Media ownership

Blog, Media ownership, Media plurality, Media policy

Project round up: Online resources and next steps for media plurality research

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Our media plurality project, based at University of Westminster’s Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), is now formally coming to an end and we want to thank everyone who engaged with us online, or participated in any of our events over the last 18 months. The project has benefited hugely from the knowledge, experience and contributions from all those who generously gave their time and commitment.

We want to draw your attention to some of the outputs and resources which emerged from the project and which we hope will continue to provide useful material for continuing research and policy debates on media plurality in the UK and in other countries. This issue is becoming more rather than less urgent, with implications for media freedom and diversity in virtually every democracy in the world. In the UK, we are hopeful that it will now be recognised as sufficiently important to feature in party political manifestos for next year’s general election.

Our main resource is this website, mediaplurality.com, which includes:

We will also be publishing next year an edited collection of essays by 13 national and international scholars addressing the policy themes raised during the project. We are hoping to stage a major event in May/June 2015.

We would also like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this project and our colleagues at University of Westminster, and other organisations with which we collaborated, for their support. We hope you will continue to find the website and its associated resources useful for ongoing work in this area.

For more details of media and communications research at University of Westminster please visit the CAMRI website.

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

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

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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, International, Media ownership, Media policy

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

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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.

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, Comment, Guest post, Media ownership, Media plurality

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

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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.

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, Comment, Media ownership, Media plurality

Steven Barnett: Murdoch and media power – déjà vu all over again?

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This week saw the announcement of half-year results from BSkyB. There was a slight dent in its relentless profitability following recent competition from BT for Premier League rights, but very little deviation from the last full-year results: annual revenues of £7.2 billion with an annual operating profit of £1.3 billion. One and a third billion is an awful lot of spare cash to be generating each year.

That was precisely why Rupert Murdoch, who still owns just 39% of BSkyB, was desperate for his 2010 News Corp bid for the whole company to succeed, until it was finally derailed in July 2011 by the Milly Dowler phone hacking revelations and subsequent Leveson Inquiry. While in previous years his UK newspapers were the company cash cow, they have been increasingly overshadowed by the sports-driven pay TV business of Sky. Unfortunately for Murdoch, only 39% of that £1.3 billion belongs to him.

According to the Daily Telegraph, he may be lining up a new bid and “the move makes more strategic sense now than it did in 2010”. Any bid would now come from his new 21st Century Fox business, created when he split the film and TV business from his publishing interests (still called News Corp) in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal. But in media ownership terms, Murdoch chairs both companies and the end result would be no different from the highly profitable and enormously powerful conglomerate which was eventually sidelined in 2011.

There is in some circles an increasingly relaxed view of a new Murdoch bid: a sense that, with the emergence of global social media and online giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon, anxiety over an expanded Murdoch empire would be yesterday’s problem. This is misguided. A wholly Murdoch-owned BSkyB would still mean that a single media enterprise – and ultimately one individual – controlled over a third of national newspaper circulation (and their associated websites) in the UK and the only commercial 24 hour UK news channel – which in turn supplies the news for Channel Five and almost every commercial radio station in Britain.

Apart from the news plurality issue, a new takeover bid would raise other issues. A unified corporate culture can determine editorial direction across a range of media outputs beyond news, including drama and comedy. Moreover News Corp, like all media conglomerates, are adept at exploiting their media outlets to promote their own products and ignore or disparage those of their rivals. A wholly owned Sky will give Murdoch more leverage for cross-promotion across his empire, thereby entrenching his competitive advantage and further reducing the number of alternative voices.

And apart from influence over editorial content, there’s the scope for consolidating power by putting undue pressure on regulators. Sky has already shown a healthy appetite for expensive litigation, draining the resources of regulators and competitors. Allied with strident editorial assaults on Ofcom in News Corp newspapers, this can create formidable barriers to public interest interventions which reinforces an unfair competitive advantage in the battle for rights and talent.

All of these fears about the potential consequences for unhealthy dominance of the newly merged conglomerate were rehearsed in the months before the News Corp bid fell victim to the phone-hacking scandal. It was, however, on the verge of going through and the lengthy process exposed serious flaws in the UK’s regulatory regime around media plurality. As ministers and prime-ministers past and present explained during the Leveson hearings, politicians became too enmeshed in the Murdoch empire and were given too much discretion in determining the outcome of such bids. If a second bid is also to be thwarted – which the public interest surely demands – that plurality regime must be overhauled.

Next Tuesday sees publication of the long-awaited report by the influential House of Lords Communications committee on media plurality. It will, I hope, propose a number of recommendations for reforming the media plurality public interest test, which was a last minute addition to the 2003 Communications Act (courtesy of some nimble political footwork from David Puttnam in the House of Lords). Without it, the Murdoch takeover would have been waved through.

But now the plurality regime urgently needs updating to embrace a broader view of plurality and media power than just news. Moreover, a new framework needs to re-engineer the complicated sequence of interventions which currently can only start and end with the Secretary of State. If we have learnt anything from the phone-hacking scandal and the relationship between politicians and the press, it is that powerful press barons still command a deeply unhealthy genuflection from politicians in desperate search of a positive headline. It is the independent and competent regulator, Ofcom, which should be tasked with ensuring that the public interest is not sacrificed to political expedience.

Governments are not bound to accept the recommendations of select committees, and there is no guarantee that the Lords committee will propose sweeping changes. But without them it is quite likely not only that Murdoch will launch another bid for the Sky cash cow, but that this time he will succeed. The consequences for democracy of such undiluted media power being concentrated in the hands of a single individual are just as dire as they would have been three years ago.

A version of this post first appeared on the Huffington Post.

Blog, European policy, Guest post, Media ownership, Media Plurality series

Media Plurality Series: Interview with Robert Picard on policy priorities for a pluralistic society

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For the last post in our special Media Plurality Series with the LSE Media Policy Project, LSE MSc student Emma Goodman interviewed Robert Picard, Director of Research at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, on definitions and measurement of pluralism, the role of the internet and overall policy priorities.

P_28074512e9[EG] You have said that the UK tends to use a more narrow definition of plurality than that employed in other countries. Would you suggest a wider definition, and if so what would that be?

[RP] The question is: what are you trying to achieve? The definition of plurality used in the UK is designed to try to maintain an existing range of plurality, primarily in the press, and a range between Conservative party views and Liberal/Labour views. It doesn’t really worry about other parties’ views. It doesn’t really care if the Greens or UKIP have anything to say, so in that regard it’s problematic, because it’s essentially designed to maintain existing power relations among the parties, and that’s not a really effective policy. It only concentrates on political plurality and ignores all other aspects.

There are many other aspects of plurality and many other influences on plurality besides just ownership. If you’re not really looking at plurality in terms of how varieties of cultures and classes and varieties of ethnic groups in the country are covered, you are taking a very narrow view of what society needs to do to be able to discuss itself, understand its identity and explain its problems to each other. That is why I say there is too narrow a conceptualization in the UK. And it’s not that the ownership of the press isn’t a problem, that’s just part of the problem.

While citizens of a country all share a particular culture as national citizens, there are often several sub-cultures within a country that need to be well represented. For Britain this is a particular problem now, as we have devolution going on and other such things – how do you represent that but still maintain some sort of broader national identity? That’s a huge problem. You can only do that if you’re not just looking at politics.

Does increasingly widespread internet access make plurality of traditional media ownership less important? Is there inherent plurality on the internet?

There’s no question that there’s the opportunity for more people to express their views on the internet. But it does not increase the opportunity to be heard, and in fact much of what goes on on the internet actually restricts the ability to be heard. We know that the majority of people go to the sites that are primarily the big brands of offline media, and when you use search engines, the first results they give you are companies that pay them money – usually people with a good deal of money.

The second thing they give you are sites that don’t pay them money but are the most visible. So the algorithms tend to promote established powerful organisations rather than the alternatives. And when you get a page of search results, about 90% of people will go to the top 10 sites. A lot of people don’t realize how skewed those searches are because of the algorithms.

Are we better off than we were? Yes. Is it dramatically better in terms of what the other person sees and hears, no. The traditional media is still very, very important.

There has been a lot of focus on how to measure plurality – but more importantly: who decides, and on what basis, when it’s enough?

We, as human beings, tend to read the things that are most comfortable for us or tend to reflect our viewpoints the most. One of the terrible limitations of the human mind is that a lot of us don’t want to be confronted by other ideas, although of course there are some who seek out other ideas and want to hear debates. So you have a problem: can you force people to listen to views they don’t want to listen to? You can’t force people to read a particular newspaper or magazine. But you can ask broadcasters to make sure that they show a range of views.

Right now the range that’s demanded is pretty small, and in fact the broadcasters get yelled at if they go too far outside the normal range. UKIP, for instance, for all those people who think it’s racist and xenophobic and all of those things, does have some interesting arguments about whether Britain is losing sovereignty because of the EU – a reasonable question for any citizen anywhere to ask. But it’s hard of them to get their voices heard. That is problematic and it means that certain debates won’t take place. It’s very difficult in this country to have a debate about a topic like euthanasia, for example.

What should be the number one priority for policy makers going forward?

I think the biggest problem that policy-makers in the UK have to look at right now is what they are going to do about cross media ownership, the range of cross media ownership that is occurring and growing, and those who want to go further. Currently today nobody has effectively come up with a measurement system that really works. Some of the best ones, I think, ultimately come down to audience measures rather than ownership measures, because ownership isn’t the issue, the effect on the public is the real issue. So I think audience measures make sense, there are different ideas as to where the limits should be placed or how you should measure them – those are up for debate and should be discussed.

I think the second thing that needs to be discussed is how to meet the needs of many urban areas today where there are large communities of people who never see themselves in the press, or on television, unless there is a riot or some sort of problem. That is bad for society: somehow, we need to solve that. It’s not a peculiar problem for Britain. It is a problem for many countries, but it is one that needs to be addressed in policy because it is so important in a pluralistic society to make sure that they are represented. Because if they don’t see themselves in the media, in the news, in the issues that are put forward, they can never integrate, they can never fully become part of society.

European policy, Media ownership, Media plurality, Media Plurality series

Media Plurality Series: The transparency of media ownership – Mark Thompson

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MT-pic-22In the next post in our Media Plurality Series curated together with the LSE Media Policy Project, Mark Thompson, of the Open Society Media Program, argues that an important first step toward media pluralism in Europe is better transparency of media ownership. 

Amid all the attention that scholars and activists have paid to media ownership over the years, the transparency of ownership has been neglected. This is odd, because the public availability of accurate and up-to-date information about ownership is – undeniably – an essential component of democratic and pluralist media systems. And anybody who has worked on media and journalism standards outside North America and north-western Europe is likely to have witnessed the problems that result when ownership is opaque.

Media regulators and ordinary citizens must have access to information about who owns what. It is impossible to take steps to address excessive media concentrations and conflicts of interest – or even to identify such problems – if owners cannot be identified. Public knowledge of owners’ identities helps to ensure that abuses of media power can be assessed, publicised, openly debated and perhaps even prevented. Transparency also ensures that people can be accurately informed about the interests and influences behind the news presented for their consumption, and that media markets can operate fairly and efficiently, especially towards new entrants.

The state of transparency in Europe

European organisations agree that transparency of media ownership is essential for media pluralism and democracy. This has been broadly recognised by the European Parliament, and by the European Commission’s High-level Group on Media Freedom and Pluralism. The OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media has consistently urged member states to respect transparency of media ownership.

Above all, it has been recognised by the Council of Europe. Thomas Hammarberg, as the  Council’s Commissioner for Human Rights (2006-2012), concluded “there must be transparency of media ownership”. The Committee of Ministers has led the way in drawing attention to the importance of media ownership transparency and urging member states to “adopt any regulatory and financial measures called for in order to guarantee media transparency”.

Despite this recognition of the importance of the principle, no systematic research had been carried out before Access Info Europe (AIE) and the Open Society Media Program (OSMP) examined the availability of ownership information in 19 European countries, in 2012.[1]

We found that the public in most of these countries cannot obtain a detailed and comprehensive picture of who owns all media outlets. The data available does not make it possible to identify the ultimate or beneficial owners of media outlets. In nine countries it is impossible for the public to find out who the actual owners of the media are through media-specific reporting or company registers. In only six countries can the public access sufficient information from the media authority to establish who owns the broadcast media; for print and online media this is possible in just two countries.

In only four countries does the ownership information submitted to a company register allow identification of the owner for all types of company (publicly listed, limited company, etc.), but such requirements do not apply to owners of other kinds of media outlets. For the broadcast media, beneficial ownership is only required to be disclosed to the media authority in six countries and to the companies register in four countries.

What can be done?

This is clearly an unhealthy situation. AIE and OSMP have prepared a set of detailed recommendations for mandatory reporting requirements to disclose the entire ownership chain to a national media authority. This disclosure would allow the identification of beneficial and ultimate owners, back to natural persons. The information should be available to the public in an accessible format free of charge, and be published in a regularly updated and centralised database.

At the Council of Europe, the Steering Committee on Media and Information Society noted our research while the Parliamentary Assembly referenced it in a report on media freedom. The Committee of Ministers may yet be persuaded to issue a detailed declaration, pointing towards a clear international standard of media ownership transparency. This could then be used as leverage with member states and the European Union.

The wider context for this campaign is media pluralism, which is explicitly supported in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (Art. 11). Yet progress in Brussels is bound to be difficult, given the Commission’s extreme reluctance to legislate on media values and the certainty of push-back from powerful industry players against any meaningful disclosure regime. With elections to the European Parliament due in May, it may be harder still to make headway in 2014. The best opportunity may arise as and when the Audio-Visual Media Services Directive comes to be revised; without effective campaigns at national level, however, the opportunity will prove elusive.

More positively, this initiative coincides with an unprecedented global debate around company ownership transparency (commitments at the Open Government Partnership and the G8 are recent proof). Transparency of media ownership is an idea whose time has come.

[1] The countries are Austria, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Georgia, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK, plus Morocco as the 20th country. Open Society Foundation, part of the Open Society Foundations, is a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (company number 4571628) and a registered charity (charity number 1105069). Its registered office address is 7th Floor, Millbank Tower, 21-24 Millbank, London SW1P 4QP