The challenge in scrutinizing the press coverage of the probation service is not interpreting the message, but finding that coverage in the first place. While local authority social services staff appear to yearn for a media-free world, the probation service is trying to raise its profile in the news. The search for news media visibility is being pursued both nationally, through organizations like NAPO and the Association of Chief Officers of Probation (ACOP), and locally. By mid-1991 about a quarter of probation services had a full-time external/public relations officer; nearly all the remaining areas had an officer who had PR as a part of their responsibility.

None of the chapters in Franklin and Parton’s (1991) review of social work’s relations with the news media discuss the probation service. Articles about media relations in the probation press are rare. One of the few examples (Smyth 1990) is about promoting the Greater Manchester Service. It is written in a wry but cheerful tone very different from the social services equivalents. Is this because probation work is not social work? Not according to many in the service itself, who characterize its work precisely as social work within the criminal justice system, nor to a Daily Mail editorial (29 February 1992) which comments, with manifest distaste, that ‘four fifths of officers’ training is devoted to social work’.

Surely the probation service shares many of the characteristics used to explain the allegedly poor public image of social work felt so acutely by its practitioners? It often appears to take a radical stance, advocating both non-common-sense explanations of offending which challenge models of individual responsibility, and hare-brained non-punitive responses to offenders. (On 23 March 1992 Independent Television News described a two-year probation order as ‘going free’.) Nor is probation work a ‘traditional’ profession: it falls into that group, along with local authority social workers and teachers, whose clients are provided by the state

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