Greg Philo

Last updated
Greg Philo
Born30 June 1947
Bexleyheath, Kent (now a London borough)
Died23 May 2024 (aged 76)
Alma materBradford (Bachelor's) Glasgow (PhD)
Known forThe Glasgow Media Group
SpouseMay Menzies (m.1984 div. 2010) Yajun Deng (m. 2021)
Children4
Scientific career
Thesis [https://theses.gla.ac.uk/2501/1/1989philophd.pdf News Content and Audience Belief: A Case Study of the 1984/5 Miners Strike] (1989)

Gregory Philo (30 June 1947 - 23 May 2024) was an English sociologist, communications researcher, activist and author who was the Professor of Communications and Social Change in Sociology at The University of Glasgow and director and founding member of The Glasgow Media Group (GUMG). [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Philo was born in Bexleyheath to Irene (née Campbell) who was a telephone operator and Thomas Philo a shipyard manager. He attended St Mary's Roman Catholic grammar school in Sidcup. Philo then went on to study sociology at Bradford University. There he co-founded the General Will theatre group. He graduated in 1970 and in 1972 then went to study at The University of Glasgow. In 1980 he became the GUMG research director and in 1990 was appointed professor and stayed there until his retirement in 2021. [1]

Career

The original goal of the project was to "record and analyse the daily news bulletins across the three main channels, empirically demonstrating the extent of bias and distortion in the reporting of economic and industrial news." Philo later became the leading spokesperson for the group in 1990 and started to develop the groups content analysis methods, further assisting in the sociological media research of subjects such as: The Falklands War and Media Power in The UK. [1]

After the group received funding from the Social Science Research Council (UK), the group started analysing TV news reporting using new video recording technology. The research was published as Bad News which stated that TV in the UK was not politically neutral, but rather reflected powerful groups in society. [2] The book was badly received by large news organisations such as The BBC, with many groups condemning it as a purely Marxist work. This was later overturned though with the BBC's John Wilson stating "it was necessary to be honest and admit that there was something in what the GUMG was saying" [2] at which point the BBC attempted to institute some changes that came from the report.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Glasgow</span> Public university in Scotland

The University of Glasgow is a public research university in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded by papal bull in 1451 [O.S. 1450], it is the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world and one of Scotland's four ancient universities. Along with the universities of St Andrews, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh, the university was part of the Scottish Enlightenment during the 18th century. Glasgow is the largest university in Scotland by total enrolment and, with over 15,900 postgraduates, the fifth-largest in the United Kingdom by postgraduate enrolment.

Melvin Lawrence DeFleur was a professor and scholar in the field of communications. His initial field of study was social sciences.

Richard Sambrook is a British journalist, academic and a former BBC executive. He is Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. For 30 years, until February 2010, he was a BBC journalist and later, a news executive.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Greg Dyke</span> British media executive (born 1947)

Gregory Dyke is a British media executive, football administrator, journalist and broadcaster. Since the 1960s, Dyke has had a long career in the UK in print and then broadcast journalism. He is credited with introducing "tabloid" television to British broadcasting, and reviving the ratings of TV-am. In the 1990s, he held chief executive positions at LWT Group, Pearson Television, and Channel 5.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bernard Crick</span> British political theorist and democratic socialist (1929–2008)

Sir Bernard Rowland Crick was a British political theorist and democratic socialist whose views can be summarised as "politics is ethics done in public". He sought to arrive at a "politics of action", as opposed to a "politics of thought" or of ideology, and he held that "political power is power in the subjunctive mood." He was a leading critic of behaviouralism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barry Wellman</span> American sociologist (1942–2024)

Barry Wellman was an American-Canadian sociologist and was the co-director of the Toronto-based international NetLab Network. His areas of research were community sociology, the Internet, human-computer interaction and social structure, as manifested in social networks in communities and organizations. His overarching interest was in the paradigm shift from group-centered relations to networked individualism. He has written or co-authored more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books. Wellman was a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013, including a five-year stint as S.D. Clark Professor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adrian Monck</span> British journalist

Adrian Monck is the managing director, Head of Public And Social Engagement at the World Economic Forum and a former British journalism professor and writer on the media and current affairs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Craig Calhoun</span> American sociologist (born 1952)

Craig Jackson Calhoun is an American sociologist who currently serves as the University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. He is a strong advocate for applying social science to address issues of public concerns. Calhoun served as the Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) from September 2012 until September 2016 and continues to hold the title of Centennial Professor of Sociology at LSE.

Georgina Emma Mary Born, is a British academic, anthropologist, musicologist and musician. As a musician she is known as Georgie Born and for her work in Henry Cow and with Lindsay Cooper.

The Levada Center is a Russian independent, nongovernmental polling and sociological research organization. It is named after its founder, the first Russian professor of sociology Yuri Levada (1930–2006). The center traces back its history to 1987 when the All-Union Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) was founded under the leadership of academician Tatyana Zaslavskaya. As one of Russia's largest research companies, the Levada Center regularly conducts its own and commissioned polling and marketing research. In 2016, it was labelled a foreign agent under the 2012 Russian foreign agent law.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Rose (political scientist)</span> American political scientist (born 1933)

Richard Rose is a political scientist, author, and academic whose comparative studies in social science have significantly influenced political science and public policy in both practice and theory. He is a Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Public Policy at the University of Strathclyde (UOS) in Scotland, and is a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre of the European University Institute and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

The Glasgow Media Group, is a group of researchers formed at the University of Glasgow in 1974, which pioneered the analysis of television news in a series of studies. Operating under the GUMG banner, academics including its founders Brian Winston, Greg Philo and John Eldridge have consistently postulated that television news is biased in favour of powerful forces such as governments, transnational corporations and the rich over issues like climate change, conflicts such as Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, welfare benefits, economics and refugees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Faculty of Human, Social, and Political Science, University of Cambridge</span> University faculty in England

The Faculty of Human, Social, and Political Science at the University of Cambridge was created in 2011 out of a merger of the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Faculty of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies. According to the Cambridge HSPS website: graduates pursue careers in "research, the Civil Service, journalism, management consultancy, museums, conservation and heritage management, national and international NGOs and development agencies, the Law, teaching, publishing, health management, and public relations."

Beverley Skeggs is a British sociologist, noted as one of the foremost feminist sociologists in the world. Currently, she works as a "Distinguished Professor" in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University, developing a Center for Social Inequalities in the North West of England. She continues to run the "Economics of Care" theme at the International Inequalities centre at the London School of Economics (LSE) and is a visiting professor at Goldsmiths University. She has been the head of two of the UK's leading Sociology Departments, at the University of Manchester and Goldsmiths, as well as co-director of Lancaster's Women's Studies. In addition, she played a part in transforming Britain's oldest sociology journal, The Sociological Review, into an independent foundation devoted to opening up critical social science and supporting social scientists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Curtice</span> British political scientist (born 1953)

Sir John Kevin Curtice is a British political scientist and professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research. He is particularly interested in electoral behaviour and researching political and social attitudes. He took a keen interest in the debate about Scottish independence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">1988–1994 British broadcasting voice restrictions</span> Partial ban on voices of specific speakers

From October 1988 to September 1994 the British government banned broadcasts of the voices of representatives from Sinn Féin and several Irish republican and loyalist groups on television and radio in the United Kingdom (UK). The restrictions, announced by the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, on 19 October 1988, covered eleven organisations based in Northern Ireland. The ban followed a heightened period of violence in the course of the Troubles, and reflected the UK government's belief in a need to prevent Sinn Féin from using the media for political advantage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sally Macintyre</span> British sociologist

Dame Sarah Jane Macintyre, known as Sally Macintyre, is a British medical sociologist. She is a professor emerita at the University of Glasgow.

David Miller is a British sociologist whose research and publications focus on Islamophobia and propaganda. Miller was Professor of Sociology at the University of Strathclyde (2004–2011) and the University of Bath (2011–2018) and was Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol (2018–2021). He is the co-founder and co-director of the non-profit company Public Interest Investigations (PII).

Jason Arday FRSA is a British sociologist, writer and fundraiser. His research interests and publications include education, social mobility, mental health and race. In March 2023, he began an appointment as Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK, becoming the youngest black person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge. He had previously been a Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Glasgow in the College of Social Sciences, and before that Associate Professor of Sociology and Deputy Executive Dean of People and Culture in the Faculty of Social Science and Health at the University of Durham, as well as visiting professor at Nelson Mandela University in the Centre for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation, South Africa. He is an Honorary Doctor of Education at Anglia Ruskin University.

Emma L. Briant is a British scholar and academic researcher on media, contemporary propaganda, surveillance and information warfare who was involved in exposing the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal concerning data misuse and disinformation. She became Associate Professor of News and Political Communication at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia in 2023. Before this she was an associate researcher at Bard College and taught in the School of Communication at American University. Briant became an honorary associate in Cambridge University Center for Financial Reporting & Accountability, headed by Alan Jagolinzer, and joined Central European University, as a Fellow in the Center for Media, Data and Society in 2022.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Professor Greg Philo Obituary". www.gla.ac.uk. Retrieved 2024-10-30.
  2. 1 2 "Greg Philo Showed Us How Broadcast Media Really Works". jacobin.com. Retrieved 2024-10-31.