Tag Archive for media reform coalition

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

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.

Dave Boyle: Addressing the decline of local media – a response to Theresa May

Dave Boyle

It was a shame that in her recent intervention on the subject of local newspapers, Home Secretary Theresa May chose to use the opportunity to indulge in every government minister’s favourite sport of bashing the BBC.

In seeking to implicate the BBC in the decline of local media when speaking to the Society of Editors, she flattered her audience by avoiding the uncomfortable reality.

The BBC does, of course, have strong regional coverage, but this in no way can be said to be local in any meaningful sense of the word; if viewers and listeners and website readers are happy enough with what the BBC produces, then the real problem is that local media has been producing a fully-featured product for generations of people who would have been quite happy with the odd snippet.

It was a shame that May ignored the elephant in the room, because she has direct experience of it. In her remarks, she praised the Maidenhead Advertiser’s editorial freedom, but didn’t talk about its economic and strategic independence.

The paper, like others in the Bayliss group, were moved into a trust in 1962 by their founding family of owners, to ensure that they remained independent and locally focussed. They knew that they couldn’t rely on benevolent, wealthy people to guarantee the concern with local matters and undertook to make them unavailable for sale to anyone else.

Contrast that with the reality in the majority of the UK, where titles have been aggregated into 4 major groups, where decisions with serious impact on local community and civic life are made by people looking at spreadsheets hundreds of miles away for the benefit of people of shareholders thousands of miles away.

Papers merging content or merging titles, groups closing papers because they’ve squeezed all they can from them, editors being told to sack hundreds of journalists in the name of efficiency, whilst working those that remain ever harder with the resulting growth of churnalism. (The NUJ’s Chris Morley writes brilliantly about this here.)

If May wanted to give communities everywhere the kind of service that she and her constituents enjoy, she would do better to look to guarantee local ownership away from remote and distant groups and ensure it was in the hands of people who cared passionately about the ability of the local media to hold their councils and MPs to account.

One route would be the kind of ownership in trust enjoyed in Maidenhead (or The Guardian and Observer), But whilst that might protect a publication, it doesn’t enhance it, which is where community ownership would work much better, opening up the press to genuine engagement and control by local people (as well as helping the balance sheet by bringing new capital and revenue in the form of membership).

This is – slowly – happening, but Ministers who care about this can help by ensuring local communities get the chance to control the destiny of their local media by giving them a right to operate local media wherever the current owners wish to close or merge a title or reduce locally generated content below a certain level, or even better, a right to buy a paper if they can meet an agreed and independently verified fair price.

Both would do so much more than blaming the BBC, which is the equivalent of treating the very serious issue of ensuring journalism survives in local communities with leeches.

Dave Boyle is a researcher, writer and business consultant, who wrote Good News: A Co-operative Solution to the Media Crisis and organised the Carnegie UK Trust / Co-operatives UK programme ‘Make Your Local News Work‘. He blogs at daveboyle.net and on twitter as @theboyler.

This post originally appeared on the Media Reform Coalition website.