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Academics at the fore of hacking debate

This article is more than 12 years old

Professor Robert Giddings claims "not a single media academic from one of our prestigious media schools has appeared in the news and current affairs coverage of Murdochgate" (Letters, 1 August); this is simply not the case. The originator of the Hacked Off campaign is a professor of journalism at Kingston and has written widely about the scandal, including in the Independent; on the campaign's launch day a colleague at Kent was interviewed eight times, and I've been interviewed from Brussels to Buenos Aires. These experiences are by no means atypical.

Perhaps Professor Giddings means that media studies academics haven't been particularly visible in the mainstream media; if this is the case, it could well be because these are generally ill-disposed to academics who have been consistently critical of them. However, the almost daily analyses of the scandal by journalists such as Roy Greenslade draw on a long tradition of critical academic study of the British media, and it is gratifying to see the speed at which ideas once dismissed as little more than sub-Marxist conspiracy theorising (for example, about the evils of market-driven journalism, the unaccountable power of media barons, and politicians' subservience to or complicity with them) have suddenly become common currency among the more informed sections of the media.

Furthermore, media academics are all over non-mainstream media, such as the Open Democracy website, and are heavily involved in campaigning groups such as the Media Standards Trust. Currently they're working flat-out with each other, with NGOs and with anybody else who's interested to co-ordinate responses not just to the Leveson inquiry but also to the current communications review, whose commitment to yet more "deregulation" threatens to re-create British broadcasting in the image of the press – at the very moment at which this particular emperor has been revealed to be stark naked.

Julian Petley

Professor of screen media and journalism, Brunel University

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