Over this past year, I’ve spent an enormous amount of time engaging with
the issues raised by the Communications Bill, now making its way through
Parliament and likely to receive Royal Assent in July. One of the things that
has concerned me, perhaps more than any other single issue, is that the
agenda of so-called economic liberalism which governs so much of the
Government’s approach to the Bill is likely to have serious if unintended
consequences for the plurality and diversity of UK media, and therefore for
the quality of British journalism.
Watching the recent television coverage of the war, I was forcefully reminded of just why I have become so anxious to ensure that the principles of plurality and diversity are enshrined at the heart of media regulation in this country. With respect to broadcasters it would be nice to think that a commitment to accuracy and impartiality might also survive as something more than the memory of a bygone and better age. “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was a war fought live on television; the propaganda war was largely fought through television. In fact, it’s probably something of a paradigm for the way mainstream television journalism will increasingly operate in the modern era. It exemplified the manner in which a combination of technology, a culture of instant gratification and the commercial fragmentation of the media have conspired to shape television news in modern times.
The videophone, the digital camera, and the satellites off which their images bounce are the technological innovations that make the capture and delivery of news possible. The increasing primacy of a culture in which anything that is not instant is all but irrelevant is what has shaped it; and the fragmentation of the media into hundreds of different channels, all competing for audience share, is what drives it. But the issues raised by the coverage go far beyond television news. They extend to significantly larger questions about the purpose and limits of media regulation in a multimedia age.
The war highlighted a number of developments in news coverage that we should regard with a certain amount of unease because they raise genuinely serious questions. The first and most significant is the erosion of traditional standards of impartiality. This was most evident, of course, in the way Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News reported the war. Its shamelessly biased coverage seemed to use patriotism as the opiate that lulled the audience into assent and compliance. The extravagance of the cheerleading for “our heroes” was matched only by the contempt shown for the perfidious French and Germans. Fox’s motto is “Fair and Balanced”, but its war coverage demonstrated the extent to which a growing element of the media has abandoned any ambition for impartiality.
Hardly surprising, then, that Americans say they have far less trust in the news than they used to; even CNN, which offers relatively balanced coverage, only manages to persuade four out of ten Americans that they can believe most, let alone all, of what it screens. This partiality was exacerbated by the way in which the military “managed” much of the coverage. The embedding of journalists with the coalition forces seemed in principle to be a means of opening up reporting from the front line. In practice, it often meant that the military increased its control of the coverage, since it radically reduced freedom of movement. Journalistic independence was inevitably constrained and compromised. Equally, the correspondents in Qatar were prisoners of an environment in which the flow of information was managed in such a way that the briefings became little more than anodyne televised news releases.
The second development that concerns me is that instant coverage does not deliver instant truth. Seemingly every hour, one or other of the news channels would break into its programmes with a report – “Saddam believed dead”, “bio-weapons found”, or “uprising in Basra”, most of which subsequently proved to be false or at best, unverifiable. Rolling news is so hungry for new stories that it has absolutely no interest in correcting old ones.
Journalistic half-truths and non-truths have always been with us, and probably always will be. But what is new, and a direct consequence of the creation of the 24-hour rolling news channels (aided and abetted by the Internet) is the sheer speed at which news – including those half-truths – is carried across the world. And unlike newspapers, which do, with varying degrees of regularity, publish corrections and clarifications, in the world of 24 hour news the concept of mea culpa seems all but unknown. I worry about that; it’s certainly not a great way to develop an ethos of responsibility.
This compulsive pressure to be first, to be ahead of competing channels, inevitably exacerbates the process by which gossip and rumour are palmed off as “truth”. In the world of “Breaking News” and “News Alerts”, the traditional discipline of assessing sources and checking facts increasingly seems all but non-existent. When I worked in advertising, we had a saying: “Do you want it quick or do you want it good?” It seems that many television news channels have accepted the need to sacrifice the good for the quick. Speed is all. And despite, or rather because of, the overload of information, we end up knowing not more, but less. In fact, less and less.
The third innovation that troubles me is the manner in which news is increasingly packaged as entertainment. Fox’s coverage was itself entitled “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, echoing the U.S. administration, but also contributing to the impression that we were watching something closer to a reality TV show. The graphics, captions and theme tunes, and most of all the pacing, all served to drag news closer to the “entertainment” genre – even with human lives at stake.
I find all of these to be desperately worrying developments, most especially when you consider the power and reach of television. Television is the main source of world news for nearly 80 per cent of the UK population, as compared with newspapers, which are the main source for only 9 per cent. In the words of the Independent Television Commission: “It is the only news medium presently capable of reaching across the whole of British society.” But the way in which rolling news is changing the face of television journalism poses serious questions for the public interest. The refusal to interrogate and contextualise events, thoughtfully, as they happen, combined with the erosion of impartiality in the name of politicised agendas can only be very unhealthy.
As a former film producer, I’m only too aware of how easily visual images can be manipulated to serve particular ends. I’ve remained profoundly conscious that the responsibility for creating moving images for television or the cinema is becoming, if anything, ever more potent – you really are tinkering around in people’s minds, imprinting emotions, messages and ideas which may influence them for the rest of their lives. An influence which, in my experience, film makers simultaneously yearn for, but are for the most part, terrified of acknowledging.
This present Communications Bill states that the Government’s objective is to make “high quality, impartial news available to all viewers”, and the terrestrial broadcasters are required to provide “high quality domestic and international news at intervals throughout the day and in peak viewing hours”. For the moment, Sky would appear to be willingly bound by the same impartiality rules. But already the proprietor is champing at the bit to create a station that is the UK mirror image of Fox. He recently referred to Sky News as “BBC Lite” and bemoaned the fact that it consisted entirely of rolling news, leaving no room for more polemical talk shows.
But a number of UK television executives have also recently been arguing for a relaxation of the impartiality rules, with even the BBC weighing in. “Setting some of the broadcasters free would encourage new voices and new perspectives, and it would offer real choice to consumers,” said Roger Mosey, head of television news at the BBC, in a recent Guardian article. I fundamentally disagree. The idea that loosening regulation would enhance diversity is, I believe, a fool’s bargain. In practice, it’s likely that one very well-funded partisan voice, probably a deviant version of Sky News, would drown out most of the others.
Should News Corp or any of its associates, under the proposed provision, acquire, say, 35 per cent of Channel Five, their capacity to “crosspromote” that channel, using their dominant satellite position and their newspaper holdings, would be entirely without precedent. The bleat that Five has only 6.4 per cent of the market would very quickly become history as the new, heavily promoted, “Super Soaraway Five” dug deep into the market share of ITV and Channel 4. It is for this reason I have opposed every provision in the Bill that would allow Channel Five, or any terrestrial channel, to be wholly or partially owned by any large newspaper group.
I believe that a successful media environment tends not to happen by accident, and when it does occur it can, and to my mind absolutely should, be supported by thoughtful and sensitive regulation. What is certain is that plurality and diversity are not, and never can be, a natural by-product of unregulated market forces. The competitive diversity engendered by new technology ought, in an intelligently regulated democracy, to be very welcome. It should result in a broadening of the lens through which we see the world, not a narrowing of it.
The coverage of the war in Iraq has provided a salient view of how badly we need to protect our own broadcasting standards, and it happens to have occurred at a critical time in the debate about Britain’s overall media ecology. It is vital that public service broadcasting continues to be a repository of journalistic independence, of contextual analysis, of persistence and editorial patience. The gold standard against which all other news providers are forced to judge themselves. That, in turn, requires a regulatory framework which encourages, in fact enables, public service broadcasting to flourish. Sadly we cannot legislate for good journalism, but we can legislate for the conditions under which the very best journalism is nurtured and sustained. We can create frameworks in which each new technology becomes a spur for diversity, not an instrument of its erosion.
Those who have been championing economic liberalism as the way forward for the UK communications industry should heed the lessons that rolling news coverage offers. For I believe that the developments we are witnessing today are, in many ways, a corollary of the wholesale deregulation of the broadcast media in the United States during the 1980s. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, the United States broadcast media have not always operated in an environment unfettered by regulation. During the 1960s and 70s a series of measures were passed on cross-media ownership which were designed to ensure diversity, including a 1975 measure banning ownership of a radio station and a television station in the same market. As a consequence, Rupert Murdoch was obliged to sell his local television interests when he sought to build Fox into a fourth network.
But the impact of the politicisation of television news extends far beyond the small screen. It has very significant consequences for media ownership itself. Murdoch is finally within striking distance of achieving his dream of acquiring control of Hughes Electronics and its subsidiary, U.S. satellite broadcaster DirecTV. It would be the crowning deal of his career and complete his dream of establishing a global pay-TV network – U.S. anti-trust regulators permitting.
There are many who believe that the pro-administration coverage of the war was largely designed to help oil the wheels, ensuring that the transaction did not run into any difficulties with the regulators. A Murdoch biographer, Neil Chenoweth, recently quoted a U.S. media executive who noted: “It’s going to be a walkover for Murdoch in Washington. They’re not going to have any anti-trust problems at all. They’re talking about pushing it through the FCC and the Justice Department in just six months. The war coverage has become a litmus test for media ownership.”
As a result, you find eminent figures such as Barry Diller, who was responsible for the successful creation of Fox Broadcasting, arguing that deregulatory excesses have resulted in serious detriment to the public interest. In a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters he recently argued that the dismantling of the regulatory safeguards governing the U.S. media have been subject to the law of “unintended consequences”, and that the U.S. administration has inadvertently achieved the exact opposite of what it was trying to do, namely encourage a plurality of voices and the entrant of new entrepreneurial and creative talent by creating genuine competition.
“Five corporations, with their broadcast and cable networks, are now on the verge of controlling the same number of households as did the Big Three 40 years ago,” said Diller. “We didn’t think that was such a healthy situation back then, but back then there was real, scary regulation – they may have controlled 90 per cent of what people saw, but they operated with a sense of public responsibility that simply doesn’t exist for these vertically integrated giant media conglomerates, driven only to fit the next piece into their puzzle for world media dominance.”
I also believe there is a serious danger that over the next few years the law of unintended consequences will make itself felt, in the same inexorable way, in the UK. The Government has stated in the Communications Bill that “it is essential to retain sufficient safeguards to secure a plurality of voice and a diversity of services across our media,” and that “public service broadcasting has as secure a place in the broadcasting ecology of the future as it had in the past”. While I accept that this is their intention, I do not for one moment believe those objectives can be achieved by giving equal weight to the imperatives of the citizen and the market.
As I said in the House of Lords on 29 April, when the public interest finds itself, even marginally, at variance or in conflict with the workings of the marketplace, the public interest test must be judged not as co-equal, but as being of paramount importance. For in the end, the achievement of “plurality and diversity” is not just merely the aim of this particular Government; it must be a core ambition of any plural democracy. The paradox persists. We have never enjoyed a technological environment that promised so much, yet a combination of a seemingly declining professional ethos, and managers who believe themselves to be primarily in the business of “buying eyeballs”, is driving us towards mediocrity. Sadly our democratic institutions appear to have neither the will nor the imagination to influence any visible corrective.
Lord Puttnam sits as a Labour Peer and was chairman of the Joint Scrutiny
Committee on the Communications Bill.