LAUSR

mainstream media are not systematically discussed. Hill’s excellent point about the “dramatization of science” (99) is not fully elaborated—we only hear about the ways in which the interests of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the BBC on educating the public converged. More generally, the book seems unable to decide whether it wants to focus on the analysis of the media’s coverage of political representation or on a study of activism in the context of media reporting. Thus, the anti-nuclear-weapons movements’ “regimes of representation” appear as attempts “to window dress the movement” but were “largely unenforceable” (125). On other occasions, Hill evaluates media reports against what he makes out to be the reality on the ground, a reality the study is unable to cover fully because of its chosen focus on media as opposed to movement sources. And is it even meaningful to measure the media against “how it really was” (Leopold von Ranke) or is it not, as Hill seems to suggest elsewhere in the book, more productive to analyze the mass media’s framing of things as partly constitutive of experienced reality? Because of this methodological ambivalence, the specific nature of democracy and political representation, and how these were challenged and transformed by mediated movement activism in the 1950s and 1960s, remain a bit vague. Hill is right in arguing that the debates had the potential to shake the legitimacy of the British state at its foundation (77). But there is little sustained and systematic discussion about how this challenge played out, what ideas it brought to light, or the dynamics to which it gave rise. Ultimately, Hill’s book provides a careful rephrasing of earlier interpretations of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament—and even to some extent of the more radical Direct Action Committee and Committee of 100—as geared towards “a constructive engagement with news frames and values” (246). By contrast, Hill argues that the protests around 1968 were “antagonistic” and revolved around “issues that were personal and social,” leading to a rise of “identity politics,” thus undermining “the single issue movement as a form of mass mobilization in Cold War Britain” (246). Overall, then, readers who had expected to find an analysis of “the movement and media as interacting systems,” to use Bill Gamson and Gadi Wolfsfeld’s phrase, could therefore be disappointed. Hill argues that there is a “connectedness of movements and the state” with the “mass media as intermediaries” (49), but this intriguing point is not really elaborated much throughout the study. Overall, though, these points for discussion only go to show that this study makes a significant contribution towards a fuller understanding of the relationship between the mass media and political representation in Cold War Britain.