Monthly Archives: March 2014

Blog, Event

Upcoming event: Media Power & Plurality conference, 2 May 2014

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Policymakers throughout the world recognise the need to protect a diversity of voices and views in a democracy, but what does media plurality require in practice? How do you legislate to prevent undue concentration of media power? What interventions are needed to help new players flourish? How do you reconcile sustainable media businesses and a sufficiency of voices? How should policy approaches differ at national, regional and local level?

The government’s consultation last year focused on media measurement, but there are far broader policy issues at stake and possible lessons to be learned from other countries. This conference, in the wake of recommendations from the Leveson Inquiry and from the House of Lords Communications Committee, will explore UK policy on media ownership and diversity, as well as possible manifesto commitments in the forthcoming general election. Other panels, featuring a range of leading academic, industry and policy practitioners, will look at UK and European policy, options for local and hyperlocal initiatives, and the potential for “charitable journalism”.

The conference is organised by the University of Westminster’s AHRC-funded Media Power and Plurality research project and hosted by the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism at City University London (Room A130, College Building).

Tickets for this event are free and will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. Reserve your place here.

#mediaplurality14

Programme

8.45 – Registration

9.15 – Opening remarks

9.30 – Keynote

10am – Panel 1 – Priorities for national policy

11.30 – Coffee

11.45 – Panel 2 – Subsidies, non-profits and charity: ideas for regeneration

1pm – Lunch

2pm – Panel 3 – Local media plurality: is it all doom and gloom?

3.30 – Tea

3.45 – Panel 4 – What can the UK learn from other countries?

5.15 – Close / thanks

Blog, Comment, Guest post, Media plurality, Regional and local

Jonathan Hardy: London Live goes live – What about media plurality in UK’s capital?

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London’s new local television channel, London Live is due to launch this evening. Its owner also owns the city’s largest circulation local newspaper and two national newspapers. University of East London’s Jonathan Hardy discusses the implications for media plurality arguing that the key question is how the new service will be regulated. This post originally appeared on the LSE Media Policy Project blog.

What should supporters of media plurality make of the launch of London Live by the owner of the Evening Standard, The Independent and I? Having grown up in a time when ‘one owner, one outlet’ was a plausible, if never orthodox, proposal, the London Live launch might demonstrate how obsolescent that call sounds and how far media consolidation aids diversity. London is about to have a long-overdue television service that recruits talent from across one of the greatest cauldrons of creativity in the world.

Five bids were made and Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev’s Evening Standard Television (ESTV) won the licence. So should this have been refused in order to foster greater plurality of ownership, given that the wining bid comes from the company with the strongest print presence covering Greater London? Can advocates of plurality argue against a service that will increase plurality and might provide a channel for news and entertainment worthy of London? The licence, awarded for up to 12 years, requires at least four hours of ‘fresh’ news and 100 per cent ‘London-based content’. For me, the answer is not to argue against the service, but rather to argue that media plurality is about how the service is regulated.

Media plurality and what to do

Where there is not a diversity of media suppliers, for whatever reason, the issue for media plurality policy is what to do. How can greater plurality be achieved, either by means of the range of content and voices heard (internal plurality), by ensuring independent news values (impartiality), or by regulating how the service runs to prevent or restrict problems arising from ownership, control, commercial interests, advertisers and other influences.

London Live has been heavily trailed in the Evening Standard with daily page-long sections, plus other news stories, adverts and graphics to promote the launch. London Live will have news programmes hosted by the editor of The Independent and so visual branding and editorial promotion across the Independent’s media interests is likely to start strong and grow from there. The business case for such cross-promotion is overwhelming and axiomatic. Ofcom approved the Evening Standard’s ‘strong position to launch and maintain its proposed service, given its proposals for promoting and marketing the channel.’ Whether such cross-promotion is good for editorial coverage, for news quality and independence, for competitors, and for London viewers is to say the least uncertain.

Balancing creative industries and consumers

So what are the implications of London Live for the broader debate on media plurality policy now taking place?  The arrangement here, statutory licensing (following a competitive bid process), provides a comparatively straightforward mechanism through which to apply conditions, even if the actual licence requirements fall short as they do here. Yet the quandary of whether to allow a major media voice in London to extend further into television, underscores the call by the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom and others for new approaches.

We need arrangements to address media plurality that are broad and flexible enough to address changes in media markets, investor interest and commercial viability. The arrangements must serve the needs of our creative industries but balance this by safeguarding the interests of citizens and consumers.

Ofcom should have powers to take action when firms have a significant share or influence in markets. The threshold for plurality action will vary across markets but in general should apply when firms have a share of supply or revenue above 15 per cent. Where plurality concerns are moderate, enterprises should be expected to comply with relevant industry and regulatory standards. Where plurality concerns are more severe, Ofcom should have powers to enforce divestment of firms or undertakings made in lieu of divestment. Such undertakings will include remedies to strengthen and safeguard plurality and accountability by enterprises. Licences for new services should only favour firms already dominant in markets when safeguards for plurality are secured.

Going beyond the boundaries of a single corporate vision 

For London Live that should mean that the service is obliged to demonstrate that editorial content and agendas are not unduly skewed to promote the corporate media and business interests of the commercial firm providing the service. There should also be action to strengthen ‘internal pluralism’ so that different media content producers have access to the London audience. When cable TV services were introduced in the early 1980s the licence agreements required that space was granted to smaller independent and community-based video producers. While such requirements were as short-lived as the soon closed or consolidated cable licensees does not detract from their merit.

In the digital age it is sobering how little material from beyond the established commercial or public service providers gets any airing across multichannel television. A channel that could combine the undoubted strengths of a cross-media business operation, with public regulation that protected against those intra-corporate entanglements, and expanded the range of voices and suppliers beyond the boundaries of a single corporate vision, would be a precious and fitting contributor to media plurality in the media city of London.

Dr Jonathan Hardy is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies and  Programme Leader for BA Media Studies at the University of East London.

This article gives the views of the author/s, and does not necessarily represent the position of the Media Power and Plurality Project. We welcome further views and contributions to the media plurality policy debate: please contact j.townend@westminster.ac.uk if you would like to contribute.

Blog, Submissions

Academics to give evidence to CMS select committee on future of the BBC on 1 April, 10.30am

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Professor Steven Barnett and other academic specialists will give evidence tomorrow to the Culture Media and Sport select committee inquiry into the future of the BBC. Steven Barnett’s written evidence can be found here [PDF].

Information about the session at 10.30 on 1 April can be found here and will be available to watch on Parliament TV. The other witnesses include Professor Patrick Barwise, Emeritus Professor of Management and Marketing, London Business School; Professor Charlie Beckett, Department for Media and Communications, LSE; and Lis Howell, Deputy Head of the Journalism Department, City University.

Blog, Comment, Guest post, International

Benedetta Brevini: Australia swims against the tide of democratic media reform

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By Benedetta Brevini, University of Sydney

This article was first published on the Conversation.

That media ownership rules have been progressively relaxed in many democracies is certainly not news. But that Australia, with one of the most concentrated media markets in the world, is thinking of further deregulation is astonishing.

Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull has suggested that he would like to relax the Keating-era cross-media ownership rules. These prevent any one proprietor from owning print, radio and television outlets in a single market.

Turnbull is also inclined to eliminate the rule that prevents a person controlling commercial television licences that reach more than 75% of the population. In his own words:

…the arrival of the internet and the additional diversity and avenues for competition that it brings really says we should have less regulation and more freedom.

This is the usual neo-liberal argument that the internet will set us free: it is giving us more news to consume, more diversity, more happiness.

“I see a new Athenian Age of democracy forged in the fora the Global Information Infrastructure will create,” Al Gore proclaimed in 1994. Since then, the contention that the internet will disrupt power structures and neutralise traditional gatekeepers has become popular in the new left.

In the UK, for example, the Labour government relaxed media ownership rules in 2003. It explained that “technological development had opened the way for new market entrants”. Well, it did, but only partially.

Old players dominate online

Recent studies show the internet is used primarily for entertainment rather than for news and political information. The most-visited news websites in Europe, Britain, the US and Australia are the websites of the dominant national news organisations.

According to Nielsen Online Ratings, News Corp’s news.com.au topped the Australian rankings in January with an audience of 2.767 million, followed by Fairfax’s smh.com.au and the Microsoft-Nine Entertainment Company’s co-owned site NineMSN. These represent established media institutions rather than new market entrants.

What is even more interesting is that while newspapers are facing an unprecedented decline in revenues, they are also reaching record numbers of readers because of their online editions. This translates into more hegemonic power in the hands of the same few powerful media owners.

At the same time, leading social media and search engines are acting as megaphones of the prevailing elites’ media agenda. This further impairs a variety of viewpoints.

It is this lack of diversity of voices that should worry Turnbull. Excessively concentrated media power does not just entail unchecked ties between political and media elites, as the UK phone-hacking saga demonstrated. This was one of the most remarkable examples of how such dominant media power can undermine the proper conduct of democracy.

The exercise of such power also entails the establishment of a system of control that does not allow space for dissent, for resistance, for minority voices. In other words, media concentration undermines democracy.

To echo prominent US academics Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their analysis of the news media, Manufacturing Consent:

If … the powerful are able to fix the premises of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see, hear and think about, and to ‘manage’ public opinion by regular propaganda campaigns, the standard [liberal-pluralist] view of how the media system works is at serious odds with reality.

The push for pluralism

Turnbull’s statements are at odds with calls from European media and civil society organisations that are promoting the European Initiative for Media Pluralism. The aim is to secure a European Union directive on national media ownership to avoid concentration in the media and advertising sectors.

This campaign is in line with the promotion of media pluralism by UNESCO and the Council of Europe. In 2005, UNESCO adopted the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. In 2007, the Council of Europe affirmed that:

…media pluralism and diversity of media content are essential for the functioning of a democratic society and are the corollaries of the fundamental right to freedom of expression and information.

The council specifically demanded legislation to limit:

…the influence which a single person, company or group may have in one or more media sectors as well as ensuring a sufficient number of diverse media outlets.

These international organisations have indicated resolutely the direction that media reforms should take. The Australian government should follow this course without delay.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Blog

Can charity save the local press?

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In a new article in the British Journalism Review, freely available here, Roy Greenslade and Steven Barnett look at the story of Baylis Media, a family-owned local newspaper group owned by a trust. In their view, the Baylis model raises interesting questions for journalism’s charitable status and its rootedness in local community.

They suggest that hyperlocal and community sites have a potential role to play in reinvigorating both local media and local democracy* and assess the scope for allowing more journalism enterprises to become charities, and securing both the reputational and financial benefits that go with charitable status.

While there are obstacles in existing charity law, they conclude that “the defining step which Louis Baylis took in 1962 might – albeit over 50 years later – presage a new wave of journalism enterprises which are just as independent, just as dedicated to serving the local community, and maybe just as long-lived“.

Read full article here

Suggested citation: Greenslade, R., Barnett, S., 2014. Can charity save the local press? British Journalism Review 25, 62–67. doi:10.1177/0956474814526519
*Based on research conducted by this project in collaboration with Cardiff and Birmingham City universities.

 

European policy, Guest post, Media plurality

Des Freedman: When are we going to do something about media power?

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This is a guest post by Des Freedman, which originally appeared on the UK Coalition for Media Pluralism site.

Media moguls are losing their power. At least that is what Rupert Murdoch thinks. As he tweeted back in 2012, during a discussion about a possible bid for the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, ‘haven’t you heard of the Internet? No one controls the media or will ever again’.

This is an impressively modest claim for a man whose media interests include Britain’s largest broadcaster, BSkyB, Britain’s best-selling newspaper, Britain’s top commercial radio news wholesaler and a slew of major media companies across the world. The idea that the media is now an anarchic field of competing voices may, after all, seem rather counter-intuitive given the fact that a mere three companies control some 70% of daily national newspaper circulation and that four public service broadcasters (BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5) continue to account for nearly three-quarters of total TV viewing in the UK.

The internet, despite Murdoch’s assertion to the contrary, is not going to stop this build-up of media power as similar patterns of concentrated media power are now being replicated online. For example, five groups account for more than 70% of online news consumption (measured by browsing time) and, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the ‘BBC and a few other traditional brands dominate the UK online news market’. Increasingly, we see monopolies firmly entrenched across the online world – Amazon for e-books, Google for search, Facebook for friendship and so on. In the US, Comcast, the giant internet service provider which also owns content producers and TV channels, recently announced its intention to buy Time Warner Cable to produce a company that would control internet access to two-thirds of American homes.

Handing this much influence to unelected individuals and unaccountable firms has a significant impact on who is able to direct the public conversations that take place at any one time. And we learned from evidence presented to the Leveson Inquiry that politicians are still in awe of ‘old media’ power (just as they are desperate to court ‘new media’ power) while proprietors are still able to command the attention of top politicians and to shape news agendas according to their ideological preferences.

So it matters when the Daily Mail launches its regular witch hunts against leading Labour politicians and stands firmly behind the government’s austerity programme, supports NHS privatisation and warns about a stampede of Romanians coming to our shores (a claim which it recently had to correct). It matters when the Sun uses its market power regularly to assault EU membership and when it describes the Guardian’s publication of the Edward Snowden revelations about NSA surveillance as ‘treason’ (rather ironic considering its self-declared support for press freedom).

An unhealthy intimacy between media moguls and politicians is hardly new but levels of media concentration across Europe are fostering a climate in which a handful of right-wing figures are able to exert growing political influence. Silvio Berlusconi may no longer be the Italian prime minister but his media interests still dominate Italian culture. In Hungary, the CEO of the second biggest commercial TV channel, TV2, is widely identified with the controversial governing party, Fidesz – an affiliation that has led to some 86% of political comment being dominated by representatives of the ruling parties. The Bulgarian media is dominated by Delyan Peevski who not only controls newspapers, websites, broadcast outlets and magazines, but was appointed head of the national security service in 2013. This decision was later overturned but he remains a hugely powerful political figure.

These are just some of the reasons why we need action to overturn media concentration and to press for genuine diversity in the media. In the UK, the House of Lords Communications Committee recently produced a report on media pluralism which called for more involvement from the communications regulator Ofcom, as opposed to ministers, in deciding on media mergers but still refused to recommend a course of action that might actually challenge existing media ownership structures. So while rumours continue about another bid by News Corp to take full control of BSkyB or about a joint bid by Discovery Communications and Sky to buy Channel 5, there are still no effective rules in place to prevent the further consolidation of the media by corporate interests.

It seems highly unlikely that, given the continuing influence of the largest media groups, any of the major political parties in Britain will make democratic media ownership a manifesto priority. But this should not stop us from trying, particularly as we have learned such a lot in the last few years about the corrosive relationships between senior politicians and media executives. We should also support the European Initiative for Media Pluralism, a grass roots campaign to secure enough signatures to force a European debate on tackling concentration. Today, news outlets across Europe, including La Repubblica in Italy, Le Soir in Belgium and openDemocracy in the UK, are devoting space to alt-phabet, a novel way of encoding news stories, to demonstrate the growing threats from states and media giants to pluralism and independence and to urge people to sign the petition.

Patterns of media ownership might not be able to tell us everything we need to know about how the media operate but they are certainly central to the reproduction of media power. As Stuart Hall once pointed out, media ownership might not be ‘a sufficient explanation of the way the ideological universe is structured, but it is a necessary starting point. It gives the whole machinery of representation its fundamental orientation in the value-system of property and profit.’ As long as we have a media culture that is accountable to a narrow range of corporate and state interests rather than the audiences and users who sustain it, then we will never get a media that is willing to challenge the powerful, to represent ordinary people or even adequately to make sense of the world.

To add your name to the petition please follow this link.

Des Freedman is Professor of Media and Communications in the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London and chair of the Media Reform Coalition.

This article gives the views of the author/s, and does not necessarily represent the position of the Media Power and Plurality Project. We welcome further views and contributions to the media plurality policy debate: please contact j.townend@westminster.ac.uk if you would like to contribute.