Abstract

In recent years, scholars such as Gavin Shaffer and Sarita Malik have begun to examine the role of television in the development of public attitudes towards post-war immigration. Their work has expanded our understanding of the development of race relations in post-war Britain, but has tended to focus on national media, ignoring the impact of regional television news in this process.
This paper will examine the representation of race and immigration on ATV Today, broadcast by ITV’s regional Midlands channel throughout the period. I will examine three case studies: the 1964 general election in Smethwick, the 1974 Leicester Imperial Typewriter Strike, and the 1967 Wolverhampton turban dispute. In doing so, I will demonstrate how local news played a key role in the formation of attitudes towards race and immigration within local communities, through its framing of race and immigration and focus on local issues, which viewers were able to identify more closely with than national news programming.

By investigating the media’s influence at a local level, we can gain a greater understanding of the development of racial prejudice in British communities and add depth to existing scholarship on post-war immigration.