false statements, the sanctioning of statements, and the valorization of claim makers as truth sayers (Foucault 1980c: 137). Thus the news-production process is structurally and culturally loaded. As Morton Mintz notes of his years as a journalist, the "pro-corporate" tilt in newsrooms may be "conveyed by editors at a daily news conference by silence, or it may take the form of self-censorship" (1991: 9).

The authority of the press is not only institutional but extends to the...