Media plurality

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, Guest post, Media plurality, Regional and local

Rosemary Butler: Addressing the ‘Democratic Deficit’ and the media in Wales

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As part of this research project on media power and plurality, we have been looking at media diversity in Wales and Scotland. This post, authored by the Presiding Officer of the National Assembly for Wales, Dame Rosemary Butler AM, discusses the ‘democratic deficit’ in Welsh news coverage.

Rosemary ButlerIn October 2012 I gave a speech to the Royal Television Society’s annual lecture in Wales. In that speech, I first used the phrase “Democratic Deficit” to describe the gap in coverage that Welsh people face in the newspapers they read and the news programmes they watch.

By “Democratic Deficit” I mean who is relaying, or perhaps more importantly, who will be relaying the work of the National Assembly to the people of Wales in the future, and, of course, performing that crucial role of holding the decision-makers here in Cardiff Bay to account?

We have a UK Media, both broadcasters and print, which fails to report the huge differences in approach to public policy in devolved fields such as health and education. It means their substantial Welsh audiences often get information that does not apply to them.

Research by Professor Anthony King and Cardiff University’s School of Journalism highlighted the fact that some of our leading UK broadcasters often default to an Anglo-centric position.

A position which promotes policy issues affecting only England as though they apply to the whole of the UK.

Professor King’s original report was published in 2008, and at the RTS annual lecture in 2012 he noted that despite efforts by some broadcasters, the problem persists.

BBC Wales and ITV Wales do a great job in covering Welsh public life, but the fact remains that many people in Wales prefer to listen to, or view, network news platforms and programmes which ignore any Welsh perspective.

But in fairness to the BBC they are the least worst offender, particularly when you look at the record of the commercial broadcasters in terms of coverage of Wales and Welsh issues

And it is not just the broadcasters who are at fault!

Depending on which source you believe, between 600,000 and one million people in Wales read a UK newspaper every day, and that’s not to mention the numbers who access UK media websites and mobile apps. Again these organisations fail to portray the different policy approaches taking place in Wales

The problem is further compounded by the financial pressures on our indigenous Welsh national and regional press, which leaves many unable to resource comprehensive coverage of Assembly news.

Last year, the Assembly held a series of sessions to start a discussion about the issue and to possibly find solutions.

We had a fascinating discussion with a panel of leading UK Journalists including Kevin Maguire, Peter Riddell and Peter Knowles – which was chaired by former head of global news at the BBC, Richard Sambrook.

Another session was held with Wales’s local regional press and digital media platforms that perhaps offered more hope and scope for action.

As a result much of the Assembly’s current communications strategy is focused on what support can be provided to the emerging digital platforms in covering the work of the Assembly, as well as ensuring that we have engaging content on our own platforms.

The National Assembly must, and will, play its part in addressing this issue and I look forward to working closely with all those interested in ensuring plurality of media coverage and scrutiny of the National Assembly for Wales.

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, Journalism, Media plurality, Media policy

Steven Barnett: A predictable act of political cowardice: the Government’s response on media ownership

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This post by Professor Steven Barnett originally appeared on the LSE Media Policy Project blog in August 2014, following the publication of the Government’s response to the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications Report into Media Plurality and its own consultation.

If one week is a long time in politics, three years are an eternity. Remember those heady days in July 2011, as the phone-hacking scandal broke and unanimous condemnation from our political leaders’ reflected public revulsion? It wasn’t just the criminal acts targeting young or vulnerable victims that prompted a popular outcry, but the manifest abuse of untrammelled corporate power that had allowed one company to get away with it for so long. Something, they all agreed, must be done.

Speaking in the House of Commons just days after the hacking scandal broke, David Cameron was explicit about the need for action: “[the] challenge is how we address the vexed issue of media power. We need competition policy to be properly enforced. We need a sensible look at the relevance of plurality and cross-media ownership…. never again should we let a media group get too powerful.” In the same debate, Ed Miliband was specific about the policy changes required to deal with abuses that arise from media concentration: “The [Communications] Act needs to be updated as such a concentration of power is unhealthy.”

Returning to the theme at Prime Ministers Questions on 25 April 2012, the Prime Minister made a confession and a commitment: “I think on all sides of the House there’s a bit of a need for a hand on heart. We all did too much cosying up to Rupert Murdoch.” Then, in response to needling from Ed Miliband, he added: “The problem of closeness between politicians and media proprietors has been going on for years and it’s this government that’s going to sort it out.”

Cameron said it was time to do something about media concentrations. Photo by Number 10 CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Cameron said competition policy should be enforced. Photo by Number 10 CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

So how exactly did his government propose to “sort it out”? First, it waited two years before producing, in July last year, a bland consultation document on media ownership and plurality which barely scratched the surface of a now patently discredited and ineffectual plurality regime. It then waited thirteen months – and six months after a Lords parliamentary committee had produced a rather more comprehensive set of recommendations – before finally slipping out a response to both documents in early August, under the cover of summer holidays.

Government proposals at this stage of an electoral cycle were always going to be dull, narrowly focussed and risk-averse. Even so, this is a feeble response. Its opening contextual statement sets the tone for the policy inertia that follows: government will not explore changes to existing legislation until a new “measurement framework and baseline assessment” have been delivered. Therefore its response “does not seek to review existing regulatory and policy levers, nor does it seek to propose potential remedies.” In other words, the tub-thumping rhetoric of three years ago about curbing the power of unaccountable media barons has quietly surrendered to the pragmatism of electioneering.

Even within the narrow confines of its own consultation questions, this is a vapid document. Essentially, it has taken 13 months for the government to conclude that a plurality measurement framework should include online; should be restricted to news and current affairs; should include news aggregators; should include the BBC (though not in terms of remedies); and should include “some consideration” of local and regional markets. And that’s it. This simplistic approach has therefore excluded any assessment of how the public interest plurality test should be updated, the need for periodic plurality reviews, the involvement of government ministers in the decision-making process, or the need for streamlining a complex regulatory process. It leaves untouched the regime which was proved to be wholly inadequate during Murdoch’s attempt to acquire the whole of BSkyB. In short, it has severely circumscribed the fundamental issue of how to sustain media plurality within a healthy democracy, and what policy decisions should flow from that.

Ofcom will now be commissioned “to develop a suitable set of indicators to inform the measurement framework for media plurality”. And while media moguls continue to expand, amalgamate, acquire and consolidate their power and influence, the Prime Minister who promised to “sort it out” has suddenly gone missing.

This foot-dragging has been an entirely predictable act of abject political cowardice. The last time any government was foolhardy enough to produce serious changes in media ownership legislation in advance of a general election was in 1996, when John Major courageously insisted on preventing newspaper owners with over 20% of national circulation from acquiring terrestrial TV stations. There might have been one or two other reasons for the Murdoch newspapers’ wholesale switch to supporting Tony Blair a year later, but it would scarcely have improved his mood. Even with a majority of 179, Blair’s government postponed its own proposals on media ownership until after the 2001 election. And if it can’t be done with huge majorities or after unprecedented revelations of corporate corruption, there is frankly little hope for any significant legislative change under any future government.

A detailed analysis of government policy inaction, co-authored with Judith Townend, has recently been published in The Political Quarterly: ‘And What Good Came of it at Last’ Press–Politician Relations Post-Leveson. 

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

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

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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

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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, Media plurality, Media policy

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

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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.

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.

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

#Mediaplurality14: William Perrin – Six questions for hyperlocal media policy from Carnegie UK Trust

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Ahead of our Media Power and Plurality event on 2 May, William Perrin, founder of Talk About Local, discusses new policy recommendations from Carnegie UK Trust

We have been working with five great but very different community news projects for Carnegie UK Trust – in Brixton London, Alston in Cumbria, Harlow in Essex, Port Talbot in Wales and Wester Hailes in Edinburgh. Carnegie is exploring how to bolster accountability and democracy in communities, in which news and information plays a vital part.  Talk About Local is helping Carnegie evaluate and support the Neighbourhood News projects – there is an interim report from Talk About Local and from Carnegie.  Each project receives relatively small sums – two payments of £5,000 – for creating new or expanding existing local news and information output.  The emphasis is very much on community news, information and accountability, rather than technology or business process innovation.  Even at this interim stage Carnegie have isolated some pertinent questions for UK local media policy:

1. Why do we see so little support for  local news projects by grant making  foundations, charities and grant  makers, who are interested in the wellbeing of communities and  individuals? What role could such  organisations play?

 2. Would the approach adopted in  Neighbourhood News – of spreading  risk by supporting a small number of  well-organised community media  projects with small pots of funding  and using an independent expert  advisory group to help select winners  – be attractive to other funders?

 3. Could government interventions in  the local news market, such as the  Community Radio Fund, be adapted or expanded to provide opportunities  for local news providers who operate  on other platforms, including web-based providers?

 4. In the debate on regulating media plurality, which is largely about managing market exit of  independent outlets, is there a role  for encouraging market entry by many small web-based providers?

5. What scope is there for amending the regulations relating to the advertising of statutory notices to ensure that the outlets awarded such contracts meet clear requirements in relation to population reach and  provision of at least some ‘public interest’ content, irrespective of the platform used?

 6. What is the best strategy for supporting start-up local news  projects? Can traditional community development structures play a role or is a new infrastructure required?  How can local news projects be  supported to learn from each other?

It would be great to hear from UK hyperlocal practitioners and anyone else in the comments.

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.  William Perrin will take part in a panel asking ‘Local media plurality: is it all doom and gloom?’. This post originally appeared on the TalkAboutLocal 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 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.

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.

Blog, Comment, Event, Media plurality

Attempts to carve up the licence fee are the real threat to the BBC

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Today sees the opening salvos in a debate that will determine the BBC’s future. At the Oxford Media Convention, Tony Hall will mount a strenuous defence of the BBC licence fee – and address the notion (now gaining support among the BBC’s detractors) that its proceeds should be shared with competitors, through either top-slicing or “contestable” funding models.

At the same time, a new Reuters Institute report from economists Patrick Barwise and Robert Picard will spell out, for the very first time, what will happen to the UK’s creative economy if the government continues to refuse to raise the licence fee in line with inflation. It is ideal timing for their forensic analysis.

It has been, to put it mildly, a rocky couple of years for the BBC, with its competitors and critics gleefully painting a picture of terminal decline. Two Newsnight fiascos – a murky editorial decision to drop a story exposing Jimmy Savile as a paedophile, followed by untrue allegations that former Tory party treasurer Lord McAlpine was involved in child abuse in North Wales – resulted in the resignation of a director general after just 54 days in the chair. The newly installed Lord Hall was immediately faced with evidence of inflated senior management salaries and, even worse, payoffs to departing executives far in excess of their entitlement, all apparently sanctioned by the BBC Trust.

It was therefore not difficult to portray the BBC as suffering from a fundamental malaise which demands wholesale restructuring of both its funding and constitution. To its critics, this is the worst crisis in the BBC’s history. Something must be done.

In fact, it is no such thing. Narratives about the BBC in crisis have been all the rage ever since Michael Leapman’s apocalyptically titled book Last Days of the Beeb was published in 1986. From the Hutton Inquiry to “Queengate” to fake callers on phone-in programmes to the Ross-Brand Radio 2 saga and the corporation’s refusal to broadcast a charity appeal in aid of Gaza refugees, anyone under 50 will barely remember a time when the BBC wasn’t apparently in crisis. The current wave of schadenfreude is the latest attempt to taint the BBC with an image of managerial incompetence, editorial mismanagement and general institutional turmoil.

Each episode is deliberately and mischievously exploited by those ideologically opposed to publicly funded institutions, and particularly by powerful press groups which have long been deeply antagonistic to the size and scope of the BBC on both political and commercial grounds. In that respect, little has changed. But the noise of these self-interested attacks has become louder, the excuses are flimsier, and the commercial imperatives behind them are even stronger – especially as the long-standing business model of print journalism is undermined by the flight of advertising revenue to online providers.

So while we should demand that the BBC rectify its corporate and governance mistakes, we should also be frank about the blatant exaggerations of crises that simply do not exist. Much more importantly, we should also focus on the real life-threatening crisis that could eventually engulf the BBC completely: the erosion of its funding base.

Funding the real crisis

As the detailed economic analysis by professors Barwise and Picard shows, the real danger for the BBC is a progressive decline in funding to the point where it is no longer capable of fulfilling its task as a comprehensive public service broadcaster. The authors note the gradual diminution of the licence fee as a proportion of total industry spending on television, projected to fall from its current 22% of the total to 18.5% by 2016.

This “salami-slicing” was seriously exacerbated by the 16% cut that the newly elected coalition government imposed in October 2010, and it is inexorably eroding the BBC’s ability to maintain its status as a major cultural force in Britain.

According to the authors, “It is not scaremongering to project that, if the current policy continues (even if the more radical proposals for scaling back the BBC are rejected), within a generation it will have been reduced to a barely relevant sideshow, the UK equivalent of PBS in America.” As well as public and consumer detriment this continuing decline will impact on the UK’s independent production sector since the commercial sector cannot make up the shortfall.

That is the real threat to the future of the BBC. If Britain wants to sustain a cultural institution which is still trusted and enjoyed by the vast majority of its own citizens while being consistently praised and admired throughout the world, we must have the political will to make the resources available. We urgently need manifesto commitments from all three major parties to guarantee that they will, after 2016, reinstate a licence fee that is index-linked to inflation. They must also commit to withdrawing from the dangerous BBC “top-slicing” strategy, which now sees the licence fee being used to fund broadband rollout and local television stations.

That agenda will not be pursued by our national or regional press. Instead, over the next 18 months, we can expect a concerted attack on the BBC’s size, funding, governance, impartiality, competence and standing in British society as anti-BBC MPs (mostly from the Conservative benches) join forces with ferociously anti-BBC national newspapers determined to undermine the BBC’s legitimacy and funding base.

During the last review of the BBC Charter in 2006, there was an unprecedented joint submission by three major UK newspaper conglomerates –- Associated Newspapers, News International, and the Telegraph Group -– which combined forces to call for a below inflation increase in the licence fee to “curtail the width of the BBC’s remit in the digital arena”. That submission was also signed by the Commercial Radio Companies Association and the Newspaper Society, representing the local and regional press.

Whether explicitly or not, that same alliance will be operating again this time around, with the same goal: a financially diminished BBC. It will not be the first time BBC supporters both inside and outside parliament (who still represent the great majority of the British public) will struggle to make themselves heard over the megaphones of BBC competitors. But if the BBC is to survive as a dynamic and thriving institution at the heart of Britain’s creative and cultural life, it might be the most important.

This is an abridged version of Steven Barnett’s chapter in a new book being published on March 1: Is the BBC in Crisis? Eds, John Mair, Richard Tait and Richard Lance Keeble

The Conversation

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

Comment, Media plurality, Media policy, Regional and local

[Oxford Media Convention] Plurality begins at home: policies for invigorating local media

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In a preview of his upcoming remarks at the Oxford Media Convention 2014, Steven Barnett, University of Westminster, shares preliminary findings from a collaborative study on hyperlocal media and argues for policy to enhance its role in sustaining media plurality. An abridged version of this post can be found at the LSE Media Policy blog.

While much of the headline debate on plurality tends to revolve around undue concentration at the national level – how to define it, how to measure it, how to prevent it – a growing local problem  risks being ignored. While local newspapers struggle with a failing business model, local radio stations centralise their newsroom operations, and fledgling local television stations are yet to demonstrate any appetite for original journalism, members of the public are increasingly starved of vital civic information. According to Press Gazette, more than 240 local newspapers closed in the seven years from 2004 to 2011 and some areas of the UK “are no longer covered by professional journalists”.

The implications for local democracy are profound. Issues of enormous relevance to citizens in their everyday lives – about their local hospitals, local schools, local transport, police forces, businesses and courts – are simply not being addressed. Local government officials, business leaders, and local politicians are not being questioned or held to account. Information required for knowledgeable participation in local elections is either not available or less reliable.

In the struggle to promote more editorial diversity and a more informed local citizenry there is, however, some room for optimism from the burgeoning number of new hyperlocal initiatives. The rise of online connectedness and broadband has made it easier for small, independent media enterprises to set themselves up and report to their local communities without massive capital outlay. The number of these sites is impossible to count precisely, but closest estimates suggest that around 500 are active in the UK.

As part of our Media Power and Plurality project at Westminster, we collaborated with Cardiff and Birmingham City universities in the UK’s first comprehensive survey of hyperlocals, with responses from around 180. While many of these are shoestring operations, more akin to a parish newsletter than hard-nosed journalism, our preliminary analysis shows that many are still capable of professional, independent local reporting. We found impressive evidence not only of important informational work but of investigative and campaigning journalism normally associated with mainstream news publishers: crusades over road safety and declining council standards, investigations over breaches of national emission limits, illicit council use of a greenfield site, and campaigns on over-spending on a local rail station development, cuts to the local youth service and plans to turn primary schools into academies.

Given the potential role of these sites in reinvigorating editorial diversity and local democracy, we should be asking serious questions about the kinds of policy interventions that would support them. Here are three, all of which have so far had little traction on the policy arena.

1. Charitable status

There is currently very limited scope for allowing journalism enterprises to secure the reputational and financial benefits that go with charitable status. According to the 2011 Charities Act, a charity must have a public purpose and be run for the public benefit. It lists 13 such purposes, two of which are potentially appropriate for local journalism: the advancement of education; and the advancement of citizenship or community development.

While the public purpose hurdles might, therefore, be negotiated at local level, the public benefit test is trickier. It is not enough simply to state or to assume that an enterprise will be beneficial; the public good has to be identifiable. This raises the spectre of finding measurable evidence that, for example, residents are better informed about local issues or more likely to participate in local elections after the launch of a local news initiative than before.

In its 2012 report on Investigative Journalism, the House of Lords Communications committee recommended that the Charity Commission “provide greater clarity and guidelines on which activities related to the media, and in particular investigative journalism, are charitable in the current state of the law”, particularly in light of the financial pressures and journalism’s democratic significance. The Charity Commission has yet to respond, but there is scope for a more relaxed approach, both in terms of its interpretation of the current legislation and – conceivably – in terms of an amendment to the Act aimed specifically at promoting local journalism.

2. Subsidies

There are already explicit and implicit subsidies for local media, a legacy of traditional print and broadcast regimes. The Community Radio Order of 2004 enables Ofcom to license not-for-profit community radio stations according to strictly defined criteria relating to “social gain”. These stations (231 by the end of 2011) receive small grants of around £15,000 out of a Community Radio Fund administered by Ofcom, which in turn comes from DCMS. That fund was worth £321,500 in 2010/11.

Given the rationale for that investment – in particular, to facilitate discussion and a better understanding of the local community – there is little sense in confining such direct subsidies to the medium of radio. It should be possible to expand both the technology scope and the pot: these are tiny amounts of money in terms of government expenditure, but with potentially massive benefits for resourcing local journalism.

Similarly, there are hidden subsidies for the national and local press both through VAT exemptions and through the regime on statutory notices. Figures from a Reuters Institute report put the value of VAT exemptions at £594m per annum in 2008 (though it’s difficult to know what proportion of that benefits the local press). In addition, the statutory duty on local councils to place notices in the local paper on planning, licensing and traffic orders is likely to be worth around £45m per year. It is surely an absurd anachronism that in the 21st century online world councils and other public bodies are obliged to use tax-payers’ money solely to advertise in local hard copy newspapers which in some geographical areas no longer exist.

3. The BBC

Finally, BBC Director General Tony Hall has indicated that partnerships – where the BBC acts as enabler rather than “senior” partner – will play an integral part of its future as the UK’s leading cultural institution. This is very different from top-slicing, which takes money away from the BBC and therefore weakens its effectiveness. At the local level, such partnership could enable those running hyperlocal sites to take advantage of BBC expertise in editorial, web design, legal advice, promotion and marketing. As with the redirection of subsidies, any such initiative would inevitably attract hostility from the major newspapers groups, and would require both central and local government support.

In fact, each of these initiatives will require serious investment of time and energy by those who are concerned about the inexorable decline in local media plurality. Policy thinking in this area – whether on Community Radio, newspaper subsidies or the role of the BBC – has always been predicated on the democratic and citizenship value of local media to their respective communities. That thinking now lags well behind real-world media activity, and takes little account of emerging forms of local and community online initiatives. It is time that changed.

See:

 

Blog, Media plurality, Media policy, Regional and local

New research: How do hyperlocals contribute to local democracy and what do they need?

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Collaborative survey asks about hyperlocals’ contribution to the UK media landscape 

Hyperlocal publishing and community websites are becoming an increasingly important feature of the UK media landscape, supplementing existing print titles and other local platforms.  In some places they may even be the only form of dedicated media coverage.

While the term ‘hyperlocal’ isn’t favoured by all, it is recognized at a governmental level, with a brief mention in the Department of Media, Culture and Sport’s recent consultation on media plurality as a “key source of information for people in specific communities”.

And new – and extensive – funding is being made available: through NESTA’s Destination Local project and the Technology Strategy Board.

However, there has been little systematic collection of data about the practice and direct needs of hyperlocal producers and consumers.

The hyperlocal strand of the Creative Citizens project at Cardiff University and Birmingham City University aims to fill this gap by looking at the emergence of neighbourhood news websites that have started to materialise in scores of communities around the UK.

These researchers have now joined forces with the media plurality project at the University of Westminster to design a research questionnaire.

The survey, supported by TalkAboutLocal, aims to understand better the nature of hyperlocal operations, and the problems or issues that those who run them are facing.

It has already been sent out to hundreds of hyperlocal sites on the TAL mailing list and in the Openly Local directory. The initial response has been very encouraging.

But we think there are more voices to hear. If you have already participated, please pass the link to fellow publishers. If not, please consider taking part – it shouldn’t take any longer than 15 minutes.

Our collaborative survey

We want to collect information about your main hyperlocal activity: it could be a website, blog, Facebook page, Facebook group, forum, Twitter feed, Tumblr, or something else. For simplicity, we use the word ‘site’ throughout the questionnaire although we will occasionally ask questions about specific media such as Facebook.

In the survey you will be asked about the way in which you run your site, the kinds of content you produce and your reach, and the support you would like in future.

This questionnaire should take around 15 minutes to complete. The data will be aggregated and anonymised which means your replies cannot be linked to you or your site’s name in any published findings.

There is a space at the end to leave your name, email and site name if you would like to be sent results and subsequent reports. Many thanks for your participation, which we believe will benefit all those involved in hyperlocal projects.

The questionnaire can be accessed at this link:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/J8XDSRF

Please do not fill in the survey twice – if you took part at the end of 2013 there is no need to do so again.

For further information, please contact:

Or leave comments and questions below!

 

Blog, Comment, Media plurality

Lords Communications Committee report on Media Plurality: two cheers

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The House of Lords communications select committee publishes its report on media plurality today [Tuesday]. While there are a few holes in its policy approach, the recommendations provide a practical basis for a long overdue upheaval of the UK’s plurality framework, argues Professor Steven Barnett

There are two ways of looking at the House of Lords select committee’s report on Media Plurality, published today. The less charitable view is that it has ducked the crucial issue of how Parliament should lay down clear, unambiguous guidelines to prevent undue concentrations of media power. In doing so, it leaves a hole in the central plank of its proposals for reform, and breaches the very specific advice given in evidence by Chris Goodall, a former Competition Commissioner now working with Enders Analysis: “Whatever you decide to propose, I hope you leave no discretion to anybody.”

The more charitable – and probably fairer – view is that the report has provided both the philosophical and practical basis for a long overdue upheaval of Britain’s plurality framework. Since the positives outnumber the negatives, I will start with those.

From the beginning, there is a welcome and unambiguous declaration about the need for a dedicated plurality policy within a democratic society. In an important passage which sets the context for the rest of the report, there is a clear exposition of why plurality cannot simply be left to the market or to competition policy: “we believe that determining clear demarcation lines between plurality and competition policy is crucial”.

There is also common sense and restraint in dealing with the BBC, where the committee rejects any suggestion that the BBC should be subjected to plurality “control measures” from outside its own regulator. It floats the idea of a more creative role for the BBC, in which the next Charter might give it explicit responsibility “to stimulate consumption of diverse viewpoints from different external sources”. That is wholly in line with Director General Tony Hall’s recent pronouncements about the BBC’s potential contribution to fostering partnerships. Moreover, in a powerful rejection of top-slicing, the committee urges Government “to support our view that the licence fee should be for the BBC alone”.

Revamped framework

But the meat of this report lies in its suggestions for revamping the plurality framework. In what they call “the centre-piece of our approach”, the committee recommends a statutory periodic review of plurality, to be undertaken by Ofcom every 4-5 years. This idea was first floated by Ofcom itself, and is a wholly laudable and desirable proposal measure designed to account for organic growth in a dynamic and fast-changing market. At the same time, the committee recommends keeping the “transactional” review to be triggered – as now – by specific merger or acquisition activity.

Perhaps the most intriguing set of recommendations is the proposed regime for who should make the ultimate decision, with different approaches being advocated for the two types of review. For periodic reviews, a final decision would rest with the Secretary of State. Ofcom would rate any concerns across or within media markets (including the so-called digital intermediaries such as Google) on a three point scale from moderate to high to severe. Where it finds “immediate and pressing concerns resulting from organic change”, the report even allows for Ofcom to order divestment although it warns that the bar should be high, and would be subject to offers of mitigation. Moreover, with the final recommendations resting with a cabinet minister, it could of course still be overturned.

For transactional reviews, however, the final decision would rest with Ofcom. This is the most radical part of the report, including recommendations for “a new statutory responsibility for the assessment of a transaction’s impact on plurality”. It is a role for Ofcom which stems directly from the committee’s opening argument that competition policy and plurality policy are entirely separate concepts and that “a plurality assessment must focus on the interest of the citizen”. While the competition authorities would still have a role in assessing the competition aspects of a transaction, it would ultimately be left to the Ofcom board to reach a “Public Interest Decision” to resolve any conflict. The committee have therefore taken the perfectly logical view that, since decisions on plurality are ultimately about citizenship and democracy, the final decision should rest with the body which has a statutory duty to promote the interests of citizens as well as consumers.

Why no final decision on transactional reviews for the Secretary of State? Because, says the committee – clearly influenced by the evidence of Jeremy Hunt to Leveson as well as several witnesses to their own enquiry – “it is impossible for the Secretary of State to [make that decision] without the appearance of being influenced by political motives”.  There is some logic in making this distinction between periodic and transactional reviews, though the same political considerations will no doubt apply equally to any divestment recommendations stemming from organic growth.

Ofcom’s discretion

All those elegantly argued and positive recommendations are slightly diminished by the huge amount of discretion left to Ofcom and the measurement process in carrying out either type of review. Parliament should, says the report, lay down guidance for a new framework but “there should be flexibility for Ofcom to interpret statutory guidance, design the assessment framework and select appropriate metrics according to the circumstances at the time of the review”.  Although the report is not specific about the guiding framework for periodic reviews, it is essentially based around ensuring a sufficient diversity of viewpoints and preventing too much editorial influence. For transactions, it follows the same guiding principles and concludes that negative decisions should be based on the likelihood of a “material and unacceptable lessening of plurality”.

While Parliament’s role in providing a clear framework is essential, the discretion left to Ofcom to interpret that guidance, design an appropriate assessment framework and select metrics leaves it wide open to accusations of selective and subjective approaches. The biggest media companies are notoriously litigious; it is difficult to see either kind of review – if it results in recommendations for divestment or prevention of a transaction – avoiding lengthy legal challenges and judicial reviews.

Perhaps that is the nature of the plurality beast, and no set of proposals was ever going to fulfil what is by definition a difficult and contested policy aim. But while I sympathise with the sentiment that “a concept as complex as plurality can [not] legitimately be reduced down to one (measure)” – and indeed that proposals around behavioural remedies raise as many questions as they answer – I worry that a 21st Century Fox bid for Sky or a Google bid for ITV or an Associated Newspapers bid for the Independent would all receive an eventual green light whatever creative combination of metrics might be cooked up by Ofcom.

Local initiatives?

One further aspect of the report is disappointing. Although it mentions in passing the importance of new initiatives and interventions to stimulate media enterprises, particularly at the local level, there is little attention paid to the different creative approaches that might be feasible or the potentially enabling role of government policy. Apart from reiterating the charitable funding idea raised in a previous report, there is a missed opportunity to call for new approaches along the lines of existing small grants to Community Radio, or allowing hyperlocal sites to share revenue from statutory notices.

These, plus other ideas for generating revenue to help boost new local media, could have been included as complementary initiatives to the reformed regime for plurality reviews. Overall, however, we should certainly welcome a report which puts the citizen and Ofcom firmly at the centre of a new plurality regime.

Steven Barnett is Professor of Communications at the University Westminster, and is currently leading an AHRC funded project into Plurality and Media Power. He acted as specialist adviser to the Lords select committee on four earlier inquiries.

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.