Jean Seaton
Professor of Media History
Email:j.seaton@wmin.ac.uk
Jean
is Professor of Media History and the Official Historian of the
BBC. She is writing the next volume of the Corporation’s story,
The BBC Under Siege, taking Lord Asa Brigg’s work forward
for Oxford University Press. This involves everything the BBC did
in a tumultuous decade – from the conflict in Northern Ireland, to
the invasion of the Falklands, to Not the Nine O’Clock News, the
Proms, the early music revolution, devolution, Dennis Potter’s
greatest plays, Attenborough’s great series, and Radio 1’s most
influential moment, as well as the role of women in the
Corporation, programmes for children and a tense and complicated
relationship with the government.
She has written widely on the history and role
of the media in politics, wars, atrocities, the Holocaust,
revolutions, security issues and religion as well as news and
journalism and is particularly interested in the impact of the
media on children. She has contributed to policy debates and
formulation especially concerning public service content and
freedom of speech.
Her
Carnage and the Media: the Making and Breaking of News about
Violence (Penguin) was published in 2005, and gives a,
perhaps unexpected, account of sensation in the reporting of news
about violence and audience reactions to it. While examining the
destructive power of contemporary media in attack mode, it also
shows how news paints stories in emotions and argues for the values
of stoic fortitude. It shows how news provides us with contemporary
ceremonies. It also contains a pictorial essay examining many
iconic images and their role in the news.
A new 7th edition of the classic book she
wrote with James Curran,
Power Without Responsibility: the Press and Broadcasting in
Britain will be published in 2008 containing new research
on the international role of the British media. This book, which
has both been translated into many other languages (including
Chinese, Portuguese and Arabic), and copied by other writers, in
other countries, has become a moving project, the book still aims
to change the media as well as describe them.
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Her concern with the impact of the media on politics has been
developed in a series of books, including Ed. (with Ben Pimlott)
The Media in British Politics, Gower, Aldershot,
1987, The
Media and Politics in Britain: Harlots and Prerogatives at the Turn
of the Millennium Blackwell’s, 1998, and with John Lloyd
of the Financial Times,
What Can be Done? Making the Media and Politics Better,
2006, Blackwell’s. |
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These include some of her political essays. Her interest in the
role of the media in conflict has been developed in Ed. (with
Tim Allen), War, Ethnicity and the Media, Development
Books, 1996, Ed. (with Tim Allen) The Media of
Conflict, Zed Books, 1998, a new updated edition of which
is being prepared. |
Her most recent essays include
‘Feral Beasts:
Tony Blair’s Reuters Speech on the Media’ in Political
Quarterly, December 2007, and a review of the BBC and OfCom
reports on news December 2007, as well as essays in
Global
Voice on the international role of the news March 2007,
and an essay on the BBC for OfCom, March 2008, and
Pragmatic
Ethical Engineering: the BBC and the BBC World Service in May
2008.
She is an editor of Political
Quarterly, on the editorial Boards of 20th Century British
History and Media
History. Recently she has received research awards from
the AHRC, the BBC, The British Academy, and the Axess Foundation.
She has chaired and served on a variety of public enquiries,
including recently the Broadcasting of Parliament and the use of
images of children for the Home Office.
She was awarded the ‘Thank-Offering to
Britain’ Fellowship for her work on the BBC and the Holocaust. She
speaks frequently at conferences and public meetings, has made a
series of programmes based on aspects of the BBC’s History, and
appears on a variety of television and radio programmes.
In 2007 she became Chair
of the Orwell Prize ( www.theorwellprize.co.uk ),
taking over from Sir Bernard Crick, and is chair of the judges of
the Guardian/Fabian
Ben Pimlott political history essay prize.
She supervises PhD students across a wide
range of political and cultural topics.
Areas of Expertise
Broadcasting history and policy: the media and atrocities;
children; revolution; ethnic conflict; politics and
politicians.