Truth, power and newsmaking : the public inquiry and the Westray disaster

Abstract

This thesis studies how the press constituted the Westray public inquiry as a discursive formation that defined what could and could not be said about Westray and its aftermath. I critically examine news narratives from the Chronicle Herald between December, 1995 to June, 1998 within a theoretical discussion of Michel Foucault's (1980; 1991; 1995) concept of the "politics of truth" and Stanley Cohen's notion of "the culture of denial" and "vocabularies of denial".

I argue that the press coverage of the public inquiry consisted of a number of distinct narratives that operated both intra discursively and inter discursively with news themes from previous reporting to form a distinct "regime of truth" about Westray. In the news coverage of the inquiry the politics of truth governing "the limits and forms of the sayable" were expanded which allowed previously subjugated accounts to be validated and valorized as truths. Narratives of legal accountability and defense were intersected with a vocabulary of moral opprobrium which included a minor but compelling law and order discourse and a discourse of socio-legal reform and prevention.

The "plasticity of law" allowed a multiplicity of new and conflicting accounts to be heard which, in turn, led the press to produce a more complex, conflictual and multifaceted "regime of truth" about Westray. This contrasts with the more uniform, congruent human interest and tragedy news themes that preceded it. But this also enabled corporate and state officials and politicians to play legalistic "games of truth" with the inquiry and the press. Through processes of registration and reinterpretation, claims and counter-claims, they deployed strategies of denial that diffused harm, evaded accountability and displaced blame onto subordinates and victims. But these accounts were posited on a shifting terrain of power/knowledge relations and rhetorics of denial were not posited without answer.