The gloss placed upon the 'Three Wise Men' Report by the DES press release which accompanied it was picked up by the mass media which, on the whole, accepted the DES interpretation of the Report as rejecting all aspects of progressivism out of hand. Alexander was so concerned about the way the Report was publicly interpreted that he went so far as to write a rebuttal of this interpretation (Alexander 1992b). Like education policy, educational research reports are not received in a vacuum but in a context highly charged with competing interests and value systems.