The once commercially strong US television networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) long ago lost their independence. NBC is owned by General Electric (GE), ABC is part of Disney and CBS is owned by Viacom. GE, a multinational technology and services conglomerate, was ranked by Forbes in 2009 as the worldís largest company, and Disney and Viacom are amongst the top five global media groups.

A really good account of the impact of corporate control on journalism is The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest by David Croteau and William Hoynes (Pine Forge Press 2001). In particular, their chapter 'How Business Strategy Shapes Media Content' has some excellent examples of how 'censorship, and broader constraints on the media' are more likely to come from corporations for economic purposes than from governments for purely political purposes.í (p162) It is worth reading to give context to this recent story.

The New York Times (August 1 2009) carried a remarkable story, 'Voices from above silence a cable TV feud'.

The strange thing was that the journalist didn't really analyse the wider significance of the story, which highlights the damage corporate control of news can do. At the end of 2005 Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, the cable news channel, began savaging Bill O'Reilly of the Fox News Channel on the MSNBC programme Countdown which competes with the two other cable news channels CNN and Fox in the prime time 8.00pm slot. (You can get a sense of the way Olbermann treats the targets he attacks here.)

O'Reilly in turn led an exceptionally hostile campaign against GE, the parent company of MSNBC and the TV network NBC, targeting in particular the GE chairman, Jeffrey Immelt. In 2007 OíReilly had a producer ambush Immelt and ask about GE's business in Iran, and the following year a shareholder's meeting was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of O'Reilly's producers).

The New York Times story describes how, at a 'summit meeting' the CEOs of News Corporation and GE met in May this year to engineer an end to the 'feud' between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox's Bill O'Reilly. Murdoch and Immelt wanted the agreement because they believed the feud was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corporation. As a result, since June 1 when the deal took effect, O'Reilly's attacks on the corporate activities of GE or Olbermann's criticisms of O'Reilly and Fox News have ceased.

Glenn Greenwald has covered the case, which he describes as 'one of the most blatant examples yet of pernicious corporate control over Americaís journalism', for the US online journal, Salon.

As we move towards the Media For All conference on 31 October in London we will publish other case studies. We also invite you to send in your own case studies and contribute to the policy discussion.

Granville Williams
Project Director
Media Ownership in the Age of Convergence

I am reading Suze Rotolo's A Freewheelin' Time (writes Granville Williams), her memoir about her time with Bob Dylan during the artistic and political ferment in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. Her parents, Pete and Mary Rotolo, were in the Communist Party, and there is a lovely picture of her mum on the stump for Vito Marcantonio, Harlem congressman with the American Labor Party.

Suze Rotolo is good on the impact of McCarthyism on US society and media and reading the book spurred me to listen again to the CDs from Bob Dylan's The Bootleg Series Vols 1-3 and in particular 'Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues'. This is the song which the record company Columbia pulled from The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) for fear of a libel suit. Dylan was also booked for the Ed Sullivan Show and he walked out when a CBS executive prevented him from singing the song. (Edward R. Murrow also worked for CBS and it was his March 1954 See It Now programme, 'A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy', which attacked McCarthy, to the discomfort of CBS top brass). However a decade later network television and Hollywood were still under the influence of the McCarthy era blacklist which prevented entertainers with alleged communist affiliation from appearing on American TV or in films.

Information is an Essential Public Good

America was called into being by a journalist from Thetford.

Months before the shot heard ‘round the world' was fired at Concord in Massachusetts...

More than a year before our American Declaration of Independence was authored by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine outlined the vision of an enlightened America as “the essence of liberty.”

We have fallen a tad short of that goal during the 233 years of the experiment.

But we have, when we are honest with ourselves, always understood the essential elements of liberty.

These were outlined by Paine and his comrade James Madison.

Madison, the great guardian of the revolutionary impulse, explained, “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both.”

So there you have it.

The purpose of anti-imperialist rebels of1776 who threw off their colonial overlords, who rejected the divine right of kings and the specific authority of King Georg III, was popular government – democracy, where citizens are not merely the governed but their own governors.

The founders of the American experiment were men of the enlightenment who understood and believed in structures and systems: Put the right structures and systems in place, so the theory went, and America would be a democratic republic. Fail in that task, fall short of that responsibility, and democracy would be the promise never achieved.

So how then do we give power to the people?

Madison said it: Popular information and the means of acquiring it.

Stop there. Take that concept, take that principle, in.

For there to be popular government, for there to be democracy, the first and essential element is the assurance that citizens will have information and the means of acquiring it.

Without information, gathered with the purpose of informing and enlightening citizens, packaged in a form that can be easily consumed and used, distributed widely enough so that all have access, there can be no popular governance.

Let us stop and take in the most basic lesson, the most basic message, of two centuries – and for those of us who see the roots of American revolution in British revolt: of a millennium of rebellion against unaccountable authority – the essential understanding is that for people to have power, they MUST have information.

And that information must come not as a cacophony but in a form that is useful, that serves citizenship, that underpins and defends the democratic ideal.

Popular information, gathered and distributed in a form that serves citizenship and democracy, is a public good.

In America, as in Britain, we assumed the market would provide that public good.

It was a bad assumption.

Our media system, as it is currently organized, has failed repeatedly in the past decade to meet the standards established by Paine and Madison.

Our consolidated and dysfunctional major media so inadequately covered the 2000 presidential election and its aftermath that we allowed that presidency to be handed to the candidate who lost the popular vote – George Bush – when the highest court in the land halted the Florida recount that would have confirmed his defeat.

Our consolidated and dysfunctional major media so inadequately covered the debate prior to the invasion and occupation of Iraq that our country – and yours – was led into an unnecessary and ultimately disastrous war.

Our consolidated and dysfunctional media – which takes as its highest responsibility the coverage of business matters -- so badly botched the job of reporting on the economy that bad bankers and Wall Street schemers were able to lead the United States and the world into a global economic meltdown.

It is no wonder that Americans, especially young people, are turning off, tuning out and rejecting major media.

It is no wonder that the American media system – as we have known it – is in collapse.

More than 100 American newspapers will close this year – including major daily newspapers in Seattle, Denver, Albuquerque and communities across the country.

Newspapers (and television and radio stations) in the United States are in rapid and radical decline – a decline that is at least instructive and in all likelihood predictive for Britain and other countries.

Every week, a foreign bureau is closed – vast expanses of the planet go uncovered by American journalists; broadcast and cable media networks no longer maintain bureaus on the continent of Africa.

Washington bureaus, the primary vehicles for reporting on the world’s most powerful federal government are closing so quickly that their disappearances are no longer noted.

Local news coverage is disappearing as newspapers and radio and television stations “downsize” newsrooms” so rapidly that town councils, county councils, school boards and other local and regional governments now operate “in the dark” – without reporting or accountability.

When we review the record, there is an inclination to believe that if the media corporations are heading over a cliff, we should tell them to accelerate.

So be it. But let us recognize that historic lesson: For there to be popular government, there must be popular information and the means of acquiring it.

The crisis, of course, is that when media corporations go over that cliff, newsrooms go with them – journalists go with them,

If we lose journalism, we lose the legions of well-trained, experienced and committed men and women whose determination to gather information with the purpose of informing and enlightening citizens, to package that information in a form that can be easily consumed and used and to distribute that information widely enough so that all have access.

And we are losing them.

In 2008, 16,000 newspaper workers in the United States.

In 2009, if the current rate of layoffs continues, we will lose 20,000.

The United States have around 60,000 print journalists – the vast majority of the reporters and editors employed in a country where television and radio long ago shed the vast majority of their journalists.

You can do the math. In short order, without immediate interventions, journalism will die.

That may sound like an extreme statement.



After all, as old media dies, new media develops. But new media is not, by and large, hiring journalists – let alone producing journalism or providing the information sufficient to democratic life.

America is losing 1,500 journalists a month.

Yet, according to the most recent figures, there are only about 3,000 reporters and editors employed full-time to produce online journalism in the U.S.

So every two months, we shed more old-media journalists than are employed in all of new media.

The equation does not work.

And if the equation does not work, neither does the Madisonian calculus: “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both.”

We are on the verge of tragedy and farce – indeed, it can be argued, we are already there.

So what is the answer?

Not bailing out the old media institutions – media corporations – that gave us a disputed presidency, and undeclared war and an economic meltdown.

And not the digital fantasy that tells us to sit back and wait for the market to figure out how to log on to the internet.

The market that failed in old media will fail in new media. Advertising Age analysts Bob Garfield reminds us that advertising that has left newspapers and television is not migrating to internet news sites. In fact, quite the opposite.

The market has proven itself incapable of providing the public good that is information via old media.

The market will not provide that public good via new media.

There must be an intervention by the public sector to provide that good.

But the intervention must be sophisticated.

Helping the corporations that colonized old media platforms to colonize new media platforms would be madness.

We need to support new ownership models and systems that have as their purpose the sustaining of journalism and democracy.

These models must borrow from the best of historic experiments with public broadcasting and with subsidies for print publications. They must embrace diversity and ideological competition and debate. They must guard against totalitarianism and the control of information by governmental and economic elites.

We believe that it is necessary to supercharge support for traditional public broadcasting – with an eye toward using new technology to create new networks – while at the same time promoting the development of community-owned and community-focused media.

We believe that it is necessary to give citizens encouragement to support the media that serves them and that serves their communities. The way to do this is by giving citizens 100 percent tax credits for subscriptions and for contributions to non-for-profit media.

We believe that laws and regulations should be restructured to encourage the change the ownership models of traditional media outlets that are struggling under the weight of investor demands. Newspapers that are considered to be “failing” because they do not return 10-, 20- or 30-percent profits to investors could be successful if they are reorganized as low-profit or not-for-profit newspapers, and broadcast and cable and internet news outlets.

With the rise of digital communications, governments must develop subsidies to develop and sustain online news sites – especially in underserved communities but generally throughout society. Models can and should be developed to employ journalists online – not as lonely bloggers but in newsrooms that are charged with covering communities, regions, nations and the world.

This is not a romantic vision of what might be.

This is the necessary work of the months and years to come.

It begins with a recognition that popular governance, democracy, requires information.

Thus, if we are democrats, we know that information is a public good.

That public good must be sustained by the public sector.

The market has failed.

The public sector must step in.

It is not journalism that is at stake.

It is not media as we have known it or might know it.

The question we face is whether we will in the 21st century assure for popular governance.

To make that assurance, we must guarantee by law and by structure that there is popular information and that citizens have the means to acquire it.

Media reform is not about pens and notepads, cameras and microphones, digits and gigabytes.

Media reform is about democracy -- better, stronger, more vibrant democracy than we have ever known.

If we reform our media systems to sustain democracy we can, as Thomas Paine of Thetford suggested so many years ago, “begin the world again.”

Our purpose, considering the circumstance of the world as we know it, should be nothing less.

Media Ownership and Democracy in the Age of Convergence

In the panorama of European media, Italy is an extreme case. Where else, you might ask, could the country’s second richest man, Silvio Berlusconi, owner of the largest media conglomerate in the country, with a virtual monopoly of private television, take over the government and then use that power to become the richest man in the country, taking effective control over his chief competitor, the state broadcasting system, RAI, placing his own employees, TV executives, lawyers and journalists in parliament, passing legislation exempting himself from all prosecution, [despite strong evidence of criminal wrongdoing] passing media legislation to aid his own media companies and to punish his competitors.

Then, in recent months, news from Italy has more resembled Suetonius’ chronicles of the Caesars with tales of underage women, call girls at the presidential palace, topless girls and pantless politicians at the prime minister’s private Xanadu in Sardinia.

Italy and Berlusconi have provided fodder for a lot of jokes, raised eyebrows and shrugging of shoulders comments about crazy Italians meant in part to make the rest of us feel better about the imperfections of media in our own countries. I would suggest that Italy and the Berlusconi case deserves a more sober hearing. In Italy tragedy and farce are deeply intermingled and the developments in Italy are extremely serious and potential disturbing for the state of democracy in Europe.

In the wake of the embarrassing revelations about his sexual escapades, Berlusconi has been waging a major counter-offensive meant to silence his critics, weaken the already-weak checks and balances within the Italian system and increase his own control over the country which already is without parallel in Western Europe. Berlusconi has sued two of the only Italian newspapers that gave prominent coverage to the sex scandal, in the case of the Roman daily paper La Repubblica for simply publishing, repeatedly, a series of ten questions that Berlusconi has refused to answer. He has sued various other non-Italian papers for their coverage of the sex scandal and is increasing his already considerable holdings of media in Spain, where he has attempted to intimidate and silence the main national newspaper El Pais. And after the unfavorable court decision that rejected the law he had crafted to give himself immunity he has vowed to press forward with reforms that would place the judiciary – the branch of government which has most eluded Berlusconi’s control – under his direct power.

In recent months, I have heard repeated again and again the question: “How the Italians, after all these embarrassing revelations, possibly still support this man?” The answer is long and complex but one of the reasons is that most Italians, as a matter of fact, know very few of the actual facts that have delighted readers of Britain’s tabloids and daily newspapers. One of the things that Berlusconi did in response to the sex scandal was make drastic changes in the state TV system where already compliant and inoffensive journalists were replaced by people whose loyalty to the leader was total and beyond question. As a result, the new director of news, at RAI 1, the main national channel, simply refused to air any news about the case, insisting it was mere gossip of no possible public value. (Never mind that this same journalist, in another context, had insisted that there for a public figure there was no line between public and private life.) Patricia D’Addario, the escort-call-girl who taped and photographed her overnight stay with the prime minister (in the bed of Putin, as Berlusconi put it) has been interviewed widely in the British press, including in ultra-respectable media such as The Financial Times.

The Berlusconi sex scandal is a journalist’s equivalent of the “perfect storm,” combining two subjects of the greatest interest, sex and power, at the highest possible level, a story meant to cause newspapers to fly off news stands and television ratings to soar through the roof. And yet Italian television has barely touched the story. Only very recently was the woman at the center of the escort-call-girl scandal, Patricia D’Addario, interviewed for months in the British and American press, including in ultra respectable media such as the Financial Times, finally interviewed on Italian national TV. It was one of the four or five programs that have maintained a measure of independence during the past fifteen years. Needless in recent months, and particularly since the broadcasting of that interview, calls have been increasing from Berlusconi’s center-right coalition to take the program off the air. Most of these programs air on Rai 3 , the smallest and poorest of the three state networks, traditionally the “left-wing” network in the Italian scheme of things. Berlusconi is pushing now to replace the head of Rai 3 and have the programs he finds offensive.

Before Berlusconi entered politics, media pluralism was already very shaky. In the field of television was governed by what is known as the “duo-opoly” – 90 percent of the television market is taken up by two players, Berlusconi’s three private networks, which accounted for about 45 percent of audience and more than 60 percent of advertising sales (since the public networks have strict limits on advertising) and 45 percent audience share to Rai, the state broadcast system’s three main networks. Despite a revolution in technology during the past 15 years, the decline of traditional analogue television, the introduction of satellite and digital TV, with most viewers picking among hundreds of channels, the duopoly in Italy remains. They still hold 82 percent of the television audience. Some inroads have been by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky satellite network. The moment that Sky began to challenge Mediaset for marketshare, the Berlusconi government passed a law raising taxes on Sky, much to the fury of Rupert Murdoch.

Berlusconi, of course, also owns the largest book publishing group, the largest magazine publishing group, two daily newspapers, and much, much else. But this does not do justice to the extent of his power.

The old duopoly was already very vulnerable to political pressure. The State Broadcasting system was divided up along political lines with Rai 1 considered the Christian Demcratic channel, Rai 2 to Bettino Craxi’s socialist party, and Rai 3 (decidedly the smallest and least funded) being known as the Communist channel. There was a certain crude pluralism in this arrangement. Nightly newscasts were made with a stopwatch in hand, with each party getting a certain amount of air time according to their share in parliament. But since the fact of direct political control had already been introduced, it was easy for Berlusconi and his allies to capture this system, which was already used to serving as a political fiefdom. With Berlusconi in power, it now gave him de facto control of almost all television, with the exception of a few programs here and there mostly on Rai 3, decidedly the smallest and least well-funded of the three networks.

Political control of these media is nearly total. But there is a division of labor. Berlusconi’s own networks are used openly to advance his interests. On two of his networks, Rete 4 and Italia 1, the partisanship is blatant and there no effort to hide it. Berlusconi’s causes are openly championed, his enemies vilified and ridiculed. He sometimes occupies as much as sixty or seventy percent of the air time with his competiors reduced to a few seconds here and there, often included to make them appear ridiculous rather than to articulate a position. Canale 5 - his biggest channel - tries to maintain the appearance of greater balance: Berlusconi likes to say it is a left-wing channel, which is total nonsense. Berlusconi still dominates it but his opponents get a little more space and the newscasts are not openly strident.

But make no mistake, nothing that Berlusconi does not want to appear appears here and because it has a larger audience and greater credibility, Canale 5 can be used strategically at critical moments. For example, when evidence emerged that Berlusconi had made a 20 million dollar off-shore payment to former Socialist leader Bettino Craxi, Canale 5 suddenly had an exclusive interview with a mysterious Tunisian lawyer in Paris who claimed that the money was his and was payment for TV programs Berlusconi’s company had bought from him. Needless to say, no one asked what programs Berlusconi’s TV company had actually purchased and broadcast from Tunisia.

On the Rai stations, Berlusconi mostly makes sure that nothing appears that is unfavorable or undesirable, not succeeding totally, but the vast majority of the time. Every word that is spoken on Rai broacasts is monitored closely and all hell breaks lose if someone says the wrong thing. Journalists I have spoken to have described being called up on the carpet and threatened with the loss of their jobs if they have used the wrong word in a political story.

If there is a struggle going on in the center-right, when a journalist used the word “conflict” she was heavily reprimanded. Journalists hired from Berlusconi’s networks occupy key positions and the wiretaps from one criminal case demonstrate exactly how control is maintained. One set of wiretaps shows one of Berlusconi’s former personal assistants consulting daily with her former colleagues at Mediaset about what would be covered and how. They talk about how to present to delay unfavorable news for Berlusconi, relegating it to later broadcasting and consciously relating the news in a confusing manner so it’s import would be blunted.

In many cases, political control is not so overt. News directors don’t need to be told to keep any detailed discussion of Berlusconi’s legal difficulties off the air. It is much easier and non-controversial for example to do crime news. So that, in 2007 and 2008, when the center-left nominally controlled Rai, during the last Prodi government, coverage of crime news literally doubled on the state networks even though crime in Italy was quite stable and even declining slightly. But to watch Italian television one would have thought that any woman leaving the house would be instantly raped by a band of Romanian immigrants. This played perfectly into the center-right’s election campaign which made Security and insecurity a central campaign issue. You may note that why would news directors chosen by the center-left do this? Partly because it is easy, gets ratings, but they also know that if they want a futrure they must reckon with Berlusconi. The center-left appointed news director of Rai 1 became the editor-in-chief of Sole 24 Ore, the chief financial editor, something that would be inconceivable had he acquired the reputation as an anti-Berlusconi hothead.

There are a couple of formally independent networks, but they, too, are heavily conditioned in an environment where few people want the prime minister, particularly this prime minister, as an enemy. A seventh network emerged a few years ago and wanted to compete with the Rai-Mediaset duopoly, rightly seeing a big opening for a network news that was independent of political forces. The company invested millions in preparing a new nightly newscast – it was cancelled at the last minute by the new corporate owners who reportedly were under enormous pressure from Berlusconi.

In this context, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky – since he is not so easily intimidated and seems quite determined to make his network a success – represents a breath of fresh air, which seems highly paradoxical and ironic, but there it is.

[There are a few theoretically independent national newspapers, the Corriere della Sera, La Stampa of Turin and the financial newspaper Sole 24 Ore, but they all operate under difficult conditions. Their ownership is weak and divided. All are owned by businesses that depend greatly on government largesse and are vulnerable to pressure from a prime minister who is not shy about exerting it. When FIAT, which owns La Stampa and a part of the Corriere, was on the verge of bankruptcy, Umberto Agnelli, then the chairman of Fiat came to Berlusconi asking for help, to which Berlusconi replied: “Certainly, that editor of the Corriere della Sera is more a problem for you than for me.” In others, get rid of the editor and we can talk about government aid. The editor went and Fiat got its help.

There are a handful of independent media or media openly hostile to Berlusconi. La Repubblica which also has a chain of affiliated local newspaper is openly anti-Berlusconi as are left-wing newspapers such as L’Unita and Manifesto, both of which have small circulations. But these papers reach a largely left-of-center audience which would never vote for Berlusconi and so Berlusconi cares much less what they do. He is much concerned with keeping centrist papers like the Corriere and La Stampa in line because they are the voices of the Italian establishment and they speak to the Italian middle and upper-middle-class centrist voters who may vote either center-left or center-right depending on circumstances. This is an important audience for Berlusconi and therefore he cares very much what these papers write. They try to maintain a basic level of independence but are very careful to avoid appearing anti-Berlusconi and the Corriere has stocked its editorial page almost exclusively with pro-Berlusconi commentators to balance the fact that it still maintains a degree of independence in its news pages. ]

The current Berlusconi counter-offensive shows how pernicious and explosive the combination of private and public power that he represents. First he uses his almost unlimited wealth to pursue intimidating libel suits against the few media outlets that have dared to criticize him. In the case of L’Unita, a small leftwing paper, already teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, it could force them to close.

Berlusconi then changed the editor of his family newspaper Il Giornale (a newspaper he theoretically “sold” to his brother to avoid anti-trust laws), feeling that the old editor was insufficiently combative. He hired Vittorio Feltri, the journalistic equivalent of a contract-killer to take over. And after meeting personally with the prime minister (strange given that Berlusconi formally doesn’t own Il Giornale and continues to claim he has no ties to his media empire) Feltri then unleashes a set of attacks against the editor of the Catholic newspaper L’Avvenire, who had had the temerity to criticize the prime minister’s moral turpitude. Feltri outed Dino Boffo as gay and obtained information about a court case which was supposed to be sealed in which Boffo was accused of harrassing a woman allegedly involved with his gay lover. Boffo resigned. But the question remained: how did Berlusconi’s newspaper get its hand on court documents which were supposed to be sealed? Did the Italian secret services lend a hand?

When Italy’s high court dismissed Berlusconi’s law granting himself immunity from all criminal prosecutions during his time in office, even of cases that preceded his election. His personal defense attorney, who is also the most important legislator in the Italian parliament in matters of criminal justice, immediately set out drafting new laws to keep Berlusconi out of trouble. Even as a court has confirmed the conviction of British lawyer David Mills, for accepting a bribe of $600,000 to keep quiet about Berlusconi’s off-shore slush funds which he helped manage, Berlusconi’s lawyer was drafting legislation that would shorten the statute of limitations in the case, already set to expire in 2011.

Then after another court rules that his company, Mediaset must pay nearly a billion dollars settlement to a competitor who lost a takeover battle for Italy’s largest book and magazine publishing group. The case is based on the fact that Berlusconi’s lawyers during the takeover battled bribed the judge who decided the takeover battle. In the days that followed, Berlusconi said: “We’ll hear some interesting stories about this judge.”

Almost immediately, Berlusconi’s main TV channel, Canale 5, sent a camera crew to shadow the judge and film him as he walked around the city without letting him know. It then ran a program turning him into a figure of ridicule, a kind of crazy person, even making fun of the fact that he wore “torquoise” socks. Trailing a judge, demonizing him and making him the object of public ridicule in a countrt where many judges have been assassinated has a decidedly menacing aspect to it. As if to make it clear that any judge who rules against Berlusconi will find themselves the object of character assassination.

Finally, the last incredible chapter. Just as the center-left party was getting ready to chose a new leader, a story breaks revealing that the center-left governor of the Region of Lazio, the region that includes Rome, Piero Marazzo, has been videotaped with a transsexual and an envelope of drugs. And that a group of police officers had been blackmailing Marazzo and trying to sell the video. The story about Marazzo turns out to be substantially true.

The story appeared to be a Godsend for Berlusconi. In a week in which the papers and news programs would have normally been talking about the left’s new leader, given that beleaguered party a lift in the public opinion polls, that story was pushed off the front pages and replaced by a squalid scandal involved a leader of that same party. Moreover, the fact that it was a sex scandal, and one involving transsexuals and the payment of blackmail money, had the convenient effect of seeming to absolve Berlusconi of his own sex scandals, which, by comparison seemed like good, clean, old-fashioned fun of a prime minister who simply likes women.

Indeed, the convenient timing of the Marazzo scandal is suspiciously convenient and it turns out that there are some Berlusconi fingerprints on it. The blackmailers approached the editor of a Berlusconi tabloid magazine, Chi, -- one in fact that Berlusconi has been using to rehabilitate his image as Italy’s pater familias – to sell them their video tape. The editor, of course, got in touch with the prime minister, who called Marazzo to let him know about it and to “reassure” him that his magazines would not publish the story. The fact is that his media have been sitting on the story since July and then played this particular card at a time of maximum benefit to Berlusconi.

Italians live in a highly controlled media environment where there is little news about the actual state of the Italian economy, which is poor. Where stories appear about Berlusconi as a miracle worker who has restored the earthquake zone of the Abruzzo in a few short months when the capital of Abruzzo remains uninhabited and virtually uninhabitable. Berlusconi has been greatly aided by the crisis and incapacity of the Italian left. But it must be acknowledged that anyone would have a hard time getting their message across in that media environment.

It is not an accident that Berlusconi’s closest friend in the international community is Vladimir Putin – and do not be surprised if damaging information emerges from old KGB files about some of Berlusconi’s political opponents. Berlusconi, together with Putin and leaders such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, have forged a new model, of governments that are nominally democracies, in that they hold elections from time-to-time, but in which the control of media and economic resources is so complete that is frankly difficult to speak about a fair democratic competition.

Moreover, the situation in Italy is not unique to these weak democracies. The behavior of Berlusconi’s own media bear a remarkable resemblance to the behavior of Fox News in the United States. The deliberation distortion of information, the invention of phony stories meant demonize the enemies of the right, the suggestion for example, that Obama’s health care plan will create “death panels” to euthanize the elderly or that it is a subterranean effort, as one major Fox commentator suggested, to achieve “slavery reparations.” Propaganda of the sort that Joseph Goebbels would recognized quite well, masked under the trappings of traditional news, goes hand in hand with the kind of faux democracy of the Berlusconi and Putin. We are seeing in the United States and Italy, an incredibly polarized media environment, where left and right literally cannot understand one another. I recall a chilling moment when interview a delegate from North Carolina to the Republican convention in 2004. When speaking about Iraq, she maintained that weapons of mass destruction had indeed been found in Iraq but had been quietly shipped out of the country on trains to Syria.

When I pointed out that not even the Bush administration, which had every interest in promoting such a view, had made that claim, she was unmoved. The fact that this fact had gone unreported by reputable media or by government was for her a confirmation of its value. “We have our sources of information and you have yours.” Richard Vigurie, a pillar of the American right, when he was asked how he could justify publishing many things that turned out to be slanderous lies about John Kerry’s war record, during the whole Swift Boat Veterans for Truth episode, said blandly: “It’s just opinion. That’s all journalism is, opinion.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a conservative American democrat, once observed: “You have a right to your own point of view, but not a right to your own facts.” This basic notion, until recently the fundament of modern journalism, now seems as quaint as the beliefs of the Enlightenment in truth and progress.

The present is a rich time of amazing media pluralism, in which the web has allowed thousands, millions of previously unheard voices to be heard. But the Balkanization of media, in which people seek out web sites that confirm their existing viewpoints, bolster their biases with often misleading or even plainly false misinformation, has led to a polarization in our population that is actually quite new and troubling.

Gaps in reporting

One of the things that we have been arguing at the Institute of Race Relations is that over the last few years we have seen the rise of new forms of racism - first seen in the focus on asylum seekers towards the end of the 1990s and now widened with the war on terror to anti-Muslim racism.

In 2003, I kept a record of every national newspaper article that referred to asylum seekers. In that year, you could have read articles blaming asylum seekers for terrorism, for TB, AIDS and SARS, for failing schools, for failing hospitals; you could have read articles blaming them for falling house prices, or for rising house prices. They were responsible for the problem of road accidents. They were blamed for dwindling fish stocks in our rivers and for the declining numbers of swans on the river Lea. The Daily Star even blamed asylum seekers for missing donkeys.

You might have heard about the headline 'swan bake'. The Sun's 'swan bake' story, for example, claimed that it was based on an official Metropolitan Police report and stated that 'police swooped on a gang of East Europeans and caught them red-handed about to cook a pair of royal swans'. In fact, there was no police report and no swoop; only a one-page note produced by the Wildlife Crime Unit, which recorded that members of the public had reported seeing people they described as eastern European killing and eating swans.

There was no reference to asylum seekers being responsible. And nobody had been arrested in relation to the reports. Complaints were lodged with the PCC which eventually adjudicated on the case and agreed that what was presented as a factual account was in fact conjecture. But all the Sun had to do to make amends for its sensationalist front-page story was put in a short disclaimer, months later, on page 41, explaining that nobody had been arrested and therefore the suspects may or may not be asylum seekers. Similarly the front-page story about asylum seekers eating donkeys, in the Daily Star, was corrected with a tiny item on 8 January 2004, acknowledging that the article may have been offensive to Somalis.

In recent years, we have also seen the systematic creation of scare scenarios in relation to Muslims. The Express, for example, 'Ban the burka' on the front page in June 2009.

Now 'Muslims demand sharia law demo' cancelled.

There is the case of The Sun newspaper running an entirely false story about a terrorist hitlist of leading Jews in Britain, which was entirely made up by the so-called terrorism expert Glen Jenvey.

The annual slew of screaming "Christmas has been banned!" headlines of course, which now resurface as regular as clockwork. The story that ëthree little piggiesí has been banned from schools. The story that Nat West and Halifax have banned piggy banks. All made up.

What all of these stories point to is an idea that the Muslim presence in Britain has pushed the multicultural tolerance of the majority to its limits, that excessive immigration has left the majority feeling bereft and alienated, that the so-called multicultural experiment in Britain is in crisis. In short, we have seen the mainstreaming of Margaret Thatcher's comment that the British people were worried that ëthis country might be rather swamped by people with a different cultureí.

What I want to particularly focus on is the role of the BBC in this because it is noticeable that unfortunately the BBC has played a key role in driving this agenda, not only by reporting many of the same scare scenario stories from the red tops but at times also trying to beat the red tops at their own game.

Asylum day
The second example is the BBC's so-called White Season that was broadcast a year ago, a series that was meant to shine the spotlight on the white, working-class. The trailer for the series showed a white manís face being written over by black writing until his face is no longer visible. The implication being that white identity has been erased by multiculturalism - essentially a BNP argument given visual legitimacy by the BBC.

The series itself included an attempt to rehabilitate Enoch Powell casting him as a brave champion of forgotten whites. Whatís interesting here is that a broadcaster that has ignored ëclassí for years suddenly discovers that class is an issue but only if the definition of class is racialised. One result of this has been the construction of something called the ëwhite, working classí as a new political identity in Britain. We donít hear about the white middle class or the Asian working class. Why is the working class in particular constructed through the notion of a white race? Which implicitly can only be authentically represented by the BNP. Hence the appearance of Nick Griffin on Question Time is the logical outcome of this thinking.

What's interesting here is the way that this discourse of multiculturalism in crisis is articulated not by conservatives but by liberals.

This new liberal attack on multiculturalism regards its chief defect to be the permission it gives to minorities, particularly Muslims, to reject British values in favour of an illiberal communal identity. These liberals argue that Britain must wake up from a kind of self-loathing and, in place of multiculturalism, embark on a programme of forceful integration of minorities into secular, liberal values. It is argued that liberalism has been infected by guilt, political correctness and moral relativism - which prevent its defence against the threat of Islamic extremism. Previously cherished norms of multiculturalism should be discarded and the fight for racial and religious equality is now less important than the danger of not standing up for British values.

On this basis, I would suggest, a wholly new sentiment has gripped the mainstream of liberal thinking over the last few years, often articulated most forcefully by former Leftists of the 1968 generation. (And I would say that there is a strand here of a certain generation of 1968 Leftists who have turned their particular experience and memory of fighting for certain social campaigns on issues of gender, sexuality, religious authority and freedom of expression into, in this decade, markers of civilisational superiority- and this has happened in a way that is not reducible to the cliche of moving to the right as one gets older. But that's really a footnote.)

Hitchens, Andrew Anthony, Nick Cohen, Martin Bright. But many others too.

First, Andrew Anthonyís arguments which received a lot of publicity and were taken quite seriously by many people last year. He argues that the glue that will hold British society together post-7/7 is a revived British nationalism ñ the superiority of British values over other peoplesí and the need to defend them against foreign, ideological threats. British culture, he says, has, throughout time, valued freedom, rights and liberty. But he does not cite any evidence to back up this transhistorical claim about British culture. The case is made, rather, by invoking a comparison with what he calls 'Third World cultures' which, he says, value 'petty corruption, sexism, homophobia, tribalism and patriarchal authoritarianism'.

Again, no evidence is cited for such a huge claim, except one anecdote: Bhiku Parekhís decision to give up teaching in India because of corruption. But the point is that Andrew Anthonyís actual dividing line is not national but civilisational and racial: on the one side, the Western Enlightenment and, on the other, what he calls the 'Endarkenment' of the Islamic world.

Freedom of expression
What is really going on here is that certain voices are not being heard: the voices of Muslims who are not calling for Christmas to be banned but for a different kind of foreign policy; the migrant worker who has a story to tell about the dirty jobs that nobody else wants to do; the asylum seeker who has a story to tell about the war and devastation that has been inflicted on her country by our own governmentís so-called ëhumanitarian interventioní. In the very name of liberal values, the validity of those voices is being undermined. And it is time that we listen to them. Thank you.

Mike Sullivan, Asylum gang had two for roasting, Sun, 4 July 2003, p7
Nick Medic, How I took on The Sun - and lost, Daily Telegraph, 15 July 2004.

Dangerous online legitimacy

Should there be controls to regulate the online television and radio output of newspaper websites? Are press proprietors eroding established broadcasting standards? Can the concept of political impartiality survive in a digital age?

Despite all the imponderables surrounding Rupert Murdoch’s struggle to get newspaper websites to turn in a profit, there is one certainty in Britain’s highly-competitive digital environment. Both the Labour government of Gordon Brown and a future Conservative administration led by David Cameron have indicated that they have no intention of either restraining or regulating the online television and radio output of the press. Media proprietors have exerted constant pressure behind the scenes to keep the government at arm’s length and allow the press a free hand to develop on line. Nonetheless the ability of newspapers to reinvent themselves online does raise some important questions: Why is it that within the Department of Culture, Media and Sport there are apparently no red lines when it comes to safeguarding broadcasting ethics? Why, for their own commercial interests, should press proprietors be allowed to give a dangerous degree of legitimacy to a lowering of journalistic standards?

Newspapers currently have total freedom to innovate in their online output and it is clear this is a state of affairs which will continue whatever the outcome of next year’s general election. Their websites are under no obligation to pay any heed either to their potential impact on existing radio and television services or to the threat which their unregulated output poses to the broadcasters’ well-respected rules on invasion of privacy and political impartiality.

“So what”, tends to be the response whenever I raise my concerns with newspaper executives, website providers or government officials. Their argument is straightforward: the more the competition, the better. They refuse to accept there could possibly be any hidden dangers in allowing newspapers to transmit audio-visual material which flouts the editorial guidelines of both the BBC and Ofcom. What is wrong -- they say -- in giving the press even greater leverage when newspapers manage to command the news agenda? Why shouldn’t the press challenge the BBC in its own backyard?

At the heart of a debate about whether or not there should be any restraints on the freedom of newspapers to innovate online are two critical decisions. The audio-visual output of newspaper sites is self-regulated under the codes of the Press Complaints Commission. And, as from the start of the year, it was agreed – again after pressure from the British government – that the output of newspaper sites should be outside the remit not only of the British regulator Ofcom, but also European Union regulations which seek to control the online development of television-like services.

A laissez faire regime for the online television and radio output of newspapers – when compared with regulated world of the mainstream broadcasters – begins to assume a greater significance when we take into account the unique nature of the British press. The UK’s newspapers constitute a free press in the true sense of the word. They have total political freedom to campaign for whichever cause or party they choose. They have a well-deserved, world-wide reputation for campaigning journalism. But they are also renowned for having the deepest cheque books when it comes to buying sensational information, intrusive videos and what are often politically-loaded stories and interviews.

Such is the intensity of the competition within the British news media that we can now begin to assess the impact of the exclusive online interviews, sensational videos and other material purchased by newspapers. Often, especially at weekend, this output can dominate the news agenda. As a result newspaper proprietors are succeeding in joining up the dots: they are dictating the agenda not just in print but also online and more worryingly their material is feeding through almost instantly into mainstream television and radio news bulletins which eagerly re-broadcast extended extracts from the online output of newspaper sites.

You can see the red logos of newspapers like the News of the World or the Sun in the right-hand corner of the shot. What the BBC, ITV and Sky do not tell their viewers and listeners is that they are regularly re-transmitting material which the broadcasters would have been forbidden by their own guidelines from ever commissioning in the first place. But once intrusive and sensational footage is made available online on a newspaper website – and is thus in the public domain – it gains an unwarranted and potentially dangerous legitimacy. The haste with which such footage is being rebroadcast is weakening the rules designed to prevent intrusions of privacy by radio and television.

The threat is even more insidious when it comes to the ability of the press proprietors to manipulate the political agenda. An exclusive interview, bought up by a newspaper, has far greater impact when it is also available in an audio-visual format. Again the newspapers are succeeding in setting the agenda not just in the press but also online and on radio and television as well.

This blurring of standards is most worrying when newspapers have obtained footage in circumstances which conflict with the guidelines for television and radio. The press can offer the kind of audio-visual output which no established broadcaster could have originated – yet these self-same broadcasters are quite prepared to jettison their high and mighty scruples when retransmitting footage from newspaper websites.

Safeguards to protect the identity of children are much stronger on radio and television than for newspapers. Again when it comes to the invasion of people’s privacy, newspaper journalists can go much further than broadcasters in pushing to the limit the ethical boundaries of the news media. The code of conduct issued by the Press Complaints Commission allows editors to argue that intrusion is sometimes in the public interest, a defence that is rarely available under the codes of the BBC and Ofcom.
When a Sun reporter with a video camera filmed thirteen-year-old Alfie with what was thought to be his newly-born baby Masie, extracts from the footage were released to broadcasters and transmitted almost immediately on ITV’s news bulletins. (Dad at 13, Sun, 13.2.2009). The family division of the High Court had to step in to order a ban on further news coverage in order to protect the rights of Aflie and Masie.

Similarly when the News of the World obtained a purloined copy of Prince Harry’s personal video of his time at Sandhurst – his commentary included racist remarks such as “Ahmed, our little Paki friend” -- extensive extracts were rebroadcast by all the mainstream radio and television news bulletins. (Harry’s Racist Video Shame, News of the World, 11.1.2009).

Both stories were paid-for journalism -- neither the Sun nor the News of the World has divulged what they cost – and they were genuine newspaper exclusives which were avidly followed up by radio and television. But no regulated broadcaster would have dared to send a television crew to film a young father and baby in such disputed family circumstances when the publicist Max Clifford was hovering in the background. Nor would the BBC have dared to originate a story about Prince Harry’s video when it had so obviously been obtained in dubious circumstances. There was no soul searching at the BBC. No health warnings about whether the video might have been stolen.

Both cases illustrate the way in which established standards are being eroded. Once video footage is available on the websites of the Sun and the News of the World, their stories acquire an added degree of legitimacy. This material is now in the public domain which justifies – so the argument goes – even wider circulation by television and radio and because video clips are freely on offer, established broadcasters can hardly be criticised for jumping on board such sensational story lines. For the newspapers the follow up coverage is win, win --- they are eager to publicise their websites and the wider the subsequent use of questionable material, the easier it is to defend.

The impact of politically-loaded video footage is of even greater concern because it allows the newspaper proprietors to pursue their political agendas with added vigour. Broadcasters often have difficulty following up exclusive newspaper interviews; sometimes the interviewee has agreed a deal that excludes interviews by rival news organisations. By offering video clips to radio and television bulletins the newspaper are again in a win, win situation. They have control over the extracts which are being released and the broadcasters are trapped and have no alternative but to use the footage which has been offered.

A year ago the Mail on Sunday succeeded in dominating the weekend’s news bulletins when it offered broadcasters footage from its exclusive interview with Lord Levy, fund raiser to the former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Levy’s interview included the sensational claim that Blair had told him that Gordon Brown ‘could never beat’ the Conservative leader David Cameron in a general election. (Blair: Gordon can’t beat Cameron, Mail on Sunday, 27.4.2008).

The story coincided with one of the many crises surrounding Brown’s Premiership and it demonstrated the power of the Sunday newspaper exclusive. The Mail on Sunday had purchased exclusive rights to Lord Levy’s autobiography. BBC journalists could not ask Levy questions to test his claims – all that was available was footage from the Mail on Sunday’s website and that was used extensively.

Another exclusive Mail on Sunday interview – brokered this time by the publicist Max Clifford – dominated media coverage at the end of September, during the weekend that opened the Labour Party’s annual conference. “I didn’t show the Baroness any passport” was the front page splash over its interview with Tongan housekeeper Loloahi Tapui in which she made a series of allegations about the conduct of the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland. (Mail on Sunday, 27.9.2009)

Here was another example of politically-loaded footage getting blanket coverage on radio and television without any questions being asked. Broadcasters had no choice but to use the Mail on Sunday’s footage, such was the intensity of the competition. But it was a paid-for interview obtained in circumstances which would have rung alarm bells within the BBC and ITV if their journalists had tried pay for an interview with a woman whose legal status was in doubt.

What is happening by stealth is the creation of a two-tier system: the press has moved into broadcasting without the restraints which apply to mainstream broadcasters and because of the purchasing power of the press – and the ability of newspapers to deliver sensational exclusives – the established television and radio services are rolling over and broadcasting material which could never have been obtained under their own ethical codes.

When a delegation from the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom did its best to raise these issues with the government, the response was entirely predictable. I asked Sion Simon, junior minister at the Department of Media, Culture and Sport if he was any concerned by the backdoor demolition of established broadcasting standards. What did he think of broadcasters using pictures of Alfie and Masie? Was her concerned that a paid-for newspaper interview with the Attorney General’s housekeeper dominated radio and television output?

Simon could not have been clearer: the government had no plans to either restrain or regulate the expansion of newspaper websites. Audio-visual output was subject to the codes of the Press Complaints Commission and there was no evidence that the online broadcasting of the press was undermining the standards of mainstream television and radio services.
“I don’t think there are any red lines within the department…We are not saying ‘never’ and I don’t think there is an ideological objection to the possible regulation of online output in the future… It isn’t inconceivable but the government certainly isn’t in any rush to regulate or restrain newspapers as they seek to reinvent their businesses”.

A new agenda for policy change in communication ownership

The ownership of the means of our cultural and communicative production is on the one hand no different to the ownership of the means of any other form of production whether it takes place in a factory, the services industry or even the so called knowledge economy. It is no different because ownership equals with power to determine the way of development and distribution of products, whereby decisions are made as to which products are deemed useful, necessary, risky or appropriate. Moreover, it is no different because ownership equals the entitlement to manage and determine the working conditions of those actively producing and sustaining production.

At the same time however making the news, or a cultural programme for television, a film or a music video is very different process to the process of building things or offering services. Although in both sets of activities a degree of creativity is involved and intellectual effort and labour is necessary, the very nature of the end-products and their impact on individuals and societies is deeper and far more reaching than any other form of outcome in a production process.

The media are the means of our cultural and communicative expression, the tools to explore and understand the human condition. The whole culture industry, with its news outlets and mainstream media, music industry, film industry and now the internet, shapes our consciousness as human beings, citizens and consumers. The ways in which this sector of human activity is regulated is paramount in the forms of societies we are making today, for tomorrow. The special role of the media has been recognized in international agreements quite strongly: in Europe, the public service broadcasting system is considered in its constitutional foundations as paramount for the functioning of European societies; elsewhere the role of the media has been recognized in its political and cultural impact through Parliamentary resolutions; the Council of Europe has also made similar statements. The UNESCO declaration on Cultural Diversity goes a step further to recognize media as part of the culture and cultural production. Citizens are actively involved in the making of media and civil society organizations are concerned with the conditions under which citizens’ media input and use is restricted and controlled.

The increasingly liberalized ownership of the media brings about a political malaise that does a disservice to contemporary and future generations. It is intrinsically a problem of democracy and the ways in which we talk about democracy and public agendas, and the ways in which we understand what these concepts and issues may be.

Journalists are called to fulfill their roles as expected of them from society and to manage the tensions of expectations by their management. They are often left without backing, as we have seen in the deeply disappointing outcome at the European Parliament recently to reject a resolution on media pluralism and the protection of journalists. For over 15 years, the subject of pluralism has been raised and drown in European politics- the difference this time is that even the European Parliament has not managed to send out a strong message, which is different to previous calls in relation to media ownership concentration in Eastern Europe and media control in Italy among other cases. At the European level, the Commission or the Council of ministers are not necessarily the drivers for change in this area. And we know very well, that unless national governments work together with Parliament, the institution which by default is more open to diffuse interests, the status quo remains. In this case, the status quo is in favour of the retreat of the Nation-State from controlling the media industry while becoming heavy-handed on individual ‘wrongdoings’: from protests (as The Guardian has been excellently reporting this past week) to use of the Internet to accessing information and culture. These are all blows to a fundamental right, the right to freedom of expression.

The gagging of free speech and cultural expression is also achieved in other ways as well and I would like to highlight a couple of areas that remain hidden from public debate on the one hand and when indeed debated they are treated as disconnected from concerns around media ownership concentration. The main problem we face with ownership concentration is that there is very little that the public, professionals and interested parties can do to impact on decisions and hold companies accountable. There is no transparency of decision making and no way to affect change that corresponds to public interests. The declarations of the freedom of expression in the European Charter of Fundamental Freedoms and the UN declaration of Human rights have in mind a freedom threatened by the interference of the State. However, the right to freedom of expression is rather narrowly defined in our laws and as such it offers minimal protection in practical terms. As the Communication Rights Campaign in the Information Society explains ‘Increased freedom of expression is not generating a corresponding flowering in media diversity, including diversity of content and plurality of resources’ (CRIS Campaign 2006 p29) The campaign also states ‘freedom of expression, narrowly defined, is largely compatible with corporate media dominance, especially in jurisdictions where corporations are deemed, just like people, to have a right to freedom of expression’ (p30). Our basic legal tools have not necessarily provided for a mediascape governed by multinational media as sources of power the lack of interference of the State in the functioning of these companies. A series of legal provisions are rendered inadequate when dealing with media ownership concentration and its effects: from libel laws that have gagged civil society organizations and journalists as well as public service media, to freedom of information frameworks that do not necessarily cover private corporations, to the right to reply, which is severely misused or ignored. Overall, the comprehensive right to freedom of expression or more broadly understood the right to communicate is eroded as private, centralized and converged media attain more power than governments.

The core problem with ownership concentration is the lack of accountability and mechanisms of transparency, which empower the public to judge and intervene in its own interests. This lack of accountability is at the core of media control and is exacerbated through concentration of ownership. At an international level, accountability is one of the most recent foci of attention for international organizations, precisely because the lack thereof renders the involvement of corporations in governance (through private – public partnerships for example) illegitimate. The OECD has published guidelines to which enterprises are to expected to follow. The 20 signatories of OECD among which the UK and US undertake to implement those guidelines. The following sections of the guidelines are of particular interest:

OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises (2008). Section III, Disclosure
4. Enterprises should also disclose material information on:
a) The financial and operating results of the company.
b) Company objectives.
c) Major share ownership and voting rights.
d) Members of the board and key executives, and their remuneration.
e) Material foreseeable risk factors.
f) Material issues regarding employees and other stakeholders.
g) Governance structures and policies.
5. Enterprises are encouraged to communicate additional information that
could include:
a) Value statements or statements of business conduct intended for public
disclosure including information on the social, ethical and environmental
policies of the enterprise and other codes of conduct to which the company
subscribes. In addition, the date of adoption, the countries and entities to
which such statements apply and its performance in relation to these
statements may be communicated.

Section VII Consumer Interests
4. Not make representations or omissions, nor engage in any other practices,
that are deceptive, misleading, fraudulent, or unfair.
5. Respect consumer privacy and provide protection for personal data.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/56/36/1922428.pdf

Certainly, these are mere guidelines. They are not incorporated in any legal instrument neither are they specific enough as to how they can be implemented.
However, I argue that they constitute one more point of international accord, from which civil society and parliamentarians can direct a new political claim for the reform of media corporations:

In the case of media and the problem of accountability of media conglomerates, it is important that the level of accountability demanded by the public service media is also applied to private media. The reason is two fold: first, private media are effectively subsidised in many different ways from the publics and governments in national territories, through special favourable taxation measures, subsidies to support technological and other infrastructure (broadband etc) but also indirectly through their publics who constitute their audiences, giving their time and attention to consuming advertising programmes, which themselves generate profit.

Second, they are subject to so-called corporate responsibility or corporate citizenship expectations. Given their special role in societies, economies and cultures, expectations regarding the transparency of media governance should be a paramount goal for the protection of democracy, the independence of Parliament and government and to serve customers’ interests.

Information about the ‘toxicity’ of programmes, which could be measured in terms of independence of journalists, adherence to ethics and codes of standards, adherence to respect for human rights and human dignity, can be understood and assessed, much like the labels we expect to see on our food in supermarkets. We want to know where our programmes come from, what standards have been followed in their production and how much ‘sugar’ and ‘fat’ they contain or in other words declare bias, interests and dispositions.

One final aspect I would like to highlight in relation to the ‘toxicity’ of corporate media when left unchecked is that of the products they create for popular consumption. Our attention should not be focused only on matters of journalism. A free press is after all a press that reports but also comments on lifestyles, ideas, propositions, also a press that creates culture. Popular culture reporting for example is a severely understudied and rather ignored issue, not only in policy circles or academic circles but surprisingly in activist circles. Studies have shown that the loosening of control over corporate ownership results in the deterioration of specific social groups’ rights to communication, but also their right to dignity. Such consequences are lack or restricted access to, and representation in the media and participation in communication making. Most severely affected are women and pre-teens. The former through their infantilisation and sexualisation in media, whether journalistic or fictional programmes. Young people because of a complete lack of appropriate programming for them, and of course because of the conspicuous positions children today find themselves in relation to the state (criminalises subcultures and treats them as adults) and commercial culture (press, music, fashion) that sexualizes them.

As concerned citizens in our various capacities, we are interested in a change that takes into account and recognizes the problems generated by media ownership concentration, lack of accountability and consequences for the democratic functioning of the political system.

Our campaign should target for the comprehensive, systematic and rigorous application of the OECD guidelines, to which the UK is a signatory and the development of legal measures for corporate accountability of media companies.

What we also need is a policy that reinstates the role of journalists by strengthening protections for the profession, by taking into account, respecting and allying with new forms of citizen involvement in recording, monitoring and checking abuses of power. We need alliances and solidarity among journalists and media workers and their publics. These alliances between professionals, amateurs and the public can only be built and maintained on the basis of a wide ranging involvement of publics in ‘expert’ enclaves. Journalists must resist and they can only do so with the support of their publics.

The Decline of Public Service Broadcasting

Has there been a decline in public service broadcasting in the last two decades? Some would argue against the idea that there has been. I want to raise some points connected with that issue and point to some policy solutions to the current crisis.

Public service broadcasting, variously defined, had at its core the idea that broadcasting should be run primarily in the public interest. It was a constantly evolving beast, but it was rooted in the idea that all the public should have access to the widest possible range of entertainment, news and information. This was, in part, to make up for the failings of the newspaper industry and in part to make creative use of the powerful media of TV and radio.

In its heyday the two key organisations, ITV and BBC provided an infrastructure that delivered this. By the 1980s this was changing. Technological and policy changes intervened to alter radically the ecology of broadcasting in the UK and change the nature of public service.

It is now 23 years since the publication of the report of the Committee on the Financing of the BBC Chaired by Alan, now Sir Alan Peacock.

That report initiated a major series of changes in the ways in which UK broadcasting was organised.

Not all at once. But gradually.

The changes, from 1986 onwards included:
* forcing BBC and ITV to take programmes from independent producers
* putting ITV contracts out to auction * liberalising the regime around radio
* allowing the concentration of ownership in ITV
* forcing the BBC to sell off chunks of its operation
* establishing a regulator 'Ofcom' with a brief to promote markets in mass communications
* allowing the growth of a massive number of satellite and digital channels with little or no obligations to provide any major form of public service programming.

In programming terms the consequences have been severe.
* A decrease in the amount of news and current affairs programmes on ITV since the 1980s, and an increase in soap operas.
* There is now a real crisis in TV in the production of children's programmes. ITV has withdrawn from the creation of these kinds of programmes, leaving the BBC and S4C to pick up the pieces.
* ITV has now, with Ofcom's encouragement and blessing beaten a retreat from making distinctive news programmes and non news programmes in the nations and regions of the UK.
* In radio we have had a proliferation of music stations - most of which arguably sound the same wherever you listen.

For the workforce we have seen
* an increase in casualisation;
* the spread of insecure jobs in the independent sector,
* and the setting up of special training schemes, like Skillset to make up for the shortfall that the collapse of ITV and the failures of the independents to train has created.
* From a rough split between the BBC, ITV and C4/S4C of 45/45/10-15% of the audience in the 1980s audience shares have declined for these institutions of public service broadcasting. In 2006 they were:

BBC 31.6%
ITV1 19.7%
C4 9.8%
C5 5.7%

So there have been changes. Major changes.

All has been accompanied by the evolution of the internet to provide new challenges to all people in the media, and new opportunities.

Those who argue that there has not been a decline, more a change in the relative position of public service broadcasting in the UK point to the way in which, despite the massive increase in competition, the UK public service channels continue to dominate viewing, how radio - especially BBC radio- is thriving and how the BBC has moved online to put its public service footprint on the net.

I have sympathy with this view. The BBC has remained a key player in the world of mass communications. Across a range of platforms and genres it continues to both appeal to mass audiences and produce varied programming. ITV, in spite of its now long standing crisis, is still standing and - current recession aside - will survive. But it will not be the ITV of the 1990s that survives, it will be one stripped of its main obligations - a kind of big beast Channel 5.

There is then a problem about using the word 'decline'. It is clearly the fact that public service electronic media do not dominate production or reception in the way they did before. It is clear that key genres have been under immense pressure and have sometimes all but disappeared.

But, despite the odds, the BBC still exists and there is plenty of evidence, accrued by Ofcom, that the public value highly the public service element of programming that the BBC licence pays for and that subsidy from the government enables on ITV 1, and S4C.

Yet this is all a bit misleading.

The key change that has occurred is that successive governments have allowed the core principles of a public service to be progressively eroded.

By that I mean policy which sustains a wide range of highly valued and well made output in the commercial sector as well as the public sector.

This has been because the policy makers and regulators have accepted the idea that the new technologies that seem to drive change should be allowed to operate as, primarily, a market.

The BBC is therefore under continued and considerable attack from people who want to see the end of its sole control over the licence fee. Ofcom broods in the corner, ready to pounce whenever the BBC looks like it will do something the market dislikes. ITV will no longer be anything like a public service broadcaster in the future. And, in the nations and regions the government is about to implement a scheme to fill the gap left by ITV' s failure to live up to its obligations, by taking chunks of the licence fee and putting it out to tender.

We have a Labour government, a Tory opposition and a generation of civil servants who have either made their ideological peace with neo-liberalism or have know little else. Their careers, status and income have been made by their willingness to go with the current of change that brought us markets that were allowed to take over everything from gas, electricity, rails and schools, and which have left our society more socially divided than it was at the height of the so-called divided 1970s. They do not yet seem to have woken up to the full implications for their theories of the contraction of the economy since 2007.

So, if there is a decline, it is in the relative position of public service in the ecology of mass communications and also in the attachment of key movers and shakers in politics, the civil service and the industry to the idea of public service.

Predictions are a dangerous game. I genuinely believed 23 years ago that by now the BBC would be rump. I was wrong. But those of us in the CPBF and TU movement were not wrong when we predicted the negative consequences of applying a version of neo-liberalism to communications policy.

My predictions are:

* ITV will cease to be anything resembling a public service broadcaster, but it will be called one by the government and regulators because they will not want to see their policies exposed as the failures they are;

* The regulators and government will continue to chip away at the BBC and ensure that, in time, only some very key functions (news, current affairs, children's' programmes) are produced their.

* There will be a patchwork of interventions in mass communications to cover up the holes left by this policy of retreat. It will be a bit like the complicated and all too inadequate systems of welfare provisions we have for the poorest in our society. A reality yes, but not an edifying one.

What can be done?

Firstly a political argument has to be won.

We need to say, repeat, argue and insist that a healthy democracy depends on a healthy, open, accountable and varied public media.

We have to repeat that this needs not just piecemeal intervention but major intervention.

These are what I would call the long term issues. We have to keep this kind of argument alive.

In the short and medium term though we can do things:
* We have to assert that the BBC and licence should fee remain intact.
* If we are to fund new public service initiatives we need to look to a variety of mechanisms such as those discussed in the recent NUJ and Bectu commissioned report by the NUJ. It identified potential alternative sources of income. These include:
* [a] a 1% levy on recording equipment or blank media, which would have yielded, in 2006, around £26 million in 2008 prices;
* [b] a 1% levy on pay TV revenues would yield an estimated £70 million per annum;
* [c] a 1% levy on the five major mobile phone operators in the UK would yield an estimated £208 million (IPPR, 2009: 4-5, 26).

* Independent Producers benefit from ring fenced sums allocated by public service broadcasters. Many of these companies have grown large on the back of what is, in effect, a public subsidy. Some mechanism for raising money from the larger beneficiaries of this system could be devised to provide a funding stream.

* In addition some consideration needs to be given to whether it is possible for the public to gain financial benefit from the future exploitation of the ITV plc brand and archives. Both of these valuable resources were nurtured with public support and, as such should be a potential source of funding.

* We need a new Communications Act that puts public service principles and economic resources behind major initiatives in mass communications.

* We need to change the governance of mass communications - to increase the role of democratically accountable bodies in the system and loosen the grip of the big media companies on policy in the sector.

* We need new rules on media ownership that limit radically the ability of major operators in the offline world to move into and colonise the online world. This could be done by using a range of indicators, from company ownership, to advertising revenues, to traffic on the net in order to determine where limits should be set.

* We need a national, independent research programme to work out policy in the area, policy which is driven by a clear, public service agenda, not the kind of agenda that has been the norm since the 1980s.

So in answer to my question, 'Has public service broadcasting declined?' I would have to say yes. It remains a force, but its position has been eroded considerably in the last 23 years.

We need to work in our local community groups, trade unions and political parties to do our best to halt that decline and put public service media at the centre of the rapidly evolving world of communications.

The media are failing democracy. Politicians are failing the media.

It is often said not much happens in Midlands town of Long Eaton - which is just as well. It has no commercial radio station, little coverage on regional ITV news and earlier this year its only local newspaper closed.

The Long Eaton Advertiser, owned by Trinity Mirror, who recorded profits of £145m in 2008 and £50m in interim results this year - the equivalent of £200,000 every single day over the past twelve months - was closed, not because the people of Long Eaton did not want news about their council, their health service, their education system or their local community but because of “difficult trading conditions”.

The Long Eaton Advertiser was not a victim of the recession, even though it had seen a huge fall in advertising revenue –it was a victim of a failed corporate business model for news. A model encouraged by politicians through deregulation and turning a blind eye to the effects of mergers, indebtedness and excessive profiteering on citizens rights to information.

Since the Long Eaton Advertiser shut a further sixty newspapers have closed. Almost one in four jobs in local newspapers have gone. Thousands of jobs have gone across national newspapers – not just in old-fashioned print but in shiny new media. Dozens of local media offices have closed removing journalists from the communities they serve. ITV has cut more than 1000 jobs and halved its regional news services. A growing number of newspapers have gone from daily to weekly, from evening to overnight, from paid for to free. Editions are cut, supplements axed, specialists ditched. Claire Enders, a media analyst predicts that half the country’s 1300 local newspapers will close between now and 2013, destroying a further 20,000 media jobs.

As a result local and national democracy is suffering – councils, courts and public bodies are no longer being scrutinised. Journalists are increasingly stuck in offices rewriting press releases – relying ever more on corporate or celebrity PR, experienced journalists are being replaced by unpaid interns.

While the media industry remains fundamentally profitable the corporate business model is killing quality journalism, cutting at what is perceived to be expensive newsgathering – investigative, international and original newsgathering.

At the heart of this debate must be a total rejection of the idea set out by James Murdoch that profit is the best guarantor of media quality and independence. It’s not.

The supply of the independent information people need to be engaged citizens is too important to be left entirely to companies motivated primarily by profit.

The founders of the free press never thought that freedom of the press would only belong to those who could afford a press. They would have been horrified at the idea that if rich people determine there is not sufficient commercial value in news that communities should be deprived of quality information and quality journalism.

So we need action to save, build and sustain newsgathering. We’ve called for an economic stimulus plan for journalism with action aimed at encouraging a variety of voices, across all platforms, a greater plurality, maximised through a combination of different ownership models – commercial, public, mutual, employee, co-operative, for profit and not for profit.

RDAs could be charged with investigating how new media could be stimulated through start-up grants (as happened with the Camden New Journal), subsidised technology, office space or training grants, solutions driven by journalists and communities themselves – online radio, broadband tv, print and online.

Such moves could be supported by tax breaks for local media who meet clearly defined public purposes, tax credits for individuals subscribing to publications that meet such public purposes.

Companies planning to close titles could be forced to divest them. Action taken to break up large corporate media groups which fail to meet clearly defined public purposes.

In the idea of IFNCs – once we have secured the Channel 3 local and regional news - we have the potential to explore such new thinking if instead of just replicating failed business models and concentrated ownership they bring together a wider array of civil society partners and media. Such local media could support hyper-local initiatives, encourage partnerships between traditional and non-traditional content providers based on the pursuit of specific public interest goals.

To ensure any public money is used for the public good, for the benefit of the communities media serve – not primarily private businesses and shareholders – clear and enforeceable conditions need to be applied – that safeguard the production of original content in the public interest - reinvestment quotas to ensure the maximum amount of public money invested is used for content rather than profit; guaranteed levels of original content and caps on directors’ pay.

Politicians say they like such ideas. Restate their commitment to local and national democracy. Recognise media, news and information is vital to that democracy. But say the ideas are not affordable.

Even if you could bring the supply of fair and balanced information down to a simple economic equation, safeguarding the future of the media is not a question of resources but a question of political will.

Top slicing the licence fee is not the only way to fund local and regional news.
Cutting the BBC down to size is not the only means of ensuring the supply of local news in print and online.

With the right commitment we could levy, as most other countries in Europe already do, those who profit from rebroadcasting public service content but pay nothing towards its creation. News aggregators, exploiting news content for commercial gain, could be charged

Or, as the digital revolution gathers pace, huge revenues are being made by TV operators, internet service providers and consumer hardware manufacturers – all by consumers desire to watch high quality programmes on new platforms.

Added to the advertising income made by non-public service broadcasters, these revenues dwarf those of the public service operators who are responsible for 90% of the UK-originated content available on our screens.

Almost every other European country applies a levy to recording devices. In Germany it raises €146m, in France €168m yet we are told it is politically unthinkable here.

Even in pay-TV households, the average viewer spends 80% of their time watching the public service stations. Without the BBC, ITV and C4 on their platforms, pay-TV providers would struggle to reach a fraction of the £4.3bn they earned in 2007. We are almost the only country which does not insist they pay retransmission fees. Applying just a 1% levy would raise more than £70m for content creation.

Commend the detailed work in this area of IPPR, Professor Patrick Barwise, Steve Morrison, Mark Oliver in this respect.

Ofcom’s consumer research showed levies to be “the most acceptable of the potential new sources of funding, were “one of the most appropriate long-term solutions” and were “perceived as a fair way to fund PSB, by taking money from the industry to reinvest in the industry”.

So funding for news is not a question of resources it is a question of political will.

I’m sick of hearing MPs say “but can you imagine what Rupert Murdoch would say about that” while bemoaning the closure of another newspaper, a scaling back of local and regional TV news or the hubbing of yet another set of radio stations.

Digital media offer us huge opportunities to enhance our democracy through investment in newsgathering. It offers us greater opportunities for participation, collaboration, mutualisation yet we are hamstrung by those who cling on to old failed business models.

That’s my manifesto – on the inside cover would be printed the words of William Morris – “Intelligence enough to conceive, courage enough to will, power enough to compel. If our ideas of a new society are to be anything other than a dream, these three qualities must animate the due effective majority of the working people; and then I say, the think will be done”

Broadcasting Markets and Audience Choices: The Limits of Policy-making

Note: reference and key term entries appear here in alphabetical order, and not in the sequence in which they appear in the Power Point document.

1. AVMS: the Audio-Visual Media Services Directive of the European Union, replaces the Television Without Frontiers Directive and must be transposed into national law by the end of 2009.

See: http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/reg/avms/index_en.htm

2. CC/TS: Contained Contestability and Top-Slicing. The concept of a ‘Contained Contestable Element’ of the Television Licence Fee is referred to in the UK Government’s White Paper, Digital Britain (2009: 19) as an appropriate source to be used to fund programmes for ‘older children’ and ‘news in the Nations, regionally and locally’. This proposal was put forward in the context of a recognition that investment in certain types of public service programming (PSB) was diminishing. In the case of news for the nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and for the English regions, particular concern has been expressed about the significant reduction of investment in these programmes on the ITV1 channel during periods of national or regional ‘opt-out’ transmission.

The Government’s proposal is to limit the amount of money taken to fund such vulnerable types of programming to around 3.5% of the Licence Fee; this is the significance of the term ‘contained’. The Digital Britain report also points out that the money given to the BBC, and ring-fenced to be used by the Corporation to support the process of Digital Switchover (DSO), also amounts to around 3.5% of the Licence Fee. It is this same proportion of the Licence Fee that it is proposed should be used to fund the type of PSB programming referred to above, but produced by organisations competing with and providing an alternative service to the BBC. The DSO process is planned to end in 2012. Thus it is proposed to roll-forward the use of this 3.5% for other purposes from 2013.

Those opposed to this proposal tend to refer to the ‘top-slicing’ of the BBC Licence Fee. Opponents express the view that Licence Fee money should be seen, unlike any other tax, as licence fee-payers money. They object to what they see as unacceptable Government interference in the use of such money, point out that there are no serious precedents for such action since the BBC was founded in the 1920s, and object to the transfer of what they see as BBC resources to be used by the BBC’s commercial competitors. Opponents also argue that the transfer of such funds away from the BBC will not achieve, in any significant way, the objective of increasing the overall flow of investment into the production of the more vulnerable genres of public service programming. In support of this view earlier research is cited (by Oliver and Ohlbaum in 2003) to demonstrate the value for money aspect of BBC investment and the likelihood that a smaller proportion of any re-distributed monies would reach the screen, once the additional costs had been met of managing the re-allocation of resources and of servicing obligations to shareholders in the case of profit-distributing companies competing with the BBC.

3. Digital Britain: Digital Britain. Final Report. Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and the Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting. Department for Business Innovation and Skills and Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Cm. 7650, June 2009. Norwich: The Stationery Office.

4. Goldberg98: David Goldberg, Tony Prosser and Stefaan Verhulst (1998) EC Media Law and Policy. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman.

5. Levies: the case for a variety of types of levies and re-transmission fees has been made in a number of places, including in the 2009 report published by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), Mind the Funding Gap. The potential of industry levies for the continued funding of public service broadcasting. An IPPR report for BECTU and the NUJ. March 2009.

See also the detailed submission of evidence by Steve Morrison, Chief Executive, All3Media to the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications, 20 May 2009

at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld/lduncorr/com200509ev7.pdf

6. ‘Limits of policy-making’: my talk assumes that audience behaviour, money and markets all shape and sometimes limit both public and private policy-making.

7. O2ndPSBR09: Ofcom (2009) Putting Viewers First. Ofcom’s Second Public Service Broadcasting Review. Final Statement and Recommendations, January. London: Ofcom.

8. OCMR09: Ofcom (2009) The Communications Market Report 2009, August. London: Ofcom.

9. OICM08: Ofcom (2008) The International Communications Market Report, 2008, November. London: Ofcom.

10. TWF: the Television Without Frontiers Directive of the European Union, established in 1989. See: http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/reg/tvwf/index_en.htm

Decline in Public Sector Broadcasting

The decline, which we have all witnessed, in public service broadcasting, has its roots in the 1980s in the Thatcher years and I want to identify a number of factors which were writ large in promoting that decline. They are causes from which we can learn for the battle that is to come in the next decade which may well decide whether PSB survives.

Mrs. Thatcher’s 1990 Broadcasting Act stands out as the single most malevolent cause – perhaps the worst piece of legislation of the last 50 years, discredited and disowned as soon as it was operational. Some ITV bosses even felt it was designed to drive them out of business. One Government Minister, responsible for the Bill, told us: “I don’t believe in this legislation, but my career is getting in the way; a Government adviser described it as “An Act of Vengeance” and a cabinet minister confessed: “The only good thing about this Act is that there will never be another one like it”.

Mrs. Thatcher had been right to criticise the poor labour relations and restrictive practices in ITV in the early eighties but she refused to believe that ITV had listened and that they had been reformed. In the late eighties she even appointed a Monpolies and Mergers inquiry into ITV believing that it would produce evidence to justify her policy. When it did not and showed that the problems she complained of had already been eliminated she refused to talk about it and carried on shouting.

In the late stages of the Bill one ITV managing director, Harry Turner, South West, even made an eleventh hour personal bid to persuade the Prime Minister to change her mind. He was granted a private late night audience with her at the Carlton Club but didn’t get much chance to speak. She launched straight into him. “Not afraid of competition are you, Mr. Turner?” “But, but but, Prime Minister surely…”he stuttered. Later he confessed he couldn’t get a word in edgeways and had considered desperate tactics to halt the tirade. “I wanted to say”, he said (Pause) “I suppose a fuck is out of the question, Prime Minister”.

But she swept out shouting: “If you have anything more to say, say it to Lord Young”, (the trade minister) (PAUSE). Life was like that. The image of Mrs. Thatcher at this time was well caught by a parliamentary sketch writer who described her entering the Commons: “She was wearing an outfit of an officer in the junior hussars (PAUSE) and the expression of a B-52 bomber”.

Her 1990 Act introduced crazy, blind one time bids for ITV franchises which did not even work for the Government and took a great deal of money out of programme budgets; it split up ITV and Channel Four to compete against each other for ratings and money rather than programmes; it fatally weakened the regulator opening the floodgates to lower standards and it introduced haphazard takeovers in ITV reducing competition, promoting monopoly and destroying the regional network.

All this had the effect of making ITV and Channel Four much more commercial with an incentive to abandon public service commitments; to narrow their schedules, chase ratings and put advertisers before viewers. This in turn put the BBC, defending its audiences, under pressure to follow suit – which they did.

Mrs. Thatcher and her senior ministers soon admitted the failure of the new Act but it was the law and when Channel Five was put forward, it would with disastrous consequences, be used again. It proved to be the most significant negative influence on today’s broadcasting – were it not for a freak accident it would have also eliminated the two best ITV companies, London Weekend and Granada Television.

It should be noted that 13 years later under Mr. Blair’s New Labour Government in 2003 when the Communications Act was passed, essentially the same policy – deregulation – was pursued as Blair, in Mrs.Thatcher’s footsteps, continued to treat broadcasting as though it was merely an economic activity, failing to recognise its cultural and social role. But bad legislation hasn’t been the only factor that sold broadcasting short.

The free for all climate of the late 1980s encouraged a new breed of entrepreneur to move into ITV. The existing leaders who had their roots in showbusiness and in public service moved out or were pushed out. They believed that broadcasting had a purpose; had to have standards; had to educate and inform as well as entertain.

They were replaced by accountants and financiers – Gerry Robinson, Michael Green, Charles Allen. None of these men had any broadcasting experience or seemed to care about what was made or about public service. They saw it merely as an economic activity and their first and last interest was the bottom line.

What marks out the difference between these two groups is that the first sought to earn money to make programmes and the second merely made programmes to make money. One group was deeply committed to what they made; the other had no instrinsic interest in what was made. As long as the leaders failed to see that broadcasting has been the central cultural – not economic – experience of our age: if their first and last criterion was maximising returns, then it was inevitable that broadcasting, led by ITV, would lose its range and diversity and thus decline.

Because they did not understand the business it was also inevitable that the new men would make expensive mistakes that contributed to ITV losing its way. Hundreds of millions were splashed away on ill thought out schemes. But the problem was more fundamental than that. The underlying philosophy was bad because Robinson and Allen demanded profits before production they would neglect investment and training, diverting funds from television into unwise takeovers, foolish investments and mountains of debt leaving ITV as a crippled business. It was worthy of a programme title we always wanted to use at Granada “Trubble at Till” and another one the lawyers forbade for a programme about Malta “Anything Gozo”.

Two other factors contributed significantly to the slide in ITV. The regulator, the ITC, refused to recognise the enormity of what Mrs. Thatcher had done – that she had made the regional system of 16 licences untenable. They could have redrawn the map and advertised say just six licences, but they passed it up and saw the ITV companies gradually eat each other in spasmodic amalgamations. They ceased to be creative; ceased to compete effectively against their true competition as they fought each other – a destructive process that would go on for 14 years.

But perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the regulator should lose its way. Under Mrs. Thatcher a Conservative businessman and a Conservative politician were appointed to run the ITC as chairman and deputy together, breaking accepted convention.

Finally Mrs. Thatcher consistently disadvantaged British broadcasting by privileging one of her favourite businessmen, Rupert Murdoch by allowing him to unfairly takeover satellite broadcasting in Britain and then to allow that business to trade on unfair terms against ITV and the BBC. Programmes of bought in pap could be scheduled against the terrestrial broadcasters public service slots to enhance Murdoch’s profits. Again this was a policy continued by Tony Blair for essentially the same reason – selling broadcasting and the public short in order to get support from the Murdoch Press.

These four factors hit public service programming very hard especially in ITV but it also diminished C4 and the BBC.. Some will argue in a changing world with new competition and fragmenting audiences, what happened was inevitable but it isn’t so. ITV lost its pre-eminent position because of very specific decisions and a bad philosophy held by its new chief executives. It lost audiences and revenue far faster than its rivals.

There was hope with the arrival at ITV of Michael Grade that the channel might be turned round. Others thought it far too late. I suspect that Grade tempted by huge financial rewards and a last big career move did not realise just how far his old network had slipped. The difficulties of fast receding audiences, profits and share price would be compounded by discovering a wave of programme fabrications, by incurring massive fines; the seizing of a stranglehold block of ITV shares by their arch rival Murdoch and the mother and father of all recessions.

Although Grade claimed to have stabilised the business this was at the price of further reducing their PSB commitments, collapsing the remnants of their regional base and opting to leave.

But there is positive hope for the future. We have seen the complete failure of businessmen treating broadcasting as a pure economic activity but we still have, just about, solid structures in the BBC and possibly Channel Four. The development of Salford Quays is for example a big positive step for public service broadcasting even if it does not compensate for the decline of ITV. We have a tremendous talent base and we have quality technology.

But it has to be said that they exist in a frigid economic climate with the high probability of an unfriendly government taking power, again supported by Murdoch, seeking and likely to get, continued commercial advantage. The Conservative Party shows ominous signs of reviving their long standing hatred of the BBC (and it has to be said sometimes the BBC doesn’t help itself) and they may also in government be tempted to privatise Channel Four.

However there are policies, if a future government is honest about speaking for the whole of Britain, which could do much to encourage PSB.

The first would be standing up to the Murdoch empire, breaking their monopoly and for the first time in 20 years creating a more level competitive playing field in broadcasting. You may be interested to know that John Major, in contrast to Thatcher and Blair, considered this during the dark days of his Government in the mid nineties.
This leads to reversing the fruitless policy of deregulation pursued by Thatcher and Blair. There is no reason why the highly profitable Sky Broadcasting should not carry some public service responsibilities in line with the terrestrial broadcasters. What we need is more effective regulation not less. Imagine the opposition.

Thirdly Government needs to encourage more professional broadcasters and showmen supported not dominated by people with business skills to run television. Accountants running creative industries is a recipe for disaster.

Fourthly the decentralisation of broadcasting has much further to go and a few wiseacres in the BBC know that the future really rests in the low cost regions reflecting, representing and reporting the whole of Britain. Yet today we have some
30 mainstream channels unbelievably every one in London. Allied to that we need to encourage further the expansion of local broadcasting where some activity is stirring.

These are all positive possibilities if only we had in both broadcasting and in government leaders of vision who understood what broadcasting is for.

ITV - Where do we go now?

My name is Keith Stokes and I am Chair of BECTU’s Independent Broadcasting Division. I have worked for ITV on and off for 25 years and, most relevant to this forum, I have worked for ITV regional news exclusively for the last 10 years or so as a graphic designer based in Norwich for the Anglia region. I think I am well-qualified therefore to talk about ITV’s management failures, to talk about technological change, to talk about regulatory weakness, to talk about the extreme tardiness of policy makers and to talk about recessions (plural!) But, I’m not going to talk about those things here, any one of which might have been overcome in isolation, but in combination has proved catastrophic.

I may have an intimate understanding of how we got where we are. Nevertheless, the real question remains where do we go from here? Memories of the good old days, probably rose-tinted anyway, are no help to us now.

From the many surveys and much research it would seem that most people in this country want there to be a plurality of news provision, and someone other than the BBC providing regional and local news on television. I would guess that most people in this room concur with that view.

I wish I could use my years of experience to suggest an easy solution to the problem, but I fear all I can do is repeat what others have already said and pass the buck to someone else. Ultimately, I believe, it has to be a matter for government, and as with so much else, our political leaders have failed to grasp the magnitude of the problem until the last minute and are left scrabbling for a policy that may or may not solve the problem. With a potential change of Government soon, the problems and their resolution just get more complicated.

In order to maintain our own sanity, however, I think we can only deal with the plans currently being considered by the DCMS as proposed to them by Ofcom. A DCMS of a politically different hue, and an Ofcom stripped of most of its functions by the decree of the Murdoch family business, we will have to deal with as and when.

So, what is being proposed?

Again, the answers are less clear than one would hope or expect at this stage of the process.

In exchange for some public money (amount unspecified and source unspecified), certain organisations (constitution unspecified), are invited to apply (process unspecified), to run initially one ITV English region, plus Wales and Scotland and eventually all of the regional news output broadcast on ITV1.

I hope you’re following this because I may get lost!

In exchange for providing a slot in the schedule, ITV wants, in return, control over content and style, and will want to keep control of any advertising revenue generated. Many have questioned what right ITV has to make such demands if it has abandoned making the programmes itself. Which brings me to a fundamental question that few seem to have asked and no-one has answered: are we really just talking about regional news on ITV1? If public money (however raised) is to be spent, then it is not surprising that every community group, every media start-up, every higher education media course, every struggling local newspaper, every local radio station, every local council and countless others will make demands on it (perhaps rightly.)

As I said, I work for regional news on ITV and it is a matter of some professional pride that at 6 o’clock every night a very large percentage of the available audience sits down to watch it. Some would say that that is in spite of ITV’s best efforts, but nevertheless it is a fact. Any new system that destroys that will be a cause for regret, but not, ultimately, for ITV who at digital switchover may choose to simply walk away from the whole deal. Without the clout of ITV and the audience it delivers on Channel 3, all the arguments about plurality of provision are called into question. There are a multitude of channels now all capable of carrying locally-produced, publicly-funded news content and this capability will continue to expand on digital and broadband especially. But who will watch it? It has to be something other than worthy to be worthwhile.

It is not my intention to disparage community radio, for instance, or free-sheet newspapers with a desire to expand into video content. Nor is it my intention to suggest that only those professionals currently engaged in the business are capable of providing the service. An injection of new ideas and new practitioners would not be unwelcome. But I do believe that it is important that the audience, the present audience, is not forgotten. And to don my trade unionist’s hat for a moment, the continuation of a well-funded, well-run service is the best guarantee for jobs, now and in the future. I attended a meeting of the Westminster Media Forum recently and I was thoroughly depressed to hear a Northern Canadian TV station run by volunteers cited as some sort of blueprint for the way forward.

I concede that a local or regional news service staffed by citizen journalists, media students, and volunteer staff using facilities shared with the BBC perhaps could make for interesting viewing. I just don’t believe that ITV would carry such an offering on their network and that would call into question its worth.

ITV, under Michael Grade’s chairmanship at least, has consistently said that it would not take government subsidy to continue to run regional news. I guess it’s a fear of becoming the British Leyland of British Broadcasting. But I think it’s worth noting that British Leyland failed not because of public funding but rather because the product was rubbish!

Well, I have been skirting round the central issue here for some time, but I can’t ignore it any longer. The crux of the matter remains: how is any solution to the problem to be funded?

I think it has been perhaps the greatest success of the ITV business model to date, that viewers have felt that they were getting it for free. Watching the most tedious commercial or even one of the truly memorable ones, there can be very few people who have thought “Oh well. I don’t mind sitting through this because it’s paying for Coronation Street.” It is regrettable that technological change has happened more quickly than policy makers have been able to cope with, so that we are rapidly approaching a point where there is no question that the cost to ITV of running its current regional news operation will outstrip its value.

Personally I would love there to be a business model, pulled at the eleventh hour, out of a hat that would make it worth ITV’s while to continue to make and transmit a regional news service. But then the alarm goes off and I wake up to the reality. At the Westminster Media Forum I mentioned just now, the two things that personally gave me most heart were presentations by Scottish TV and ITN, both of which showed demos of what an enhanced regional and in STV’s case, national, news service might look like. I though they were both the kinds of thing that people might actually watch. However, both were predicated on the receipt of public funding.

When it comes to any carrot versus stick debate, I’m always on the side of the carrot. By which I mean that providing incentives to encourage your favoured outcome has a greater chance of success than coercion. In this current debate I’m not sure that things like “gifted spectrum” in exchange for PSB undertakings, have been explored fully nor have any other ideas for incentivising the provision of local/regional news.

But, the only deal on the table (as far as we know) is the provision of some funding from the public purse to allow there to be a viable news service not on the BBC. So, how is that money to be raised and can there be any guarantees about its long-term application?

Ofcom has said that any money coming from a surplus in the Digital Switchover Fund would be enough to fund their proposed pilots, but not enough to fund the whole roll-out. Any savings for ITV in not having to run services in Wales and one English region as proposed by Ofcom would still not be enough to secure the rest of their present network beyond next year. And since I’ve mentioned the proposed pilots, I wish someone could explain to me how they’re supposed to work. I certainly haven’t heard a comprehensible explanation from Ofcom and it is their idea! Where will they be? What will the selection process be? How long will they run for? How will their success be measured. What happens if they fail? And, to put my trade union hat on again, who will staff them? If it’s not present ITV staff then I think BECTU’s and the NUJ’s lawyers will be very busy.

But to return to the subject of so-called top-slicing of the licence fee. As you know BECTU, and the other unions represented, have opposed this concept from the outset and for two very good reasons. Firstly, it would in all likelihood be the thin end of a very long wedge, with future Governments raising (or lowering) the percentage taken and secondly, it doesn’t provide any new funding for PSB, it merely spreads the existing amount more thinly.

Now we can all take issue with how the BBC is run, and it could be argued that its management failures in recent years have been every bit as spectacular as ITV’s, and the view from any ITV newsroom across town to the BBC’s is different than that from BECTU HQ in Clapham or the NUJ building in Grays Inn Road. But that doesn’t mean that the argument is wrong. Just because a reporter in an ITV newsroom thinks (rightly or wrongly) that her BBC opposite number leads a cosseted life doesn’t make top-slicing the licence fee the right answer. Ensuring that the BBC is properly run and in tune with its audience is not what this debate is about.

So, how else is the money to be found. Again the ITV Unions have consistently argued that a system of levies could provide the solution as happens in many other countries around the world and especially in the EU. Ofcom told us that the idea was politically a non-starter, so it was something of a surprise to find in Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report (remember that?) a proposal for a levy on landlines to fund broadband roll-out. This seems to me to be completely the opposite of what is needed. Let us have taxation to fund content, not hardware. After all, isn’t that what the licence fee is? You buy a television, you have to buy a licence which funds the BBC content. So, why when you buy a video-enabled mobile phone or a hard disc recorder, should you not pay a premium to fund the content?

There are a whole range of other options which have been suggested including levies on BSkyB and Virgin Media. I fear that these too have been ignored by the policy makers (I wonder why?). But top-slicing need not be the only game in town.

My real concern is that whatever solution is proposed in the next few days or weeks should be sustainable for a good many years. On Tuesday Anglia Television celebrated its 50th anniversary. It seems unlikely that the DCMS can magic a formula that will see us through the next 50 years, but the next 50 weeks will hopefully give us a clearer idea of what chance there is for a slightly longer future.

Protecting and Campaigning for a High Quality and Diverse Media

I want to use my 15 minutes to talk about news, democracy, passion and vampires (it being Halloween and all). Because I am passionate about democracy and news is the life blood of a democracy. Even in a world of one-click communication and information overload, most people still get most of their news, most of the time from mainstream news sources - news matters, maybe more than it ever has. But you lot know that and Iím not telling you anything new by saying that our democracy is in a pretty bad shape and our news media are in crisis.

And here I want to draw on evidence from 2 recent studies 1) New media and the news funded by the Leverhulme Trust; 2) UK Inquiry into Civil Society and the Media funded by Carnegie Trust UK.

o Newspaper circulation and readership levels are at an all time low; there has been a tremendous growth in the number of news outlets available including the advent of, and rapid increase in free papers, the emergence of 24 hour television news and the popularization of online and mobile platforms; a decline in advertising revenue combined with increased investment in new media technologies to attract audiences online, alongside cuts in personnel have all had a negative impact on journalism for the public good and in the public interest.

o Even though there now is a plethora of media outlets, and citizens and civil society can publish media content more easily than ever, there still is a dominance of a limited number of players that control news, information content and public debate.

o Mainstream news on-line has not expanded to include a broader diversity of voices or shifted focus according to information filtered through social media. Rather, the working context of news media has increased pressures in the newsroom to fill more space (through the expansion of online platforms), work at greater speed (to fill the requirements of 24 hour news and the immediacy of online communication) with less journalists in permanent positions, more job insecurity and a decline in advertising revenue.

o In this environment there is evidence of journalists being thrust into news production more akin to creative cannibalization than the craft of journalism ñ as they need to fill more space and to work at greater speed while also having improved access to stories and sources online ñ they talk less to their sources, are captured in desk-bound, cut and paste, administrative journalism. Ready made fodder from tried and tested sources takes precedence over the sheer difficulty of dealing with the enormity of user generated content or the overload of online information leading to an homogenization of content as ever increasing commercial pressures add to the temptation to rely on news agencies and cheaper forms of news gathering. In a digital age of information surplus and real-time communication - Protecting and enhancing a diversity of media content has actually become more important rather than less important.

Of course, journalism doesnít create democracy and democracy doesnít invent journalism but there is a relationship between the two. And this relationship gets into trouble when it is sucked dry (enter the vampire) through marketization, dominated and driven by commercial imperatives within a neoliberal context of deregulation alongside the economic and technological realities of globalisation ó taken together, these factors have exerted multiple pressures on professional journalists and the mainstream news industry that are manifest in profit loss, redundancies, restructuring and closures (as Jeremy has outlined). Until, quite frankly, we are in a bloody mess.

In a commercial environment news organizations foreground rationalization and marketization at the expense of ideal democratic objectives.

And the government know this well. In the Digital Britain report (admittedly you have to read quite a lot of it to finally get there) but on page 141 they say 'The government believes that the market alone will not provide plurality in the ownership, commissioning, editorial and production of public service content that remains essential. This is particularly true of news.'

Part of their solution is

o (Digital Britain) Independently Funded News Consortia (IFNC). Now on the face of it these consortia could potentially offer a means of broadening ownership models with alternative funding regimes and increased diversity of content. A protected funding model and a wide and diverse network of partners in the consortium that includes actors from civil society (such as universities, community associations and cultural networks) could better ensure true diversity and a broad representation. They could also be governed in a way that safeguards the production of content that is in the public interest and includes civil society associations. But they will fail if they replicate current patterns of concentrated ownership, prop up failed business models and simply churn out more of the same. If one vampire bites the neck of another, they create another vampire. And right now my guess is that is precisely where theyíre heading if they make any headway at all.

o IFNCs could develop and support hyper-local media through the sharing of resources and on-line link up to encourage alternative voices. This in turn could attract tax breaks. They could be expected to foster the creation of partnership structures and collaboration between mainstream, traditional content providers and non-traditional content providers based on the pursuit of specific public interest goals.

o They could be regulated to guarantee they operate within a value system based on public service and on a not-for-profit basis ensuring that the maximum percentage of public money invested ends up paying for content rather than profit.

But if you want a news industry that functions for the public good and in the public interest, that is freed to some extent, from commercial imperatives, you have to pay for it. And who is going to do that. And hereís the rub:

o Their solution - let's use the BBC Licence fee - so having decreed that the market left to its own devices cannot be relied upon to provide adequate conditions for a news media that operates for democratic gain, lets suck the blood of the only news provider that can sustain quality public service content in the face of wider financial concerns of commercial media. You will gather from my tone that I am not in favour of this approach. In our research those organisations that were either protected from the vagaries of the market or regulated in the public interest were the only ones that could still retain professional journalistic codes and practice and struggle with some degree of success to deliver high quality and diverse news. But let's be clear, the terms of the DB consultation were clearly geared towards straightforward market models and a clear preference to draw on the Television Licence Fee (public money) to subsidise regional news programmes produced by private companies. The BBCs position as a content producer over and above its role as a content distributor needs to be preserved. This means more investment in journalism and journalists rather than less. Can we afford to continue funding the BBC in its current form? We can't afford not to. And what's more there are richer veins to gain democratic sustenance from.

o Alternative funding models - could include the charging of news aggregators that exploit news content. [News aggregators stand accused of the free exploitation of professional copy for their own commercial gain. It is possible to regulate to ensure that appropriate revenues go to the original news producers and not just to those who present and further disseminate the material.]

o Levies - a surcharge or tax on the revenues or profit of certain sections of the media industry, are common in many European countries and are found to be popular among the public (IPPR, 2009).

o The government could expand funding for public and community broadcasting at a local level with a requirement that the majority of the funds are used directly for original journalism servicing the local community.

o Provide a better infrastructure for community media.

Government funding, industry levies and other ways of inserting resources in the media landscape will not, on their own, guarantee diversity and deliberation. Distribution of money syndicated for media production in the public interest should happen according to key criteria and would require independent regulation.

The government must seriously alternative approaches to ensuring public service news content in newspapers as well as in broadcasting - this can be a carrot rather than a stick approach ñ regulation that provides the freedom to operate in the public interest rather than stifles the freedom to be 'unlovable' (Schudson). The Charity Commission could recognise journalism in the public interest as a charitable endeavour available for charitable status. This could then carry tax breaks for organizations delivering a particular level of public service media content. Similarly, to qualify for any tax benefits commercial news media could be required to meet pre-established standards of transparency in news reporting.

To emphasize original news content over news aggregation and pure distribution all news organizations could be required to be accountable for their own coverage and be seen to embrace transparency in their news gathering activities and, wherever possible, declare the source of their information to encourage original, investigative reporting and limit cannibalization and over-reliance on news agencies - particularly important for overseas coverage.

So what Iím saying is that there are values at the heart of news making that desperately need protecting if we are to preserve the relationship between news and democracy. And Iím going to come back to passion and vampires here ñ you know those vampire films where the moment comes, itís a full moon, a storm starts, the doors clash and curtains blow, a werewolf howls in the distance, and some silly sod in a nightie grabs a bunch of garlic for protection and youíre there thinking you stupid fool get the stake, go for the heart, drop the friggin' garlic

Well now is that time ñ we have had a financial crash - what happens when markets are left to their own devices (that's the full moon), we have a forthcoming general election (that's the storm brewing), and a current government who are in a hurry to do something with the Digital Britain report (that's the doors clashing).

What do we need to do, every single person in this hall , the CPBF, the NUJ, academics and CSAs alike go grab your stakes, campaign now and campaign hard to confront the aggressive liberalization and marketization that has had such a detrimental effect on our news media. Stop dangling the garlic, protecting the public interest requires both a more passionate and determined stance on media concentration and a more passionate and imaginative approach to securing media diversity, one that is based not simply on economic benefits but on the vital importance of stimulating vigorous debate and critical perspectives and securing widespread political representation. In short, on securing the relationship between news and democracy.