Monthly Archives: May 2014

Blog, Comment, Guest post, Media plurality, Media policy, Non-profit, Regional and local

#MediaPlurality14: Douglas White – six lessons from Neighbourhood News so far

by admin on 9th May 2014 • 0 Comments

Reflecting on our Media Power and Plurality event last week, Douglas White from the Carnegie UK Trust, looks at policy initiatives to help new market entrants

One of the most interesting discussion points at the Media Plurality and Power event at City University on 2 May was around the interventions that are needed to help new players in the media market flourish.

Our Neighbourhood News project, outlined here by project evaluator Will Perrin, founder of Talk About Local, and described by Will at the conference, has produced six key lessons from its first six months of operation. These six lessons from the local news projects delivered by five ‘Carnegie Partners’ across the UK highlight the importance of local news organisations to their communities and how local news might be delivered in the future. We believe they are a good starting point for any funders and policymakers interested in supporting the provision and sustainability of local news:

Local, grassroots news organisations can deliver a significant range of community news and information, in return for quite a low level of investment. For example, in just four months Your Harlow alone published 850 stories and 90 videos. This suggests that the local community news sector has the capacity to deliver projects that can deliver a high level of output in a short period of time, and can provide good value for money for both citizens and funders.
Local news organisations are often successful at attracting volunteer time and pro bono input from professional journalists to supplement paid wages. Brixton Blog, for instance, has levered 112 volunteer hours (£1,557 at national average hourly rate) with £1,400 of paid labour.
Local news can be used as a tool for community engagement, action and cohesion. To date, the Carnegie Partner projects have featured stories that matter to their communities, such as poor street lighting, library closures and the local impact of benefit cuts. And they have often done so in new and locally innovative ways. For example, the Digital Sentinel held a chat with local police and fire services on Twitter, asking a range of questions on topics from knife crime to noisy neighbours to the number of police officers on their streets.
Grassroots community news organisations made up of freelancing and volunteer contributors are subject to competing demands on their time, such as employment, family and pre-existing commitments. These real-life time pressures can cause disruption in delivering consistent output, but they are pressures which funders must respect in order to improve long-term local news provision and deliver community benefits.
Recruiting individuals with skills which supplement core journalism skills, such as advertising sales and IT know how, which help to sustain local news projects can be a challenge. These issues can impact on news production, and again, it is important for funders to take a long-term perspective and show understanding and tolerance to any delays incurred.
Taking the time to ensure that the correct structure is in place is important for the success of local new organisations. This will allow local news organisations to balance competing demands and volume and quality of output on schedule, but can be an ongoing challenge. Getting this balance right is not always straightforward, and needs careful consideration.

These six lessons have formed the basis of six discussion questions posed by the Trust in our Neighbourhood News – The Time is Now policy summary [PDF]. We’d be delighted to hear from #MediaPlurality14 attendees on these questions and how we can challenge funders, policymakers and practitioners to support and deliver new and improved neighbourhood news.

Douglas White is the current Acting Head of Policy at the Carnegie UK Trust.

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 us if you would like to contribute.

Blog, Event, Guest post, Media ownership, Media plurality

#Mediaplurality14: Onora O’Neill on media plurality, diversity and the interests of owners

by admin on 7th May 2014 • 0 Comments

Introductory remarks by Baroness Onora O’Neill at the Media Power and Plurality conference at City University London on Friday 2 May, jointly hosted by University of Westminster’s Media Power and Plurality AHRC project and the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism at City.

The Post Leveson Context

It is nearly three years since the Leveson Inquiry was established, with its dual remit

a) to investigate the culture, practices and ethics of the press, including contacts between the press and politicians and the press and the police;

b) to consider the extent to which the current regulatory regime has failed and whether there has been a failure to act upon any previous warnings about media misconduct.

In practice, as we all know, ongoing criminal investigations and prosecutions limited what could be investigated or considered by the Inquiry. Nevertheless the Leveson Report emerged and recommended a two tier structure—self regulation by the media, the standards achieved to be audited by a body that is independent of the press. The political parties have come together on this. So has Parliament. And the public support it.

Self Regulation with Standards?

As I think everyone here will also know, the seemingly archaic structure of a Royal Charter has been used to set up an audit body that any future government or parliament would find it hard to alter. What nobody knows is whether this will work: at present the only self regulatory body in existence is IPSO (Independent Press Standards Organisation), aka ‘son of PCC’, which has indicated that it will not seek recognition or audit by the Royal Charter body. This is thought by some to indicate that their preferred form of self-regulation remains self-interested regulation. We don’t know yet whether there will be other self regulators that will seek recognition by the Royal Charter body —IMPRESS (Independent Monitor of the Press) may do so. But it is not clear what the upshot will be: about a month ago at question time I asked “Does the Minister consider that the Leveson recommendations will be adequately implemented if the only self-regulatory body declines to seek audit by the royal charter body?” The Minister tried two answers and the house spluttered (which by Hansard’s convention has to be rendered as ‘Oh! Oh!’). So, as everyone here knows, these matters are not done or dusted. But today other matters are central.

Regulating Content, Act and Structure

Regulation of the media can focus on several matters, including speech content, speech acts and media structures. For example, the regulation of speech content may require or prohibit the publication of some sorts of material, so is of limited use if there is to be a free press; it but can be used by exception, for example by prohibiting sexualised content in children’s programmes. Regulation of speech acts can take many forms, running from prohibitions on defamation, fraud or perjury to requirements for truth in advertising, disclosure of relevant matters in legal disputes, and requirements for accuracy in filing income tax returns. Regulation of media structures can aim to secure plurality without directly requiring or prohibiting specific types of speech content or speech acts. (However, somewhat confusingly, regulating media structures by requiring specified amounts of certain types of content, as in the regulation of public service broadcasting is often called ‘content regulation’ (e.g. by Ofcom) although it does not however mandate or prohibit specific speech content.

Discussion of media plurality

Discussion of media plurality was to some extent set aside during the period of the Leveson Inquiry, but has now assumed greater importance as shown by the DCMS consultation, by Ofcom advice to DCMS, by the recent HoL Committee on Communication report on Media Plurality published in February, and by several other analyses, including Steve Barnett’s instructive paper on the subject. But I think that it nevertheless remains somewhat unclear what media plurality is and is not, so I shall make a few comments on the point or purpose of plurality, and leave it to others to say more about some possible forms that it might take. What I shall try to say is intended only as a stimulus, or if you will a target, for discussion today.

Diversity First

It is quite widely agreed that plurality is not a goal in itself, but a means to an end, such as a well functioning democratic society, or a vibrant culture, or limiting the concentration of media power. Plurality may help to ensure that there is a diversity of viewpoints is available, and perhaps accessed. Plurality may prevent any single owner or controller gaining too much power or influence.

Why, one might ask, if the real aim is either diversity or limiting media power, should we focus on plurality? I think there is a very basic reason why diversity is not the immediate target of regulation. It is that any attempt to impose or demand diversity of content might require a degree of dirigisme and control of the media that was incompatible with rights to freedom of expression, and specifically with media freedom. Diversity has, so to speak, to be secured by oblique methods. It may (as noted) be possible to ensure some diversity of types of content by controlling structures and prescribing limits to the quantity or proportion of content of certain types (e.g. News coverage, religious broadcasting, sport, contemporary music), but go too far in regulating content and you end up without press freedom.

By contrast, some sorts of plurality requirement are no threat to media or individual freedom of expression. In particular, classical anti monopoly provisions do not work by controlling content. Even if a powerful media organisation is required to divest itself of an asset, there need be no threat to freedom of expression, or to diversity. (I note, however, that there was considerable resistance to the thought that plurality mattered at the time of the passage of the Communications Act 2003, and that Ministers insisted that size would matter in the digital world.)

Which Sorts of Plurality?

Plurality is therefore an attractive surrogate for diversity because it does not dictate content, yet seems likely to secure some or quite a lot of diversity. But which sorts of plurality actually matter, and which are likely to contribute to which sorts of diversity? There are a lot of possibilities: a plurality of organisations (publishers, broadcasters); a plurality of owners or controllers; a plurality of political orientations; a plurality of platforms; a plurality of content providers, a plurality of media products. However, I suspect that the awkward reality is that none of these forms of plurality will guarantee diversity, although lack of plurality may jeopardise diversity, as notably in societies where the media are wholly state controlled.

Plurality without Diversity?

Plurality does not guarantee diversity because a plurality of publishers, or owners, or content providers, may produce remarkably similar content, hence little diversity. This may happen if they are chasing the same demographic, or if a particular type of content is cheap, or popular or profitable.

I remember years ago, at a conference on media and democracy in Washington DC, a delightfully cynical old hack asked his audience to say was the best sort of radio programme. We were non-plussed, but he pointed out that it was obviously a programme about water safety for boy scouts. Those programmes were ideal because they could count towards the educational and the public service quotas, and because they were so thoroughly worthy and uncontroversial that they could not lead to litigation. Blandness did not matter, but being controversial or failing to meet one’s quotas did. Here one can see an example of plurality requirements reducing diversity. Or consider the Hollywood studios in their heyday: plurality, but limited diversity. Plurality of various sorts is compatible with convergence of content, lack of diversity, indeed dreary repetitiveness. So what matters is to work out which sorts of plurality are likely to have which sorts of effects in actual circumstances.

Plurality and Ownership

Questions about plurality of ownership will no doubt be a central theme for discussion today, but I want to mention one other aspect of plurality that seems to me rather often overlooked, and that is less plurality of owners, than plurality of their interests. One of the interesting features of UK newspapers today is that while there is a plurality of owners, they share certain interests. Many are not UK citizens (e.g. they include citizens of the US or Russia); others who are citizens, are not UK residents or (presumably) tax payers. In these respects they do not share their readers’ interests or fate, yet their newspapers comment extensively and influentially on matters such as UK taxation and membership of the EU. This is fairly unusual, and in many other jurisdictions foreign ownership of the news media would be prohibited or restricted. Opinions will differ on whether a lack of plurality of interests among newspaper proprietors is likely to have material effects. But consider this scenario: If at some future time Mr James Murdoch decides that British newspapers are not profitable enough and sells off some titles, would it matter the new owners increased the proportion of the UK media in foreign ownership, by adding added (say) a Qatari or a Chinese owner of a major title to our current list of expat owners? There is nothing to prevent that.

Onora O’Neill combines writing on political philosophy and ethics with a range of public activities. She comes from Northern Ireland and has worked mainly in Britain and the US. She was Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge from 1992-2006, President of the British Academy from 2005-9, chaired the Nuffield Foundation from 1998-2010, has been a crossbench member of the House of Lords since 2000 (Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve). She currently chairs the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission and is on the board of the Medical Research Council. She lectures and writes on justice and ethics, accountability and trust, justice and borders, as well as on the future of universities, the quality of legislation and the ethics of communication, including media ethics.

Blog, Comment, Guest post, Media plurality, Media policy

#Mediaplurality14: Tom Gibbons – What is ‘sufficient’ plurality?

by admin on 2nd May 2014 • 0 Comments

In a post marking our Media Power and Plurality event on 2 May, Tom Gibbons assesses recent recommendations on media plurality in the UK

The House of Lords’ Communications Committee’s recent report on Media Plurality [PDF] is part of a process of reform initiated by the regulator, Ofcom, in the course of giving advice to the Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport about the implications of the proposed complete takeover of BskyB by News Corporation.

The constitutional proprieties require that Ofcom should only implement policy, and it is for parliamentarians to make it. However, Ofcom is obviously best placed to see how well the current rules work, in particular the operation of the public interest test for media mergers under the scheme introduced by the Communications Act 2003. So, having identified a number of problems, the minister made two formal requests for advice, thus enabling Ofcom to make suggestions for reform. But even then, Ofcom was keenly aware that some judgments about where to draw the line were matters for politicians. Of particular interest, it noted that decisions, about whether the media landscape provides a ‘sufficient’ degree of plurality, involve subjective assessments and discretion, and it suggested that it would be appropriate for Parliament to provide guidance about the issue.

The House of Lords’ Committee’s recommendations incorporate a number of Ofcom’s suggestions, notably the ideas that there should be regular, periodic reviews of plurality, supplemented by specific reviews of media transactions which are significant for plurality. It also endorsed Ofcom’s view that the criteria for review should be primarily qualitative, rejecting proposals for quantitative ‘caps’ on media companies’ ownership structures and their market share. But, while the Committee did recommend that there should be statutory guidance about ‘sufficiency’, it did not take offer any substantive suggestions itself, instead leaving to the Government to take up in the next stage of its overhaul of plurality regulation.

In many ways, this is understandable, because – as both Ofcom and the Committee acknowledged – determining what is ‘sufficient’ plurality is the trickiest part of pluralism policy. Ofcom is of course aware of that, and it considers that, ‘Given the importance of contextual factors, and the associated exercise of judgement, there is unlikely ever to be a crisp and unambiguous definition of sufficiency.’ Its approach is to offer a description of a well-functioning plural media market, indicating a set of key elements that will help to spot one when we see it. Thus:

‘Qualitative guidance could be designed around whether the news media market in the UK displays the following characteristics:

• There is a diverse range of independent news media voices across all platforms, providing citizens with access to a breadth of views on matters of industrial controversy and public policy, ensuring a vibrant democratic debate.

• Among consumers, the reach and consumption of many news sources is relatively high, across all demographic groups and across all parts of the English regions and the devolved nations.

• No one source of news commands too high a share of consumption, thereby ensuring that consumers are not exposed to too narrow a range of viewpoints.

• People multi-source from a number of independent news sources to help inform their opinions, ensuring that the process of opinion-forming draws on a diversity of viewpoints.

• The market conditions are such that there is comparatively free entry into the news media market, as evidenced by the emergence and establishment over time of new news providers.

• News media organisations are well-funded and commercial returns are high enough to ensure their long-term economic sustainability.’

The House of Lords’ Committee saw these elements as the basis of the guidance for assessing the sufficiency of plurality. Yet they are clearly inadequate (insufficient?) because they do not indicate the thresholds that have to be reached, and they rely on the same kind of intuitive approach that characterises ‘the public interest’ or the view that roughly four or five ‘players’ in a media market will provide adequate diversity.

Sufficiency has to be assessed in terms of what is needed for a particular purpose or objective. The context here is the functioning of the media in a democracy. At the least, that entails the provision of a basis of information and opinion for citizens to participate in policy formulation and decision making. That in turn requires that the qualitative components of the elements cited above have to be assessed by reference to the contribution they make to that democratic functioning:

Ideas promoted by any single media organisation should be open to challenge by an equivalent other.
The citizen’s perspective should be dominant – are they aware of the diversity of viewpoints and do they have access to them.
The viewpoints available in the media should represent the range of different interests and communities in the society.

The implications are that, in assessing sufficiency of plurality, Ofcom will have to become involved in judgments about the content of media material. This will be in contrast to current practice, whereby diversity of media sources and platforms is taken to be an adequate proxy for the citizens’ experience of diverse content. For that reason, detailed discussion of the sufficiency of plurality is bound to be controversial and plausible thresholds will be keenly contested. But the sooner debate is opened, the better.

Full details of the Media Power and Plurality conference at City University London on Friday 2 May, jointly hosted by University of Westminster’s Media Power and Plurality AHRC project and the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism at City, can be found here. Tom Gibbons, Professor of Law, University of Manchester, will take part in a panel looking at national policy.

Blog, Comment, Guest post, International, Media ownership, Media policy

#Mediaplurality14: Philip Napoli – Missed research opportunities in media diversity policy assessment in the US

by admin on 1st May 2014 • 0 Comments

In a post marking our Media Power and Plurality event on 2 May, Philip M. Napoli discusses a lack of research continuity in media policy development

In the United States, the issue of plurality/diversity in media is, at this point, represented in the media policy realm almost exclusively by the media ownership regulations that are in place. While many of these regulations have been relaxed or eliminated over the years, those that remain focus primarily on multiple ownership and cross-ownership of traditional media outlets (newspapers, television stations, radio stations) at the local level.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is required to re-evaluate these regulations every four years (ironically, it is sometimes the case that one re-evaluation isn’t fully completed before it is time for the next one to begin). And, in fact, the latest iteration of the media ownership review is just beginning. I’d like to focus on this process, as I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in each iteration of it since 2003 in a variety of capacities, including: conducting research utilized by public interest organizations engaged in the proceeding; serving as a peer reviewer for the FCC for a study that they commissioned; and providing testimony to the U.S. Senate and the FCC. So I’ve had some interesting vantage points from which to observe this process as it has played out every four years, particularly in relation to the role that research plays in the process

And if there has been one thing that has struck me about this process, it is that, from a research standpoint, every four years the media ownership proceeding begins with very little connection to the previous media ownership proceeding. That is, the questions of which research questions will be investigated, how they will be investigated, and by whom they will be investigated, are asked anew every four years, with no effort to maintain any meaningful continuity or consistency across proceedings. Individual studies addressing specific questions are conducted one year, and then abandoned in subsequent years for different studies investigating different questions, and employing different data and methods.

For instance, an effort to develop a market-level Diversity Index was employed for one ownership proceeding, but was invalidated by the courts for lacking the necessary rigor, and then was abandoned by the FCC, never to be corrected or improved and redeployed in subsequent proceedings. Some proceedings have involved studies of the relationship between cross-ownership and the ideological slant of local television news, and the impact of the relaxation of certain rules on minority and female broadcast ownership. Other proceedings have not addressed these issues, but instead provided analyses the relationship between ownership structures in local markets and civic engagement and of the availability of local news and information online.

It is as if every four years the wheel gets reinvented. Consequently, there has been no meaningful, systematic accumulation of longitudinal data and research findings. From a research standpoint, this is particularly frustrating, as it represents a waste of a very valuable opportunity that arises from the fact that this is a quadrennial proceeding. In theory, every four years the FCC has the opportunity to systematically build upon the knowledge base of the previous proceeding in ways that would facilitate potentially valuable comparative analyses across time periods and across markets; and that would allow for the systematic tracking of the impact of specific policy decisions on media diversity and pluralism. But instead, every ownership proceeding begins almost as if it is the first ownership proceeding, with no meaningful continuity with the empirical record that was established for the previous proceeding.

Why this is the case has to do with the extent to which research has become a highly politicized element of the media policymaking process. Desired policy outcomes tend to drive the research questions that are asked, the methods and data that are employed, and the selection of the researchers who conduct the analyses. Consequently, over the past decade and a half we have seen a number of fairly egregious suppressions, abuses, and manipulations of policy research (something that I am chronicling in an ongoing book project).

And so, as the policy objectives shift with each FCC administration, so too do the research objectives and approaches that underlie each ownership proceeding. As a result, the kind of robust, systematic, longitudinal body of knowledge about the effects of various policy, marketplace, or ownership changes on the diversity of sources, content, and viewpoints available to media audiences that should be a primary outcome of these quadrennial media ownership proceedings is, unfortunately, lacking.

Full details of the Media Power and Plurality conference at City University London on 2 May, jointly hosted by University of Westminster’s Media Power and Plurality AHRC project and the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism at City, can be found here. Philip M. Napoli, Rutgers University, School of Communication & Information, will take part in a panel looking at ‘What can the UK learn from other countries?’. This post also appeared on the LSE Media Policy Project blog.

Blog, Comment, Guest post, Media ownership, Media plurality

#Mediaplurality14: Des Freedman: Media ownership – the elephant in the room

by admin on 1st May 2014 • 0 Comments

Ahead of our Media Power and Plurality event on 2 May, Des Freedman introduces a new report on media ownership

Criticisms of food banks that have recently appeared in popular news outlets shows that the press has lost none of its ability to lash out at the poor and vulnerable. Former Conservative minister Edwina Currie argued in the Sun that food banks, as distinct from the desperation that drives people to seek emergency aid in one of the world’s richest countries, are a ‘mistake’; an ‘investigation’ by the Mail on Sunday, backed up by a separate editorial, demonstrated how easy it is to ‘abuse’ the charitable work provided by food banks and managed to find space to claim that many users were – shock horror! – asylum seekers.

These attacks featured in the country’s two most popular news titles that, between them, account for more than one in two of every daily newspaper bought in the UK.

This is one small illustration that we have a serious problem with news diversity in that a small handful of organisations dominate the media landscape. A new report, published by the Media Reform Coalition, shows that just three companies control nearly 70 per cent of national newspaper circulation, five companies are responsible for 70 per cent of regional daily newspaper circulation and a single news provider (Sky) provides news bulletins for the vast majority of commercial radio. In terms of local news, around a quarter of local communities have no daily local newspaper at all while in 35 per cent of communities, a single title has a 100 per cent monopoly. The report is called The Elephant in the Room based on the fact that concentrated media ownership seems to be an issue that very few politicians and, not surprisingly, even fewer media outlets are willing to confront.

On Monday, however, Parliament hosted a meeting to discuss how best to ‘reclaim the media’ from the proprietors, editors, lobbyists, and shareholders who are determined to place vested interests above the public interest. Speakers including Caroline Lucas and John McDonnell highlighted the need both to support campaigns such as the ongoing European Initiative for Media Pluralism which is collecting signatures across the Continent to force the issue of media ownership on to the agenda in Brussels, and to make media concentration an issue for the forthcoming party manifestoes.

They have recently tabled an Early Day Motion that ‘condemns the way in which groups such as benefit claimants, immigrants, women and environmental campaigners are routinely misrepresented in the media’ and ‘believes that there should be urgent action to safeguard the right to independent and pluralistic information’.

Some may argue that the audience share of the Daily Mail or the limited number of news wholesalers is hardly an issue which matches the urgency of, for example, the situation in Ukraine, the fate of the unemployed or the controversies surrounding immigration.

This is to miss the point. Our understanding of welfare, immigration and foreign policy is, at least partly, predicated on the ability of powerful gatekeepers to impose their agendas and to naturalise their own reporting frames. For example, our actions in relation to Syria and Ukraine are all too often presented as intrinsically democratic and humanitarian while our enemies are necessarily only interested in expansion and/or terrorism; welfare is a ‘drain’ and always open to individual ‘abuse’ while corporate tax evasion has to be dragged into the limelight through the actions of groups like UK Uncut.

There is a real concern that if we have only a few, dominant voices, largely repeating similar opinions about the need to shrink the public sector, to mitigate the threats to UK national identity allegedly presented by continuing immigration, and to resist the danger to global security that is posed by the Russian ‘strongman’ Vladimir Putin, our right to a full and open conversation about matters of public importance is clearly undermined.

Does the BBC provide a sufficient counterpoint to these limited agendas? Its commercial rivals continually point to the Corporation’s domination of broadcast and online spaces that ‘distort’ news markets but they are far more reluctant to identify the real problem with the BBC: that, as a recent study carried out by researchers at Cardiff University argued, the Corporation ‘tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world, not a left-wing, anti-business agenda’.

Perhaps we need not worry about pluralism any longer simply because the internet has broken the grip of our traditional media moguls and provided us with a range of opinions that was not possible in the analogue age. After all, this is precisely what Rupert Murdoch has argued: ‘haven’t you heard of the internet? No one controls the media or will ever again.’ Yet, despite Murdoch’s protestations, we are seeing the same patterns of concentrated media power being replicated online. After all, if the internet was designed to challenge the stranglehold of incumbent voices, why is it that the Mail is far and away the most popular read online with nearly 180 million monthly unique users?

Large sections of our news media have failed to represent the interests of ordinary people – little wonder that only 19 per cent of us ‘trust’ our press to tell the truth, one of the lowest figures in Europe. Many of our leading media organisations are too wrapped up in relations with power to be able to hold this power to account. Concentrated ownership can no longer be hidden away as the issue we dare not confront if we really want to see a media that represents the interests not of elites and executives but of the majority of its readers, viewers and listeners.

You can sign the European Initiative for Media Pluralism at www.mediainitiative.org.uk

Full details of the Media Power and Plurality conference at City University London on 2 May, jointly hosted by University of Westminster’s Media Power and Plurality AHRC project and the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism at City, can be found here. Des Freedman, Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Goldsmiths, will take part in a panel looking at ‘Priorities for national policy’. This post originally appeared on openDemocracy.