Analyses of the relationship between the news media and national identity often tend to focus on explicit, stereotypical representations of nationalism in news coverage of appropriate subjects such as international politics, sport and war. However, there is a danger that the news media's role in the everyday reproduction of national identity through coverage of less obvious issues can be overlooked. This article is based on textual analysis of a specific case study: representations of the nation in British press coverage of the crisis over `mad cow disease' in March 1996. It concludes that whereas images and symbols of explicit nationalism were indeed present, what was more significant was the role of the news media in encouraging commonsense identification with the nation.

This article examines the ideological assumptions and consequences of the media representation of public opinion through a study of television news coverage of the 2001 British general election. It discusses how a certain type of poll (the voting intention or ‘horse-race’ poll) is privileged, while other types of opinion surveys are ignored. But it also identifies less obvious means through which public opinion is invoked. First, casual and often unsubstantiated assertions about the attitude of the public are regularly made by anchors, reporters or politicians. Second, the views of individual members of the public are made to stand in for public opinion overall, either through vox pops or through the interaction of members of the public with politicians on the campaign trail. The article concludes that the consequence of the media representation of public opinion in the 2001 British general election campaign is to legitimize the hegemonic definition of politics as a sport played by political and media elites, thus reducing citizens to the limited and passive role of spectators.

Lm us ASSUME an election in which every seat is contested by a candidate from each of two major parties, L and N. Suppose that by securing a given proportion (f) of the total vote (V) cast for L and N candidates, L would win x seats of mean size P (i.e. in seats won by L, the total of L and N votes =Px), while with the same proportion of the total vote, N would win y seats of mean size Q (i.e. in seats won by N, the total of L and N votes = Qy). Suppose further that off V votes cast for L, the proportion 1 would be cast in seats won by L, while at the same time, of the (1 -f )V votes cast for N, the proportion u would be cast in seats won by N. Conversely, of f V votes cast for N, the proportion n would be in seats won by N, while of the (1 -f )V votes cast for L the proportion h would be in seats won by L. The two situations may be represented in tabular form thus: Situation 1Votes for(1 -f )V Situation 2

are to be congratulated on developing yet further the analysis of the relation of seats to votes.1 They note in passing, quite correctly, that in an earlier article on this themes I failed to consider the possibility of isolating and measuring the electoral distortion attributable to inequalities in size of constituencies (the "rotten borough" effect), and to the differential concentration of party voters (the "gerrymander" effect). By coincidence, or trans-Tasman telepathy, this problem had occurred to me shortly before the Soper-Rydon analysis appeared ; since the technique I evolved for dealing with it differs in some respects from theirs, a brief exposition may be of interest.Let us assume an election in which every seat is contested by two major parties, L and N. Suppose, for a given percentage of the (L+N) vote, L would win a total of x seats of mean size P, while with the same percentage N would winy seats of mean size Q. The electoral bias in favour of L is then the difference between the number L actually wins and an even division of the seats, i.e.

A method for assessing schools' performance in relation to socioeconomic indicators of their location is described. A substantial proportion of the variance in General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) results is accounted for by indicators such as the percentage of owner-occupied houses in the area around the school. The addition of car ownership, unemployment, and overcrowding to give a composite normalised score known as the Townsend Index accounted for more than half the variance in the GCSE results of two West Midlands local education authorities (LEAs). The results are critically discussed.