In the last few weeks we’ve been running a special series on media plurality with the LSE Media Policy Project. Here’s a list of the featured posts, from first to last. Please feel free to comment under the individual posts, and if you would like to contribute to the blog in the new year, please email j.townend@westminster.ac.uk.
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.
[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.
As part of our joint series on media plurality with the LSE Media Policy Project, Mike Harris, head of advocacy at Index on Censorship, argues that action is urgently needed to protect pluralism in Europe.
Currently the EU does not have the legal competence to act in this area [media plurality] as part of its normal business. In practice, our role involves naming and shaming countries ad hoc, as issues arise. I am quite willing to continue to exercise that political pressure on Member States that risk violating our common values. But there’s merit in a more principled way forward
— Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes
Last week, Index on Censorship released its report ‘Time to step up: The EU and freedom of expression’ the first analysis of how the EU protects freedom of expression within the union but also externally in its near-neighbourhood and beyond. Attention was given to our call for the EU to do more to protect whistle-blowers after the failure of EU member states to give (or even consider to give) asylum to Edward Snowden, but the report also identified a number of significant challenges to media freedom within the European Union, in particular the growing problem of media ownership patterns that are reducing media plurality.
European plurality standards
The media in the EU is more concentrated than the media in North America even after taking into account population, geographical size and income. In fact, by global standards, media concentration in the EU is high indeed. This would perhaps be acceptable if the EU was merely a trading bloc, but it is isn’t. As the report reiterates, the EU is a broader project with a clear aspiration to protect and defend human rights.
This is a legal pre-requisite of membership and as the Treaty of Lisbon has made the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights legally binding, now an on-going commitment by member states. Every European Union member state has ratified the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and has committed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Media plurality is an area the report argues where the European Commission has competency. Yet, the commission has until now left the promotion of media plurality up to member states. Now that this approach has been found wanting, the Commission is and needs to rethink its approach.
The Italian example
Italy is the most egregious example of an EU member state failing to protect media plurality. The famous Italian “anomaly” had the country’s then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi exerting influence over the state broadcaster (which in turn was mandated by law to carry his political party’s views) alongside his personal ownership of the country’s largest television private television and advertising companies. The Gasperri Law of 2004 that was supposed to prevent media concentration may according to the OSCE have helped to preserve them.
While the European Parliament condemned Berlusconi’s personal influence over nearly 80% of the Italian television media, the Commission did not respond until July 2010 where it acted to remove restrictions placed on Sky Italia that prevented the satellite broadcaster from moving into terrestrial television.
Concentration throughout Europe
Italy is not the only EU member state where media ownership patterns have undermined plurality. The Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom demonstrated this year that strong media concentrations can be seen across the EU with large media groups holding ownership of a significant share of the domestic media in many member states. These media concentrations are significantly higher than the equivalent US figures.
The internet was supposed to drive competition in the media market, yet the Centre found the most concentration was in the online market. The reduction of the cost for new entrants to enter the media market facilitated by the internet was supposed to improve media plurality. There is alternative evidence to suggest this is happening.
Those who read their news in print in the UK, on average read 1.26 different newspapers; those who read newspapers online read 3.46 news websites. On the other hand, the convergence of TV stations, online portals and newspapers may produce even bigger media corporations[1]. New entrants to the market such as VICE Magazine and the Huffington Post have sold significant shares of their business to existing media corporations.
This process has not gone unnoticed by the Commission, with the independent High Level Group on Media Freedom and Pluralism calling for digital intermediaries, including app stores, news aggregators, search engines and social networks, to be included in assessments of media plurality. The Reuters Institute is also concerned and has called for digital intermediaries to be required to “guarantee that no news content or supplier will be blocked or refused access”.
Match commitments with action
In a number of areas, the Index report has found the EU’s member states to be failing in their duty to protect freedom of expression adequately. Media plurality is one such area where a clear commitment by member states has not been matched by action from either the states themselves, or the European Commission. With increasing digital and media convergence, the role of the Commission will be crucial for the protection of media plurality. Unless the Commission is ready and prepared to act this convergence could have a significant impact on the range of opinions and views that European citizens are exposed to, with a chilling effect on freedom of expression in Europe. Italy may not be the anomaly in the near-future.
You can follow Mike on Twitter here: @mjrharris
[1] p.165, Lawrence Lessig, ‘Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity” (Penguin, 2004)
In response to LSE Media Policy Project’s policy brief on modelling proposed media ownership limits [PDF], Rob Kenny of Communications Chambers counters one of the report’s conclusions and explains why he thinks such limits would have significant impact on the media market. This is the latest post in our joint series with the LSE Media Policy Project.
Last week Justin Schlosberg (of Birkbeck, University of London and the Media Reform Coalition) and I debated media plurality issues at an LSE event. We agreed (I think) on the objectives of media plurality, but had very different views on the merits and form of regulatory intervention.
At the event Justin presented a paper Modelling Media Ownership Limits. This paper contains much useful material, but I write now to question one of its conclusions.
The paper sets out various proposed media ownership caps to support plurality, and their likely impact. For brevity I will focus on the caps proposed by the Media Reform Coalition (MRC), which are typical. In brief, they are:
Justin’s paper suggests that “the impact on markets [of these caps] would be relatively minor”. However, this seems a bold claim.
Selling off the Sun and the Mail?
Both the Mail and the Sun have shares of the national newspaper market of over 20%. Thus under the MRC’s rules, both these titles would need to be publicly floated as independent entities. It is not at all clear that there is much public demand for the shares of new newspaper companies, particularly ones that would have no ‘take over premium’, since they could never be acquired. Thus the value placed by the public markets on a new ‘Sun PLC’ or ‘Mail PLC’ might be well below its true value. Moreover, there would be the listing costs to be borne, and the future costs of being a public company. Ultimately these would all be costs borne by the current owner (since they would be factored into the initial sales price). The current owner would also face the loss of any synergies with the rest of the group, and the intangible costs of loss of control.
What would a rational owner do when faced with such a forced sale? Presumably seek to avoid it by bringing the title’s share down below the 20% mark – relatively easily done through a price increase (which would keep revenues flowing but reduce circulation). The result would be a further reduction in newspaper readership. Moreover, it would severely discourage any future investment in those titles that might once again increase their share, and trigger an enforce sale.
Nor do the problems end there – if the Sun and the Mail reduced their share, then someone else would gain it. The Mirror could easily find itself close to or above the 20% share mark, forcing it to be spun out, or potentially to reduce its own circulation to avoid that fate. There is a clear risk of a vicious circle, and at minimum an acceleration of the already alarming decline in newspaper circulation.
Putting Sky News out of business?
Serious though the implications for newspapers are from a ‘20% rule’, they are far from the most drastic consequences. Because of Sky’s provision of wholesale radio news, the paper suggests that Sky News would fail the 20% test. However, it is hard to imagine Sky News being viable as an independent company – it is substantially loss making. In such cases the paper allows that “an equity carve-out or the transferral of voting rights from shareholders to employees” would be appropriate. It is not clear what is meant by an equity carve out – who would be interested in owning any number of shares that had no prospect of paying dividends, but rather required constant subsidies?
Conceivably voting rights could be transferred to employees, but would this have any practical benefit? If a Sky News remained utterly dependent on its parent for financial support – and by extension, the employees remained dependent on the goodwill of the parent for their jobs – how much real editorial independence would they have? Indeed, why would we expect the parent to continue to support a loss making, uncontrolled entity? Ownership regulations could put Sky News’ life at stake.
Within wholesale TV news, ITN is close to a 20% share – a relatively small drop in BBC consumption or the disappearance of Sky News could push it over the threshold. Once again, there are real concerns whether an independent ITN would be viable as a public company. In 2012 it made a pre-tax profit of just £1.5m, which contrasts to its net liabilities of £60m – without the support of its parents, it could well be bankrupt.
Thus the rules proposed by MRC could jeopardise the future of some leading news providers, accelerate the decline of newspaper circulations and act as a major disincentive to investment. It is hard to reconcile these significant risks with a view that the rules’ impact would be “relatively minor”.
In 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
In the next post in our Media Plurality Series curated together with the LSE Media Policy Project, Petros Iosifidis of City University London looks at developments at the European level and calls for action to set criteria for two kinds of measurement mechanisms.
The rationale for public intervention on media ownership is twofold: to prevent excessive media concentration and the accumulation of power in the hands of a few, and to promote media pluralism (the presence of a number of different and independent voices) and diversity in the media (different political opinions and representations of culture within the media). It has long been argued that traditional conglomerates like News Corporation and Disney can endanger a pluralistic, competitive media system, but pluralism debates have gained momentum in recent years with the increasing power of ‘new’ global giants, such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. There has been a hot debate at the EU level as to whether there should be a Europe-wide intervention to curb the power of such media companies or whether this can be accomplished at the Member State level.
Previous action
During the 1980s and 1990s, following repeated requests by the European Parliament, the European Commission attempted to implement media ownership regulation across Europe. This was unsuccessful because no agreement could be reached on the unit of measuring media concentration and pluralism. In the 1990s, following the debate on media concentration at the European level (initiated by the EU 1992 Green Paper Pluralism and Media Concentration in the Internal Market), the view emerged that it was possible to measure ‘influence’ exerted by applying audience-based criteria (readership, audience reach, viewing or listenership share).
The argument was that while financial units (companies’ market share, shares of assets, value-added, sales, advertising revenue) are closer to the traditional systems of concentration measurement, which permit assessment of media market concentration or even the existence of a dominant position, audience-based methods might be more effective for the measurement of influence in the market-place.
More recently, the Independent Study on Indicators for Media Pluralism in the Member States – Towards a Risk-Based Approach (2009) split the concept of pluralism into three normative dimensions – political, cultural, and demographic pluralism – as well as three operational dimensions – pluralism of media ownership or control, pluralism of media types, and genres. While the study urges the application of the same analytical framework in all Member States to ensure comparability of results obtained, it is not a call for a harmonization of policies. Neelie Kroes, the current EU Commissioner in charge of media, established two advisory groups to examine concentration and pluralism: the High Level Group on Media Freedom and Pluralism and the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom. Both produced reports in 2013 calling for action to protect media pluralism and media freedom.
The first step: a common definition
The debate on media pluralism has been kept alive with the commissioning of independent studies and reviews, but there has been little sign of action. The prevailing notion is that pluralism can be tackled adequately at a Member State level, because a pan-Europe approach could jeopardise national press and broadcasting traditions that are often connected to specific political histories, cultures and language traditions.
There have been initiatives to establish some common European-wide ways of assessing media plurality, the most ambitious of which is probably the Commission’s efforts to implement a Media Pluralism Monitor. However, reaching agreements around the right methods of measuring media concentration and pluralism has proven to be problematic. The two different sets of methods illustrated above (audience and revenue -based) are said to correspond to two levels of measurement of concentration in the information market: the political/cultural or pluralism, and the economic or concentration of resources. It is argued that audience-based methods are coherent with the cultural/political standpoint and that revenue-based methods are close to the traditional systems of concentration measurement. However, due to the close relationship between economic power and pluralism, audience figures could also measure market power.
In fact, audience-based measures are a form of market share measurement, which is a classic economic measurement. ‘Audience’ are the equivalent of measuring sales (that is, market share), which is a classic economic measure of power. Therefore, the distinction between economic measures and cultural/political measures is irrelevant. Both sets of media market measurement assess market power.
In the absence of a direct way of establishing ‘impact’, crude measures based on market power (criteria about market structure) are used instead. And what the audience and revenue-based methods are doing is in fact that – they evaluate market power. So, both sets of criteria should be used. Regulatory agencies should come up with clear measurement criteria in order to understand fully and eventually curb media power across Europe. After all, Europe-wide networks of regulators, such as EPRA (European Platform of Regulatory Authorities) and BEREC (Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications), have their hands on data from both types of measures. Inertia is not justified as it will almost certainly result in further consolidation.
Petros Iosifidis, along with his co-editors, will be launching a new book series on Global Media Policy and Business at an afternoon event on 17 December, 2013 at City University London.
In the second post of our media plurality series, co-hosted with the LSE Media Policy Project, Justin Schlosberg of Birkbeck, University of London discusses his latest research that examined civil society proposals for media plurality measures and models. He argues that such limits and thresholds could limit media power with minimal impact on the market.
What was exposed beyond any doubt at the Leveson Inquiry hearings was the scope of informal access to ministers enjoyed by major media groups, and their willingness to use those channels to ‘communicate’ regularly and intensely in the build up to plurality decisions. We now know that Jeremy Hunt at best misled Parliament about the personal contact he had with News Corp lobbyist Fred Michel in 2011, during the supposedly ‘transparent’ process of deliberation over News Corp’s bid to buy out BSkyB. That was over and above the more substantive contact between his office and News Corp revealed to Leveson in a series of email exchanges. It is for this reason that the majority of civil society groups – and indeed the majority of the public – have come out strongly in favour of fixed ownership limits as a means of restoring transparency and accountability to plurality policy.
“Clear bright lines” are not “blunt instruments”
Ofcom – in line with commercial media interests – have suggested the opposite: that the power to decide when and how to act on plurality should instead remain with ministers. The arguments underpinning this view rest on a number of shaky assumptions. For one thing, it is often taken for granted that fixed ownership limits are ‘blunt instruments’: that they can unduly penalise groups who merely innovate or survive whilst leaving others untouched who are no less impacting on public conversation.
The sub-text here is that measures upon which ownership limits would be based (such as consumption or revenue metrics) cannot take account of contextual factors which can determine a media group’s ‘share of voice’ and may not be detectable through quantitative indicators of market share. What’s more, the argument goes, media markets are particularly dynamic and subject to rapid change which a static system of ownership limits would be ill-equipped to respond to.
These arguments fail to address the nuances of proposals for ownership limits, many of which stipulate lower and upper thresholds triggering a range of remedies according to specific circumstances and market conditions. My examination of six non-industry proposals[1] submitted to the Lords Select Committee on Communications inquiry into the issue found the following to be the most common:
A Possible consensual position based on most common positions in civil society responses
The concept of ‘absolute limits’ is often assumed to denote a market share threshold at which companies would be forced to either divest or close down. But in fact, we can look at absolute or ‘ceiling’ limits in two distinct ways: an outright prohibition on any group or company that breaches the limit, or a prohibition on any controlling interest within a company that breaches the limit (Ofcom has already provided detailed guidance on how to determine a controlling interest in media companies).
If the latter framework is accepted for remedies in appropriate circumstances (i.e. where straightforward divestment would threaten the viability of a given title as a going concern), there is little basis on which to assert that fixed limits will act as deterrents to innovation of growth. And provided that any system of fixed limits is subject to regular periodic review, there is no reason why ‘clear bright lines’ in plurality policy cannot offer both flexibility and certainty so desired by the industry and Ofcom.
Kicking off our joint media plurality series with the LSE Media Policy Project, University of Westminster’s Steven Barnett argues that the “share of references” method of measuring media power is not sufficient.
At the heart of any discussion about plurality and media ownership lies the concept of power: for democracy to function properly, the exercise of power over public opinion, law-makers, opinion-formers and elite decision-makers must be properly distributed and not become concentrated in a small group of individuals or organisations.
Principles of media power
This essentially abstract notion of media power was implicitly addressed by the communications regulator Ofcom in its advice to the Culture Secretary on “Measuring media plurality” in June 2012. It defined plurality with reference to what it called “desired outcomes of a plural market” and suggested two overarching principles:
• Ensuring there is a diversity of viewpoints available and consumed across and within media enterprises.
• Preventing any one media owner or voice having too much influence over public opinion and the political agenda.
These principles were adopted by the government in its consultation on Media, Ownership and Plurality in July 2013 and are generally accepted as a sensible interpretation of the democratic underpinnings of media plurality. They encapsulate the notion of power – over dissemination of news and opinion as well as over hearts and minds – and provide the philosophical basis for intervention in the market to promote a healthy and dynamic democracy.
Measuring media power – Ofcom’s approach
In order to gauge the nature and proportionality of that intervention – at what level concentration becomes dangerous and raises issues of democratically unacceptable power – it is necessary to generate some objective and justiciable criteria. Not only is this important for abstract reasons around justice and fairness, it is also essential for providing clarity to commercial enterprises making vital investment, employment and expansion decisions.
In an era when media sectors were discrete, convergence did not exist and there was little or no cross-ownership, it was relatively easy to impose sectoral limits by audience consumption: traditionally (though not necessarily logically) share of TV viewing, share of newspaper circulation, and share of radio listening. With convergent technologies and cross-ownership now an established fact, we need some kind of “currency” which permits measurement across sectoral boundaries.
Only one such currency has so far been proposed: Ofcom’s “Share of References”. In its June 2012 advice to government, Ofcom elaborated on the Share of References scheme it had first employed for its public interest test of News Corp’s proposed takeover of BSkyB in 2010. That scheme has never really been interrogated as a satisfactory proxy for measuring media power, despite its potential drawbacks.
A full explanation of how the scheme works is contained in Ofcom’s news consumption report published in September 2013. Briefly, share of references is calculated by asking respondents in a representative survey which sources of news they use “nowadays”, and how frequently. Each mention is counted separately and the figures are aggregated, culminating in a share for each news provider expressed as a proportion of all references for all news sources. In Ofcom’s words: “This produces a cross-media metric with consistent methodology and a consistent definition of news across all platforms.”
Share of References: why it is problematic
While superficially offering a solution to the perennial conundrum of cross-media measurement, this metric suffers from one fundamental flaw: by focussing entirely on consumption, it is bound by default to exaggerate the role of television and, in doing so, to distort the true picture of how media power is distributed in the UK.
In pure consumption terms, television’s dominance is clear. According to Ofcom’s 2013 News Consumption report, when asked about their news sources nowadays, 78% said television, 40% newspapers, 35% radio and 32% the internet. This ratio is a wholly predictable function of television’s ubiquity and accessibility, and of course the average 28 hours of weekly viewing. But does that really equate to power?
In three important respects, I believe this metric overstates the power of broadcast media and understates the power of the printed word, whether in hard copy or online.
First, it takes no account of the power to persuade, or the opinion-forming impact of print and online media. The significance of “impact” was recognised by Ofcom in its 2012 advice to government, and in particular the significant influence which could be exerted by print media’s partiality and its agenda-setting role. However, Ofcom’s ideas for possible measurement “proxies” – importance, impartiality and quality of news source – all favour the television medium despite being, by their own admission, imperfect substitutes.
Impassioned, one-sided argument is an integral and powerful element of a free press. Our national newspapers are highly partisan, and the popular press in particular often elides news and comment. While we cannot measure to what extent such editorialising drives popular opinion, intuitively a one-sided, opinionated approach will carry more weight than a carefully balanced approach. And yet the power to exercise that passion and thus to influence hearts and minds is entirely absent from this calculation.
Second, it takes no account of the power to set news agendas. Rigorous research is lacking, but there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that our national press plays a hugely important role in driving news agendas. Broadcast newsrooms are usually immersed in mountains of newsprint, and informal conversations with BBC journalists reveal a high level of editorial anxiety when bulletins are not covering a story which has featured prominently in the press.
Then there are the newspaper reviews: twice each evening on Sky and BBC News channels, at the end of every edition of Newsnight, on Sunday morning’s Andrew Marr show, and frequently mentioned on the Daily Politics and the Today programme. Both Sky and the BBC tweet the front pages of next day’s national newspapers every evening.
Third, it takes no account of the power to influence policy makers – parliamentarians, think tankers, civil servants, regulators. In his 2013 book Democracy Under Attack, former Guardian journalist Malcolm Dean published a meticulously researched account of how this press-driven influence has operated in a number of social policy areas. Moreover, evidence to module 3 of the Leveson Inquiry provided abundant evidence of how unduly powerful media corporations exert pressure on politicians and their policy-making. Four successive prime ministers admitted, either implicitly or explicitly, that they were bound too closely to News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch. That kind of power cannot be measured through share of references.
The conclusion is straightforward, even if the ramifications are not. It is inherent in Ofcom’s approach that television’s penetration and popularity equates to power. But that is an assumption which is at best unproven and at worst seriously misleading. If we adopt their Share of References schema uncritically, we may miss dangerous concentrations of power elsewhere. We therefore need to find ways of assessing media power in a broader sense than this limited cross-metrics approach will allow.
This post is adapted from a presentation to the Westminster Media Forum seminar on media plurality, 27 November 2013.
Since the publication of the Leveson Inquiry report just over a year ago, the formation of a new self-regulatory body for the press has dominated the policy debate about its implementation. However, Inquiry proceedings and the report’s recommendations also highlighted another important area for policy reform: the control and measurement of media plurality and ownership.
Although outside the limelight, policymakers have paid attention to Lord Justice Leveson’s suggestions in this area. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) launched a media plurality consultation on 31 July and is expected to respond in the coming months. The House of Lords Select Committee on Communications also just finished hearing evidence in its inquiry on the same issue. The time seems ripe for a thorough debate leading to possible reform of media plurality policy, assuming the consultation and inquiry are not just going through the motions.
In the interest of opening up the debate beyond Whitehall and Parliament, the LSE Media Policy Project and the University of Westminster’s Media Power and Plurality project have teamed up to produce a special blog series on media plurality. The series of posts will be jointly curated by Sally Broughton Micova (LSE MPP) and Judith Townend (University of Westminster) and will appear on both blogs.
Media plurality policy is not just about ownership limits and concentration. Cross-media ownership rules and other competition based-policies are challenged by convergence within media industries. At the same time, changing audience and advertising patterns are threatening traditional business models.
In this series authors will cover issues such as the implications of convergence, options for stimulating plurality in the current environment, and the mechanisms with which to measure ownership and plurality.
There will also be discussion of some of the specific proposals that have been made to the inquiries, which are expected to report early next year.
The series has no set number of posts, and we would be happy to accept further contributions, so please feel free to get in touch with us at LSE MPP or the Westminster Media Power and Plurality project with your ideas. And, of course, you can join the debate in the comment section beneath the posts, or on Twitter: @LSEMediaPolicy and @mediaplurality.