Tag Archive for ofcom

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

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.

 

Recommendations on plurality to the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications

After wide-ranging discussion at a seminar at the University of Westminster involving leading figures in media policy, law and regulation, a group of academics reached agreement on a number of policy reforms. Our recommendations, set out below, were sent for consideration to the House of Lords select committee inquiry on media plurality, which is due to report in January 2014.

[A more detailed overview of the discussion is available to download here – PDF]

 

  • There should be periodic plurality reviews more often than those proposed by Ofcom.
  • The scope of media involved in such reviews – and in the current PI/merger regime – should be broadened and not tied to old technologies.
  • A sliding scale of market concentration (with soft rather than hard caps) should  be considered, with discretion to impose behavioural remedies on those with the largest share.
  • Parliament needs to set guidance on sufficiency, and on regulatory discretion.
  • Decision-making discretion on individual mergers or whether a PI inquiry has been triggered should be invested in an independent board/body rather than Secretary of State.
  • That might be a statutory Board of Ofcom, of equivalent status to the Content Board.
  • Data gaps in relation to measurement need to be addressed by Ofcom.
  • Plurality also needs financial support. Ideas might include some kind of consolidated fund, subject to contestable funding bids for media start-ups in local, regional areas.
  • New ideas for revenue-raising should also be considered, based on media subsidies and transfer of resources (within reason) from new technology companies which have benefited from the creativity/journalism of others.
  • Ways of harnessing BBC expertise should be sought without top-slicing the licence fee.

 

Steven Barnett, Professor of Communications, University of Westminster

Natalie Fenton, Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London

Tom Gibbons, Professor of Law, University of Manchester

Peter Humphreys, Professor of Politics, University of Manchester

Martin Moore, Director, Media Standards Trust

Horatio Mortimer, Consultant, Sovereign Strategy

Stewart Purvis, Professor of Journalism, City University London

Justin Schlosberg, Lecturer in Journalism and Media, Birkbeck, University of London

Damian Tambini, Director, LSE Media Policy Project

Judith Townend, Research Associate, University of Westminster

Lorna Woods, Professor of Law, University of Essex

Media Plurality Series: Is Ofcom’s ‘Share of References’ scheme fit for measuring media power? – Steven Barnett

steven_barnettKicking 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.