Spot news
litigation and its claims that it is for government
alone to judge what information must remain
confi dential. An estimated 3m was spent by the
government on court proceedings.
This triumph for free speech was followed
by government measures to revise the Offi cial
Secrets Act in order to achieve the kind of
censorship which had been so conspicuously
rejected in the Lords’ judgment. See topic
guides under media: freedom, censorship;
media history; media: politics & econom-
ics.
Stages in audience fragmentation See audi-
ence: fragmentation.
Stakeholders A term used in public relations
(pr) practice to refer to those who have an inter-
est or stake in, and thus are likely to be aff ected
by, the activities and plans of an organization or
individual client. Stakeholders may not always
be aware of their potential involvement. Paul
Baines, John Egan and Frank Jefkins in Public
Relations: Contemporary Issues and Techniques
(Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 2004)
identify four categories of stakeholders, based
on their relative levels of power and interest as
regards a particular situation.
Firstly there are the ‘key players’ who have
considerable power to aff ect the activities of a
company or industry sector. Secondly, there are
stakeholders with low levels of power but a high
degree of interest in the situation, and who will
look to be kept informed of activities. Th en there
are those stakeholders with a high level of power
but a low degree of interest in activities, but
who should still receive a satisfactory amount
of information. Fourthly are those stakeholders
who have both low levels of power and inter-
est: consequently relatively less eff ort may be
expended to keep them informed.
A key media example of stakeholder infl uence
in practice is broadcasting regulation. ofcom,
the UK regulator of broadcasting, is required to
consult stakeholders in its formulation of policy
and is subject to pressure from agencies with
vested interests in broadcasting and advertising
(see product placement; sponsorship of
broadcast programmes (uk)). Thanks in
part to stakeholder influence, Ofcom opened
the doors of British broadcasting to product
placement in February 2011. See johnson and
scholes: stakeholder mapping; publics.
Stamp Duty A government tax on newspapers in
late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain,
with the express intention of controlling the
numbers of papers and access to them by the
general public. With news of the French Revolu-Spot news Term used to describe unexpected
or unplanned news events, such as natural
disasters, aircrashes, murders or assassinations,
often referred to as breaking news, and to be
distinguished from diary stories, which are
known well in advance and can be planned-for
by the newspaper, radio or TV news team – for
example news conferences, state visits, elections
or budgets. Th e running story is that which is
ongoing and may stretch over several days or
weeks, such as strikes, wars and famines; all
stories that transcend the newsday cycle.
Sputnik First artificial satellite launched into
space by the Russians in 1957. See satellite
transmission.
Spycatcher case A book by former British
Secret Service employee Peter Wright, first
published in the US in 1987 and banned from
publication in the UK, became the centre of the
most celebrated case of attempted government
censorship in the 1980s. Spycatcher: Th e Candid
Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer
(Viking/Penguin, 1987) was not dissimilar in its
revelations about the activities of MI5 to other
books that had been permitted to appear, but
Wright, having signed the official secrets
act (uk), was deemed to have breached confi -
dence and arguably set a precedent for other
secret agents to ‘spill the beans’ on security.
Th e Conservative government was determined
not only to prevent publication of Spycatcher in
the UK, but also to block the intentions of news-
papers such as the Guardian, the Observer, the
Independent and the Sunday Times to publish
extracts from Wright’s book. At the same time,
government law officers pursued the book
across the world to the courts in Australia and
Hong Kong, stirring publicity and interest that
made it a worldwide bestseller. Only the British
people were to remain in the dark about Wright’s
revelations.
Th e government did not prosecute under the
Offi cial Secrets Act but pushed their case on the
grounds of confi dentiality; that members of the
Secret Service, having sworn never to divulge
information about their work, must in law be
held forever to that allegiance. Eventually the Law
Lords deliberated on the saga of Spycatcher and
in October 1988 rejected government demands
for a blanket injunction against the publishing in
the UK of extracts from Wright’s book.
‘In a free society’, said Lord Goff , one of the
five Law Lords, ‘there is a continuing public
interest that the workings of government should
be open to scrutiny and criticism.’ The Law
Lords attacked the government’s conduct of the