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 Corporations story, The BBC Under Siege, taking Lord Asa Briggs 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 OClock News, the Proms, the early music revolution, devolution, Dennis Potters greatest plays, Attenboroughs great series, and Radio 1s 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.
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 Blackwells, 1998, and with John Lloyd of the Financial Times, What Can be Done? Making the Media and Politics Better, 2006, Blackwells.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 Blairs 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 BBCs 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.
