Friday 10 February 2023

2023 examples

MARCH 2023
BBC HISTORY OF CONSERVATISM? OPINION PIECE Guardian. Sample: What kind of world were the 17 white men who have served as its director general – 12 of them privately educated, 11 of them Oxbridge graduates, eight of them former military personnel – ever going to construct?

BBC SEEN TO CENSOR ECO DESTRUCTION DOC. LINEKER SUSPENDED OVER CRITICISING IMMIGRATION POLICY. GOVERNMENT APPOINTED CHAIR UNDER INVESTIGATION OVER JOHNSON LOAN LINKS ISN'T 
The facts are disputed, but senior BBC sources are clear that they are seeking to avoid attack (Chomsky: flak) from the right-wing media and government (Chomsky: concentration of ownership; anti-communism) by putting an episode of a new David Attenborough nature series online only. Guardian
Meantime there's been a presenter and commentator strike in support of Gary Lineker. 
>>>The journalist Jon Sopel, who has held several senior positions at the BBC, said: “Lucky there are no producer guidelines on whether you need to declare facilitating an £800k loan to a prime minister while applying for a job as chairman of a broadcasting organisation.”   Guardian.

The former Manchester United and England defender Gary Neville, a commentator for Sky Sports, said the decision was what happened when “you take on the Tories and the system”.
Also, a BBC Radio 4 programme was officially criticised by the BBC for failing to challenge claims by former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries (the one exposed in the Culture Select Committee for not knowing how C4 is funded even as she tried to privatise it). Guardian.

IPSO announce 2 months later they're investigating Clarkson Sun column. Guardian. Going by past rulings they're unlikely to rule against it, they are reluctant to invoke their discrimination clause and give a lot of leeway to opinion pieces. Rather like the BBFC does with violence in big budget, big 5 blockbuster films with a fantasy element.

Wednesday 11 May 2022

BBFC FILM TV 2020-22 CASES

 I've been having a trawl through some of my larger posts... There's still a lot below, but this makes it easier to find nuggets on specific industry case studies. Still TBC with some bullets...


I started with 

2021 OVERVIEW compilation of examples

last updated Jan 2022....

BBFC PUBLIC PANEL ZERO TOLERANCE OF N-WORD, NOW MIN 12 RATING UNLESS EDUCATIONAL
Guardian reports on BBFC's response to its latest public attitudes research.

DISNEY+ HONG KONG LAUNCH CUTS SIMPSONS CHINA EPISODE
Guardian. 'In the cartoon there is a sign in [Tianamen] square that reads “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened”, a satirical nod to China’s campaign to purge memories of what happened.'

GULF STATES BAN DISNEY'S MCU ETERNAL OVER GAY KISS
See Guardian.

ENGLISH COUNCIL URGES PARENTS TO BAN SQUID GAMES AFTER COPYCAT OUTBREAK
If it was film they'd have power to ban it... Guardian

NETFLIX DAVE CHAPELLE TRANSPHOBIA ROW
It looks likely that Netflix will be overtaken in subscriber numbers by one or more of Disney+ and Amazon - its long-term prospects are a little shaky. This row won't help, with cancellations and boycott over its support for Chappelle's transphobic comments in his new Netflix special. Guardian.

PANDEMIC FUELLED PIRACY BOOM
Lockdown has brought many more into using piracy as a main part of their film/TV (not least sport) viewing. The spread of exclusive content from Netflix, Amazon Prime to a growing number (Disney+, Peacock...) has meant facing multiple subscriptions - too many to pay for for many viewers who've instead switched to piracy, and maybe pay for one music service (Spotify or Apple Music mainly).
The emerging use of simultaneous streaming and cinema release has also made it easier for pirates to access high quality movie files. Guardian.

OFCOM 2021 ATTITUDE SURVEY: SWEARING OK, RACISM/TRANSPHOBIA NOT...UNLESS OLDER
Multiple useful takeaways from this, but the split over banning repeats of film/TV with aspects like blackface splits the younger (ban it!) and older (it simply reflects attitudes at that time).
Useful point too linked to Pogues case study, words like "faggot" 'were highly offensive and required a very strong editorial justification if they were to be included in a programme' Guardian.
SWEARING LOSING SHOCK VALUE - SCHITT'S CREEK etc
Guardian: 'Ultimately, despite a backlash to certain series, it seems that we’re finding “bad words” on television less gasp-inducing in general, according to Ofcom, and the number of people who bother to make official complaints about it appears to be on the decline as well. The regulator says just three viewers complained about the title The End of the F***ing World when it was broadcast, and 12 viewers when the trailer aired pre-watershed. These complaints “were assessed and not pursued”, it says. The last big fine imposed on a broadcaster for swearing was back in 2008 for MTV, which had to cough up £255,000 for “repeatedly airing swearing and offensive language” on its pre-watershed shows, including a trailer for the show Totally Jodie Marsh, in which the words “some fucking wanker from a modelling agency” were uttered.'

BBFC CONFIRM LONG-TERM NETFLIX ARRANGEMENT
They've deemed their self-rating trial a success. BBC

GOVERNMENT TRY TO FIX OFCOM APPOINTMENT PROCESS TO INSTALL PAUL DACRE - BUT STRUGGLE TO FIND PROFESSIONALS WILLING TO RISK DAMAGING THEIR REPUTATION
This is the type of behaviour that made Trump's administration so notorious a questioned for its democratic legitimacy. Dacre was the long-term Mail editor well known for his hostility towards the BBC and C4. OfCom is supposed to be the neutral media regulator - this shows the power of making appointments (see also the multiple Conservatives now running the BBC). Guardian

OFCOM FOLLOW UP CGTN BAN WITH £200K FINE!
Having withdrawn their license because the company with that license wasn't directly controlling the editorial decisions - ultimately the Chinese government was - a sizeable fine has been added! (Aug 2021; license withdrawal Feb 2021)
'The regulator revoked CGTN's licence in February after an Ofcom investigation found the international English-language satellite news channel was controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, which is not permitted under UK broadcasting lawBBC
BBFC JUSTIFY 15 FOR THE SUICIDE SQUAD
Quite a familiar rationale ... it's fantasy style, violence isn't sustained... Indie

BBFC MOCKS IT'S OWN 80s VIDEO NASTIES PAST, SPITTING SURVEY STATS TO JUSTIFY ITSELF AS HORROR FILM "CENSOR" REFLECTS ON THE MARY WHITEHOUSE/MAIL MORAL PANIC
Lots of useful material in this Guardian feature. Austin is BBFC chief executive....
'Ask Austin how he feels about the 80s BBFC and you might think he was talking about a late, disgraced elderly relative. The Video Recordings Act of 1984 gave the BBFC control over the films people watched at home; in the same year, the board dropped the word “censors” from its title. But, to Austin, a more profound change came in 1999. That was when the board switched from airing examiners’ hang-ups to transparent guidelines drawn from public consultation. Twenty-two years later, 10,000 members of the British public are still asked annually to gauge the level of sex and violence that should be viewable by, say, a typical 12-year-old. “I don’t just make up the standards in Soho Square,” Austin says. “Our standards are given to us by the public.”
Yet not everyone is at peace with the BBFC. In 2016, the film-maker Charlie Shackleton pushed back. His objections included its financial model: not profit-making, but reliant on distributors having no choice but to submit their films for certification – and to pay the BBFC to do so, for each minute of screen time. His provocative response was Paint Drying, a 10-hour study of a freshly painted wall. The classification fee was crowdfunded, the issue publicised. (The film got a U.) Shackleton remains a sceptic. “It suits the BBFC to highlight video nasties. They acknowledge the absurdity of their past and tell everyone they’re different now. Then they release another survey to justify their existence.”
(“And 88% of parents found it useful when Netflix started using BBFC classification,” Austin says.) But the relationship is unusual. Rather than submit content to examiners, the company uses an algorithm developed with the board. The bill is substantially cheaper.
Austin wants to work with other big streamers. But the real prize is the internet. If video nasties were an early freakout at rising individualism, online life is the world after the flood. Here, more than movies, is where the questions of the 80s endure. When does “I don’t want to look at this” attract the addendum “and no one else should” or “because they might copy it”? “That was video nasties in a nutshell,” Bailey-Bond says. “It came from people feeling everyone was morally shady, that we’re only ever one film from garotting someone with a shoelace.”

OFCOM COMPLAINTS RISE 4-FOLD, ALL TOP 10 ITV, 3 PIERS MORGAN, 2 BLM
BBC. A 410% increase. I'd have to think that's reflective of the number of people under lockdown plus many watching shows like GMB they normally wouldn't. 

MORE AUTHORITARIANISM: BORIS ALLY TRIED TO BLOCK BBC APPOINTMENT
Guardian. The advisor who came up with the media strategy on the race report (Britain isn't racist, yay! in summary) and worked on the right-wing TV news station GB News, warned the BBC not to appoint someone from the HuffPost. Which Boris was battling with after he okayed a minister using Twitter to bring thtreat to a journalist. He texted: 'the government’s “fragile trust in the BBC will be shattered” if she went ahead'.
Labour subsequently demanded the resignation or sacking of Gibb, former Communications Director for Theresa May as PM (Guardian). Alistair Campbell, Blair's media pitbull, had a colourful phrase to describe the Tory/Johnson attempts to shape and control the media, culling critical voices: "Putinism with posh accents". Gibb sits on the BBC Board; 'According to the corporation’s website, one of Gibb’s responsibilities as a non-executive director on the BBC board involves “upholding and protecting the independence of the BBC”.'

OFCOM SAY GB NEWS OK...BUT BLAST JOHN LENNON PEACE VIDEO
BBC: It seems there's no going back from the radical reinterpretation of broadcast news balance/accuracy requirements. Much like IPSO + the PCC before it, opinion segments are getting extra leeway, while the inclusion of some/any counterviews, regardless of how they're presented or undermined, seems now to mean right-wing Trumpian/Fox-style 'news' shows are okay.
The Lennon case is about the use of 1 of 2 videos for Happy Xmas (War is Over) which features short clips of real war footage.
As with Indie social realist films getting hammered with high BBFC age ratings, it seems that reality/realism is not to be encouraged!!!

FLASH GORDON BBFC'S BIGGEST 2020 CONTROVERSY! KARATE KID RATING CHOPPED
A new DVD edition was uprated for its use of stereotypes, eventually leading to ... 26 complaints. Pinocchio was #2! FilmStories.
SkyNews is one of many other sites who detail the range of upratings like Star Wars and LotR, but also Karate Kid dropping down to 12.

EU TO IMPOSE QUOTA ON BRITISH FILM/TV?
And so the great Brexit triumph continues... The UK music industry faces crisis as touring in the EU is made impossible (British drivers are only allowed to take tour vans to 3 venues then must return to the UK, with carnets, tax forms, required now too for all equipment).
The booming UK film/TV industry now faces a huge hit too. The EU are likely to impose a quota on UK productions to protect domestic European production and culture, echoing the quotas in place to protect against American dominance, or cultural imperialism. In France, for example, this applies across radio, film and TV.
One of several Guardian reports notes:
Good example of the clash of left/right-wing thinking, plus this government's determined attack on anything 'woke' (obviously argued one way through the Guardian lens): 
Under the EU’s audiovisual media services directive, a majority of airtime must be given to such European content on terrestrial television and it must make up at least 30% of the number of titles on video on demand (VOD) platforms such as Netflix and Amazon.

UK GOV TO PRIVATISE C4?
Good example of the clash of left/right-wing thinking, plus this government's determined attack on anything 'woke' (obviously argued one way through the Guardian lens): Guardian

GB NEWS LAUNCHES EVEN AS MURDOCH HESITATES - IS BRITAIN GETTING ITS OWN FOX NEWS?
In short - yes ... and no. Murdoch's US Fox News is a commercial juggernaut, attracting huge advertising revenues for its comically, demonically far-right proselytizing; this venture, even with a Trump-like UK Prime Minister, is unlikely to gain either the commercial of cultural importance. But it seems a large degree of newspaper style bias will be okayed by OfCom. See Guardian analysis:
Contrary to popular belief, there is no legal requirement for British broadcasters to give equal time to both sides of a political debate. Instead, GB News will simply have to ensure its broadcasts meet Ofcom’s standards of due impartiality. This would enable a host to express a strong opinion on a culture war topic as long as viewers are later exposed to alternative viewpoints.

Stop Funding Hate, the Twitter-centric campaign group that puts pressure on rightwing news outlets by targeting their advertisers, has already launched a campaign against the channel. “GB News may now be trying to shake off the Fox News label – but if to be ‘woke’ is to be anti-racist, then by branding themselves an ‘anti-woke’ TV channel, they seem to be making their intentions quite clear,” it said.

BBFC 2021 SWEARING FINDINGS: NO MORE AT 12 SAY PARENTS - WHILE THEY SWEAR MORE THEMSELVES!
Guardian. 'The report coincides with the BBFC’s first guide to what terms parents can expect to hear in differently classified TV shows and films. It says that for a U-rated film such as Monsters Inc, “look at the big jerk” will be as strong as it gets.

In Back to the Future, a PG film, Marty McFly exclaims “holy shit!” when armed terrorists approach in a van, but the word is not used again.

Bohemian Rhapsody is one of the 12/12A-rated examples: “Freddie fucking Mercury,” says Mercury in a scene in which he reveals to his bandmates that he has Aids. “You’re a legend,” says the drummer Roger Taylor. “You’re bloody right I am,” Mercury replies. The BBFC says viewers would have been expecting “sex, drugs and strong language”.
The report also touches on acronyms and concludes that the meaning of an example such as WTF is rarely lost on viewers, whatever age. “Therefore, the BBFC will classify acronyms as if they are a use of strong language in full.”'

CHINA: JOHN CENA APOLOGIZES TO PREVENT MOVIE FLOPPING; CENSORING TIANAMEN SQUARE SEARCH RESULTS OUTSIDE CHINA TOO
Google bowed to pressure from its staff and risk to its image (though does anyone still think their corporate motto 'don't be evil" is anything but a sick joke by now?) by pulling out of China in 2010 rather than agreeing to censor it's results. Murdoch pulped (last British Governor of Hong Kong) Chris Patten's autobiography and wrote off the £1m advance, and dumped the BBC from his Asian satellite TV network Star to protect his access to China. NBCUniversal made wrestler/actor John Cena apologize for correctly referring to Taiwan as a country - like Tibet and Hong Kong, China insists it isn't, it's simply part of China (and is increasingly open about threatening military invasion to enforce this). Do a 'china' word search in this post to read more.

Into this picture of craven Western media bowing to China's notorious censorship demands stumbles Microsoft. Their search engine is compliant with the great firewall of China, the extraordinary operation to block critical (what Gramsci calls counter-hegemonic) content - like any reference to Tianamen Square. They've been caught out applying this censorship in the West now too (they blamed this on "human error"). But this isn't an entirely new development...

'In 2014, the Guardian reported that Bing was censoring results for Chinese-language users in the US for many of the same terms that Bing censors inside China, such as Dalai Lama, Tiananmen Square and Falun Gong.

In 2009, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a column about receiving seemingly censored results on Bing when he searched for topics such as the Dalai Lama, Tiananmen Square, and Falun Gong using simplified Chinese language characters.' (Guardian)

It's worth emphasizing that the basic Western democracy v Chinese dictatorship binary isn't so clearcut. Trump made clear he admired several dictators and attempted to trample on US democracy. Boris Johnson is doing the same in the UK, while Poland and Hungary barely qualify as democracies any more. Many western governments were caught out secretly spying on their citizens with the Wikileaks publication of Chelsea Manning's leaks and the Guardian/New York Times publication of Alex Snowdon's leaks. The British government sent in police to literally destroy the computers Guardian journalists were working on. Democracy?!?! (read more)

Western 'democracies' secretly have their own operations - Andrew Keen covers this in his books reflecting on web 3.0, describing how Google/Facebook have brought about surveillance capitalism.

SKY NEWS AUSTRALIA: RACIST HATE SPEECH IS FINE - ITS NOT OUR JOB TO POLICE YOUTUBE COMMENTS; COMPARE TO ANTI-BBC FLAK 
There is a serious point/principle at play here, not unlike the hypocrisy-soaked shrieks of outrage that greet any attempt to raise meaningful press regulation: it is a potential threat to democracy to have statutory press regulation ... but of course the (right-wing) press love to pile on calls for tougher regulation of all other media.

Australia has been working through political attempts to make new media giants Google and Facebook legally liable to compensate news media for content they use, exploit, distribute, share, publish - the exact term you'd use has big legal consequences. Is Google a publisher? If so, it must pay for content and be legally responsible for libel and meeting regulatory standards. This includes user comments....

SkyNews Australia has been accused of a Fox News-style ultra right-wing agenda. Note: it's UK equivalent isn't seen in this way, as an OfCom-compliant news channel. The Guardian reports on the mass of racist comments under a short news clip, posted on YouTube, on the shooting of a BLM activist in London. The clip is fine - but News Corp Australasia ) Murdoch's local subsidiary) insist they are not the publisher of the comments - Google is; it's their responsibility to police racist hate speech!!!

They do have a point - but to performativize this to the extent of refusing to delete (or simply block all) comments is unconscionable. 

'After this story was published on Thursday, YouTube advised Guardian Australia they were now “actively” removing comments that violated community guidelines.' Prompted by the paper's claim that much of the hate speech remained, I checked for myself on 27.5.21 - and sure enough, there remains a dominant thread of repugnant racism in the comments underneath. Check for yourself here.

So, who is responsible for policing user comments online??? Is it Google/Alphabet in the case of YouTube? Or the account-holder uploading and publishing the video, and not only permitting comments but not either vetting (selecting the moderate all comments before publication option) or moderating comments? 'spokesperson said. “Sky News Australia is not the author of user comments on the YouTube platform. We suggest you direct your inquiries to Google.”'

There IS a HUGE principle at stake here, so I can understand the rationalisation behind this stance. But I have a channel with many 100s of videos, I'm rather busy ... but I vet all comments before publication. Same for Blogger, on which I've had over a million post reads across multiple blogs. I'm not prepared to risk hateful comments. I'm certainly not going to rely on Google's ability/will to enforce 'community guidelines'.

Both SkyNews and Google are monetising that BLM shooting video. Advertisers pay more when there's evidence of user engagement, so the racist hate speech is driving up revenue. How can BOTH these conglomerate giants get away with refusing or failing to police hate speech on their own channel/platform?

Another angle on this centres on OnlyFans, a UGC site that has been hailed for its explosive growth as an exemplar of the future of new media. The BBC article itself warns that some readers might find some of its report disturbing, as it covers exploitation of teens posting explicit content, and I'll reiterate that. If you want to read more, it is a lengthy, detailed report covering reports from schools, police, parents and teen uploaders plus analysis of UK proposals (now 2 years old and still with no definite timeframe for enacting) to fine companies up to 10% of global revenue for posting illegal content featuring under-18s. The BBC investigation suggests that the site's vetting procedures to prevent under-18s from registering are failing; the company repeatedly points to an updated registration process.

WHITHER DEMOCRACY - ATTEMPT TO BREACH UK GOV SECRECY OVER PSB PLANS
Words fail me on this. Appalling.

BBC CENSORS RU PAUL PRINCE ANDREW JOKE
Curious 'logic' of protecting the public from offence given how widely loathed the subject of the joke is since his disastrous BBC interview on sex offences. Even more so as they left in another joke about his tastes. 
The Guardian speculates this reflects the Tory government imposing a Tory Director General on the BBC.
'The edits to Drag Race came at a time when the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, is battling with a government trying to stamp its authority on the national broadcaster, with Conservative MPs accusing the BBC of being unpatriotic and failing to promote the union flag in its publications. Davie was also accused of curbing leftwing comedy programmes that have been unpopular with leading Tories.'

DISNEY'S CANCEL CULTURE ISSUE GOES MUCH DEEPER THAN PRINCE CHARMING'S NO CONSENT KISS: EXTENSIVE RACISM
People tend to overlook that Walt Disney himself was a rabid racist. Good Guardian article that runs through some examples of the racism in Disney classics. 
"streaming services such as Disney+ and the UK’s Now TV have recently added disclaimers to films such as Peter Pan and The Aristocats, making clear that the much-loved animations feature outdated and potentially offensive stereotypes.
It’s a clumsy approach, but the alternative would be to go through each movie frame by frame and excise everything that upsets modern-day sensibilities. The result would be the eventual destruction of these films, a sort of death by a thousand final cuts. Or Disney could just remake everything, which seems to be happening behind the scenes in any case."

FOX NEWS MADE ME DO IT - LEGAL DEFENSE?!
Not necessarily a hypodermic syringe application, it's as much two-step flow (being influenced by people or organs with status). One of the Trump supporters who invaded the American Congress has used the persistent Fox News coverage pushing the line that Biden had stolen the election from Trump as his legal defense. 
It's also notable that the US has fairly weak media regulation after years of deregulation through the FCC, advertisers having at least as much influence over TV and radio content. Subscription TV like HBO carries much more explicit drama series like The Sopranos that the ad-funded national networks wouldn't run. Guardian.

ITALY FINALLY SCRAPS 1914 RELIGIOUS FILM CENSORSHIP
The last major application of the laws was 1998, but it's still quite shocking that a major Western democracy would still have such regressive laws on the books in 2021. The removal will no doubt annoy religious conservatives though. Guardian.

ITALY BANS TIKTOK OVER COPYCAT KID DEATH
The era of unregulated new media looks to be fading fast. Italy has given TikTok a month to prove all its users have authentically proven their age (13+) after a young girl died from 'playing the choking game'. Choking yourself to get a high has been a recent TikTok trend, not exactly the first dangerous concept to spread through the app (+ wider social media to be fair) with so many people desparate for their 15 shares of fame. 
Copycat behaviour is of course a primary concern for and factor in BBFC age rating - generally with a thin basis of evidence behind it, but perhaps social media is backing their analysis? See Guardian.The era of unregulated new media looks to be fading fast. Italy has given TikTok a month to prove all its users have authentically proven their age (13+) after a young girl died from 'playing the choking game'. Choking yourself to get a high has been a recent TikTok trend, not exactly the first dangerous concept to spread through the app (+ wider social media to be fair) with so many people desparate for their 15 shares of fame. 
Copycat behaviour is of course a primary concern for and factor in BBFC age rating - generally with a thin basis of evidence behind it, but perhaps social media is backing their analysis? See Guardian.

TORY DONOR TO BECOME BBC CHAIRMAN
No comment needed?! Guardian

YOUTUBE BANS RADIO CHANNEL OFCOM SAYS IS OK!
TalkRadio has had its channel removed for including anti-lockdown views. OfCom has noted that this is YouTube's decision and that TalkRadio's content remains fine within its UK license conditions. Guardian
UPDATE...Within 24 hours YouTube reversed its decision! Murdoch (who owns the station) will be pleased - hurrah!

OFCOM FINE INDIAN NEWS CHANNEL £20K

OFCOM CENSURE RADIO STATION OVER COVID CONSPIRACY + FORCE BROADCAST OF RULING
A fine is being discussed too (Guardian). The contrast with IPSO (have given themselves the power to fine the papers that signed up... but have never used it) is striking. If the likes of the Mail were forced to feature rulings on its front page/lead story on the app/web page would they really continue to break the Editors Code? That would be very damaging. 


Friday 6 May 2022

IPSO COMPARED TO IMPRESS 2022 10 YEARS AFTER LEVESON

PRESS GAZETTE.
Government is going to repeal (undo) a Leveson law that would have forced publishers to pay legal costs, win or lose in libel suits. Guardian.
A controversial law that could force publishers to pay the costs of the people who sue them, even if they win, is to be repealed, the government has announced.

Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, which was drawn up following the Leveson inquiry, poses “a threat to the freedom and sustainability of the press”, the government said on Monday.

The provision, which was supported by celebrities such as Gary Lineker and Hugh Grant and the campaign group Hacked Off, had never been brought into force.

IPSO MAIL ONLINE GUILTY OF HARASSMENT 51 LILY JAMES ARTICLES IN 4 MONTHS

This is quite an extraordinary ruling - and the lack of consequence for a truly grotesque abuse of press power by the Mail Online is just as damning for the effectiveness of IPSO.

' IPSO ordered that a link to the full adjudication be linked on the top half of Mail Online’s homepage “for at least 24 hours, and should then be archived in the usual way”.

The correction was published at midnight on Wednesday morning.'

IPSO had issued THREE privacy warnings!!!!

'IPSO said that, before the formal complaint was made in March 2021, James contacted the regulator three times “to make it aware of what she considered to be persistent and intrusive approaches from the press”.

Each time, the regulator said, it circulated privacy notices to the media, including Mail Online, “to make the press aware of the complainant’s concerns and to remind the press of its obligations under the Editors’ Code, with particular regard to Clause 2 [privacy] and Clause 3 [harassment] of the Code”.

The notices were circulated on 30 March 2020, 13 October 2020 and 27 November 2020. '

Tuesday 1 March 2022

IPSO RULINGS 2021

 IPSO RULINGS 2021


DAILY STAR ACCURACY BREACH 2021

'Greedy granny' story

Complainants noted she wasn't granny; amount stolen wrong; wrong home town

Clause 1 Accuracy(note: IPSO publish details for public, including guidance on clauses!!! BBFC too!)
Star had offered to publish correction; complainants didn't accept it; 

IPSO ruled SOME inaccuracy; said correction was sufficient
Took EIGHT months to rule!!!!

arguably: reputation damage already done?

this was an issue with PCC...which was even slower!

Saturday 26 February 2022

OfCom and Russia Today which is the state stooge?

OfCom is a quango - like the BBC, supposedly a fully independent entity, the government appoints its leadership. PM Johnson acted outside democratic norms by trying to force the committee selecting the next OfCom chief to pick the notorious Paul Dacre, recently pushed out by the Daily Mail as too extreme for their audience - though now brought back in as his more moderate successor Paul Grieg is  undermined.

That committee refused to pick Dacre saying he was clearly unfit, didn't meet the job criteria. The response? Johnson's government rewrote the job criteria and put forward Dacre's name again, ruling out any other candidates, though there had been something of a boycott by many qualified candidates. The outpouring of media horror was too much even for the combative Dacre, who remarkably pushed the mid-market Mail to the top of the circulation pile and stunning global online readership figures. He pulled out.

The outspoken anti-BBC right-wing ideologue didn't manage to take control of OfCom then. But the government has been keen for Russia Today (RT) to follow the road of the banned TV news stations Press TV and CGTN, seen as agents of Iran and China's governments.

How autonomous is the quango then? They fined RT £200k for its reportage of the Salisbury poisoning case, but refused to ban RT without firm evidence it was a state agent - and are holding to that line now ... at least until Johnson succeeds in ab/using his powers of patronage. Nothing new in this - the BBC Chair personally donated over £400k to Johnson and his chancellor. Thatcher installed the free marketeer John Birt to the same post, and threats on the license fee were used by Blair's Labour government after mild coverage of Iraq War criticism as much as by Cameron, May and more. Though Johnson is going ahead with financially devastating the BBC, leading to huge cuts in its news operations.

So, is OfCom independent? For now, yes - until the government managed to install a supporter as its chief. The newspapers may abuse the democracy argument to justify their weak self-regulation, but the source doesn't mean that the point, the principle isn't valid. How would the tiny remnant of a left-wing press (or an exposé of expenses corruption from a right-wing paper like the Telegraph) fare when the PM appointed a supporter as the chief of a statutory press regulator?

Should OfCom ban RT? That remains a complex question with strong points on either side. But there are also questions about how effective a ban is when clips would still circulate on YouTube and Facebook, the connected challenges of globalisation and digitisation to national media regulators.



Guardian, Feb 2022, quotes: 
“There is too much focus on the television channel – its impact is minimal,” said Prof Stephen Hutchings of the University of Manchester, who is writing a book on Russian media that focuses on RT. “The television channel almost has symbolic value. They can’t claim to be an international broadcaster on a par with CNN and BBC without a television channel. But really their most impactful output is online and on social media and YouTube.”

The media regulator, Ofcom, which in extreme circumstances can revoke the licences of television channels, is actively monitoring RT’s output for potential breaches of the broadcasting code. But there is no ban on partisan current affairs broadcasting in the UK, as long as viewers are also exposed to some alternative viewpoints – the same rule that allows a channel such as GB News to broadcast with a rightwing slant.
Kevin Bakhurst, Ofcom’s content boss, told the Guardian he did not have any “substantial evidence” that RT was being directly controlled by a foreign state, which could force it to give up its licence. He insisted it was perfectly legal for British television channels to have the worldview of the country that they were funded by: “You’d expect that. However, they need to respect the broadcasting code.”

It was RT’s failure to meet these standards in its coverage of the Salisbury poisonings that led to it being fined £200,000 by Ofcom in 2019 – but deciding where to draw the line is an art rather than a science. The regulator also takes into account viewer expectations of a channel when considering how to enforce its rules – essentially making the assumption that if you are watching RT then you are expecting to see a strong pro-Russian viewpoint reflected in its coverage.

there would be nothing to stop RT continuing to produce online content for a British audience, free from regulation, while claiming to have been silenced.

Friday 11 February 2022

2022 points

...
MAIL FACES PRIVACY LAWSUITS FROM MANY PUBLIC FIGURES BUT DENIES PHONE HACKING, PLANTING BUGS
Guardian OCT 2022. A December update lists what the Mail group is accused of, including planting bugs, and notes the hypocrisy of papers that campaign for transparency in the court system seeking to block publication of what they're accused of (Guardian)

BBC EDITORIAL SET BY "ACTIVE TORY" MAITLIS SAYS
Guardian. Aug 2022

AMAZON LIMITS LGBT SEARCHES IN YAE

HOW GOOGLE ETC SUCCESSFULLY LOBBIED TO BLOCK EU REGULATION OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM
This Guardian account is written by the former EU Commissioner overseeing EU policy in this area. He outlines how big tech are using the same playbook as the tobacco companies to slow, block and dilute regulation, including funding a network of pressure groups that are presented as independent.

OFCOM USE TIKTOKER TO REACH 13-24S TO REPORT HARMFUL CONTENT
67% in their poll say they've experienced harmful content but just 17% report it. Guardian
The online safety bill is expected to become law by the end of the year. Ofcom will have the power to impose fines of £18m or 10% of a company’s global turnover for breaches of the act, which imposes a duty of care on tech firms to protect people from harmful user-generated content. One of the specific mandates in the bill is ensuring that children are not exposed to harmful or inappropriate content.

Andy Burrows, head of child safety online policy at the NSPCC, which has called for a strengthening of the bill, said: “This report lays bare how young people are at increased risk of coming across harmful content but feel unsupported on social media and either do not know how to report it or feel platforms simply won’t take action when they do.”
FOX NEWS FACES AD BOYCOTT CAMPAIGN
Guardian

PARAMOUNT WONT CUT OLD MOVIES THAT BREACH MODERN VALUES

MURDOCH TIMES CENSORS OWN ARTICLE ON BORIS JOHNSON. STREISAND EFFECT
Huge question marks on why The Times dropped without any explanation a story that appeared in the first edition of its print run but not online, then disappeared from the later print run. It reported how Johnson, then married to someone else, was blocked from appointing Carrie Simmonds, now his wife, to the £100k chief of staff job when he was Foreign Secretary.
'Removing the article may be an example of the Streisand effect – where attempts to delete information from the internet make the public much more interested in it.'
Confirmation that the story is true, Times AND Mail both deleted the story. Guardian.
LBC REPORTS TIMES SPIKED STORY HAS LED TO DETAILS ABOUT JOHNSON ACTIVITY WITH MISTRESS
In turn this is based on a detailed account by Private Eye of how the Foreign Office discovered the woman he attempted to get the 6-figure job was his mistress, as someone witnessed the pair being physical in his government office.

SKY NEWS AUSTRALIA KEY SOURCE FOR GLOBAL CLIMATE CONSPIRACY MEDIA

GUARDIAN JOURNALIST WINS DEFAMATION CASE BROUGHT BY ARRAN BANKS, BREXIT FUNDER, WITH PUBLIC INTEREST DEFENCE

RELIGIOUS PROTESTS CREATE UK MOVIE BAN

AUSTRALIAN COURT HEAVILY FINES AND CRITICISES GOOGLE FOR ALLOWING RACIST CYBER BULLYING CAMPAIGN AGAINST POLITICIAN WHO RETIRED AS A RESULT
The judge called for new laws to police Google as it was failing to take action itself and was profiting from such videos as those which led the politician (together with the comments it sparked under the videos and his own social media) to feel suicidal and quit. The judge also noted that Google allowed new videos to stay up during the trial which were clearly intended to intimidate the politician into giving up. He awarded $715k to John Barilaro, which rise over $1m if he also awards costs. Guardian.
DB: The case is an example of increasing moves to end the wild wild web era. The UK and EU are set to put social media under regulatory control with possible fines of up to 10% of global turnover for non-compliance.
This case also shows that web 2.0's 'we media' (Dan Gillmor's term) isn't necessarily utopian. Indeed, if we think about the case of Trump in the USA we can see the two-step flow theory at play, with many 1000s of we media sites pushing his agenda and ideology, building an extensive "echo chamber" that US right-wingers and white nationalists (racists) can live in, alongside their mainstream dose of Fox News.
There is a further layer to this too. As Elon Musk pretends to have just 'discovered' on Twitter, there are now millions of bot-operated social media accounts. Someone has to pay to run these and what we're seeing is the powerful abusing the potentially powerful democratic tools of web 2.0 to reinforce their own hegemony, and effectively put what David Gauntlett called "the former audience" back in their place. If the active behaviour of an audience is to largely echo the message of the powerful, without realising they are being manipulated, can we really see this as an active audience even if they are creating their own media output?

BBC BULLIED BY BORIS APPOINTING CONSERVATIVE MICHAEL GRADE AS OFCOM CHAIR
So says Jean Seaton, co-author of the classic Power Without Responsibility which agrees with Chomsky on the role of ownership in ensuring the press is a hegemonic force. Guardian.

HOLLYWOOD STARTS REFUSING TO CENSOR FOR CHINA: TOP GUN JACKET HAS TAIWAN FLAG


NETFLIX INSIST AUDIENCE WILL DECIDE, THEY WON'T CENSOR AS RICKY GERVAIS ADDS TO CHAPPELLE ANTI-TRANS ROW
Earlier this month, the streaming giant reportedly told staff it supports "the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with", and they could leave if they did not like it.

According to Variety, the company said in an internal document: "We program for a diversity of audiences and tastes; and we let viewers decide what's appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices.

"As employees we support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our own personal values.

"Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful. If you'd find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you." BBC.

CHANNEL 4 PRIVATISATION ANOTHER INDEPENDENT VOICE SILENCED?
See below for more on how the Conservative (Johnson) government is following the approach of leaders like Trump and Urban (Hungary) by seeking to compromise independent, potentially critical, media voices using its power to appoint leaders to the BBC (and set, slash, its budget), OfCom and C4.
The PSB C4 will, once privatised, serve shareholders and the profit margin over its current, non-profit approach where revenues are re-invested into programme-making, and ownership will most likely flip to a UK conglomerate or American streaming giant.
Guardian April 2022.

CHANNEL 4 LATEST MEDIA INSTITUTION TO HAVE TORY APPOINTED IN LEADERSHIP POSITION AFTER MICHAEL GRADE AT  OFCOM
Boris Johnson failed to get the notorious former Daily Mail editor and hard-right ideologue Paul Dacre installed as OfCom chief … but arguably succeeded in the main strategic objective of inserting someone who would follow the government’s hostility towards a strong independent and license fee-funded BBC.
The ambition to force the privatisation of Channel 4, the other main PSB now that requirements on ITV and Channel 5 are greatly reduced, has now been boosted by installing a businessman seen as close to the government, sparking accusations of cronyism.
Criticism came from prominent Conservatives, not just opposition parties and media figures.

‘The approval of Grade’s appointment last week led to an unexpected intervention by the Conservative chair of parliament’s broadcasting oversight committee. In an official statement, Julian Knight MP said: “The appointments process feels broken.”’ (Guardian, April 2022)

1959s TV REGULATION: AT HOME WITH MOTHER AND THE BEDTIME SHUTDOWN
Guardian, Feb 2022.


SIMPLE EG OF FAKE NEWS + HOW MASS MEDIA ARE GUIILTY: TELEGRAPH AND QUEEN PIC REMOVAL STORY
Guardian, Feb 2022. If IPSO was a purposeful, proactive regulator it (like the ASA or OfCom) would respond to stories like this by initiating an investigation and demanding action if they found a code breach - which it clearly is: Clause One: Accuracy. Moreover, it is a clearly politically motivated fake story which helps to fuel populist anger over 'wokeness' - you can see the link with the government advising schools that Black Lives Matter is a group that should always be noted as 'divisive' (among other curious terms for an anti-racism group).

'The current row in BEIS was sparked by a report in the Daily Telegraph on 1 January under the headline, “How a portrait of the Queen that is ‘the size of a stamp’ has ruffled feathers in Kwasi Kwarteng’s business department”.

An official was quoted telling the newspaper: “I think some of my colleagues forget we work for her majesty’s government.” A second added: “The new picture [of the Queen] is the size of a stamp. It’s laughable really.”

The article also claimed that a memorial plaque commemorating officials from the former Ministry of Power who died during the second world war had been consigned to the “basement” of the building. The report was based on anonymous quotes from sources.'

The Business Secretary (government minister) has simply refused to correct this despite an internal meeting clarifying that this was untrue, feeding the government agenda of stoking culture wars to boost their ratings and attacking the civil service (public sector) as lefty and lazy. Forget the politics - what do you think IPSO will do...?!


PRIVACY LAW TOUGHER FOR MEDIA AS BLOOMBERG LOSE SUPREME COURT CASE ON NAMING BUSINESS EXECUTIVE INVESTIGATED FOR CORRUPTION
Guardian, Feb 2022. Their story was based on a leak, crucially not a police briefing, and the court noted that police generally don't name suspects.
'The businessman in Wednesday’s ruling successfully argued that, under the European convention on human rights, he had a reasonable expectation that the details of the British regulator’s criminal investigation into him would not be made public unless he was charged with an offence.'
'British media outlets – at the tabloid end of the market and in high-end financial news – increasingly find that privacy law, rather than the risk of libel, is one of the biggest barriers to publication of stories. In 2018 Cliff Richard successfully won substantial damages from the BBC after the broadcaster revealed that he was the subject of a police investigation into alleged historical sexual offences, even though no charge was ever brought and the claims were later dismissed as false. Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, also won a privacy case against the publisher of the Mail on Sunday after it published details of her personal letter to her father.'
Guardian editorial followed warning of huge threat to press freedom. The famed investigative journalist adds warnings over police trying to seize a journalist's sources. Chris Mullin's work led to falsely jailed Birmingham 6 and Guildford 4 being released after he identified and interviewed the actual bombers - and now police insist his files are handed over. The Guardian did this in 1984, leading to the jailing of civil servant Sarah Tisdall.
Journalism doesn't function if sources dint think they can speak off the record, keeping their name off reports.

GEN Z AND MILLENNIALS DISS GEN X POSTFEMINISM AND PORN
Guardian, Feb 2022. Billie Eilish (Dec 2021: watching porn "destroyed my brain") leads the way on this. 'Much is made of the tension between older, third-wave feminists and millennial feminists (while I realise that it isn’t always useful to divide women into generations, when it comes to waves of feminism it can be elucidating), but this always lets the 1990s postfeminists off the hook. Something I share in common with my (boomer-aged) mother is that both of us wonder what on earth these women were on.

These were the women who said that feminism was over, who collaborated with the lads to bring about the heavily sexualised, objectifying, porn-influenced era we grew up in. They were the “cool girl” feminists, always one of the boys, who dismissed any attempt to critique the culture they had formed a part in creating. When we came of age and began to pull apart this hellscape, which included the women’s magazines they wrote for, they slapped us back down to protect their own interests. They could not tolerate us criticising their role in the problem.'

ASA BAN BOOHOO T-SHIRT AD USING SUGGESTIVE THONG SHOTS AS OBJECTIFYING
Guardian, Feb 2022. '“We noted that neither the partial nudity nor the bikini bottoms were relevant to the product and that the images did not show the product as it would usually be worn,” the ASA said in its ruling. “For those reasons, we concluded that the ad objectified and sexualised women. It was therefore irresponsible and likely to cause serious offence.”

Boohoo said that it understood the importance of the issues raised by the ASA and removed the images from its website before the publication of the ruling.'

TORY GOVERNMENT TO GIVE MURDOCH POWER TO INTERFERE IN TIMES EDITORIAL AND MERGE SUNDAY TIMES
Guardian, Feb 2022. A follow-up opinion piece pulls no punches:
'The revolving door between Downing Street and Fleet Street has already seen Johnson’s director of communications become deputy editor-in-chief of the Sun, a paper which failed to break any major “partygate” stories. Some publications featured extensive stories and headlines about the partying prime minister, while others – particularly on the Sun, the Express and the Mail – have struggled to get these stories on their own front pages.

When David Davis called for his leader to go, the Mail harangued Johnson’s critics by splashing with the headline “In the name of God, grow up”, while announcing that the latest Johnson baby was recovering from Covid.' 

She notes the multiple private meetings Murdoch has had with this PM and his ministers - 'These encounters are not minuted, of course, which only leaves us to ponder what exactly was discussed.'

'Murdoch has always offered assurances that his titles will remain free of his influence, like when he appointed an independent board to oversee the Wall Street Journal. Someone described these arrangements to me as “eye candy for governments”. The six similarly independent directors of Times Newspapers Ltd, paid about £15,000 each a year, meet the editors of the daily and Sunday titles every three months and write a report to parliament. The only time in recent memory they disagreed with an appointment – when John Witherow moved from the Sunday to daily title – the objections were eased with further meetings and a six-month delay.'

WHY A RIGOROUS PRESS REGULATOR IS NEEDED ... SLAPPS: DEFAMATION LAW ABUSE BY RICH SILENCES MEDIA, SMASHES PUBLIC INTEREST
Guardian, Feb 2022.
'Caroline Kean, a partner at Wiggin, represented the journalist Catherine Belton when she was sued by multiple Russian billionaires including Roman Abramovich and the Russian state oil company Rosneft. Kean is also defending FT journalist Tom Burgis against a lawsuit brought by an arm of the Kazakh mining company ENRC.

Both libel actions have been criticised by free speech campaigners and were highlighted in a recent debate in the House of Commons about abusive legal actions known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or “Slapps”.'

She argues that public interest journalism is under threat as media are put off investigating the powerful (politicians, business, rich) as they can bring vexatious lawsuits purely for the threat of ruinous legal costs regardless of winning or losing.

DON'T TEK DI VACCINE - SPOTIFY MUSIC JOINS ROGAN PODCAST IN MISINFORMATION SPOTLIGHT
Guardian, Feb 2022. It's not a new concern, or isolated to Spotify (or covid conspiracy): 'In December, following an investigation by Sky News, it removed almost 150 hours of content it said violated its hateful content policy, including antisemitic, racist and white supremacist material found in podcasts.

In 2020, a BBC investigation led Spotify and other platforms including Apple Music, YouTube Music and Deezer to remove racist, antisemitic and homophobic content.
An excerpt of a Hitler speech, calls for “Aryans” to make a brand new start, and references to white power were found in songs hosted by the streaming services.'

CHINA CENSORS GAY SCENES IN FRIENDS
Guardian, Feb 2022.

Sunday 9 May 2021

MALE MODEL ADS DEEMED TOO SEXY FOR TV AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Useful counterpoint to the usual tale of media misogyny (Guardian)... An underwear brand has found itself rendered "invisible" and in danger of bankruptcy as it's ads have suddenly been blocked from FB, Instagram etc AND a scheduled appearance on ITV's This Morning show was cancelled.

ITV claim their lawyers said that showing a model in a thong would be seen as a breach by OfCom while the social media giants categorise the same imagery as sexual. They don't apply this to shots of females in lingerie. The academic author of a book, The Story of Men's Underwear, said: “There are still double standards in how bodies are represented when semi-clothed”.

If TV regulation looks problematic here so does social media - which continues to exist without any regulator. Each simply sets and applies it's own often secretive rules.
'Instagram removed posts without explanation, and Moot employees were unable to tag products or use “swipe up to buy”, essential functions for companies when shops closed in the pandemic and e-commerce became the only way to purchase.'

Thursday 22 April 2021

2021 OVERVIEW compilation of examples

ASA BAN OAT MILK ADS OVER GREEN STATS
Guardian. 'Oatly is the latest big brand to be called out by the ASA after a pledge the watchdog made last September to crackdown on unsubstantiated or misleading green claims being made by firms.

Last week, the watchdog banned ads run by Lipton, which is owned by drinks giant Pepsi, over misleading claims that all parts of its bottles are made from 100% recycled plastic.'
COURT FORCES MAIL INTO MEGHAN FRONT PAGE APOLOGY AND MULTI-MILLION PAYOUT
Guardian. IPSO nowhere to be seen of course.
IPSO FIND MAIL GUILTY BUT REFUSE TO JUDGE RACISM CLAIM
Guardian. '. The committee made no ruling in respect of a second complaint that the article breached clause 12 of its code, which calls on titles to “avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race, colour, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability”. It said it was unable to consider the issue because the complainant was not personally affected. ' The article 
MURDOCH AVOIDS SUN HACKING COURT CASE WITH SIENNA MILLAR PREGNANCY PAYOUT
The actor had wanted to take the case to a court hearing. It after getting a large payout has decided not to risk the large legal bills - and clearly hasn’t signed a gagging agreement, continuing to air her string claims against the paper. Murdoch has maintained the line that phone hacking was limited to the News of the Screws, never The S*n, never mind that this is the latest large payout to a claimant against the paper. In all cases no guilt has been admitted. Guardian.
UK GOVERNMENT CMA DEMANDS FB/META SELL GIPHY: WILL ZUCKERBERG REFUSE?
I noted this possibility quite a while ago and now even the most right-wing government in modern British history has ruled that the free market failure in the social media sphere is so bad that they require FB/Meta to sell off Giphy (Guardian). 
BUT... FB are claiming this is "overreach" and that the UK government should not be able to make this ruling on an American company. Despite huge pressure from both sides of the US Congress and within the presidency too FB will resist and seek to overturn or block the order. Both Trump and Biden have attacked Facebook but both have also shown willingness to defend the US new media giants from non-domestic taxation and regulation.
REPORT ON UK PRESS ISLAMOPHOBIA
BBFC PUBLIC PANEL ZERO TOLERANCE OF N-WORD, NOW MIN 12 RATING UNLESS EDUCATIONAL
Guardian reports on BBFC's response to its latest public attitudes research.
DISNEY+ HONG KONG LAUNCH CUTS SIMPSONS CHINA EPISODE
Guardian. 'In the cartoon there is a sign in [Tianamen] square that reads “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened”, a satirical nod to China’s campaign to purge memories of what happened.'
MADONNA'S OUTRAGE AT INSTAGRAM NIPPLE BAN
Part of Madonna's nipple being visible triggered an image ban - and an outburst from the fed up star. Her age, 63, adds a layer to this, and she did denounce the sexism, misogyny and ageism she has faced. See post on my RepGender blog.
GULF STATES BAN DISNEY'S MCU ETERNAL OVER GAY KISS
FACEBOOK FRANCE JOINS AUSTRALIA IN PAYING FOR NEWSPAPER CONTENT
The emerging taming of the wild wild web continues to crawl its way ashore... Guardian.
ENGLISH COUNCIL URGES PARENTS TO BAN SQUID GAMES AFTER COPYCAT OUTBREAK
If it was film they'd have power to ban it... Guardian
NETFLIX DAVE CHAPELLE TRANSPHOBIA ROW
It looks likely that Netflix will be overtaken in subscriber numbers by one or more of Disney+ and Amazon - its long-term prospects are a little shaky. This row won't help, with cancellations and boycott over its support for Chappelle's transphobic comments in his new Netflix special. Guardian.
BIG 3 STREAMING DOMINANCE IN NUMBERS
Guardian: 'the top 1% of artists account for 80% of all streams, and that 10% account for 98% of all listening by fans.
And of the most popular tracks, big music companies own the rights to three times as many among the top 10% as those owned by independent labels. In any given week, nine of the top 10 selling songs globally – the streaming cash cows – are owned by one of the three big music companies.'
PANDEMIC FUELLED PIRACY BOOM
Lockdown has brought many more into using piracy as a main part of their film/TV (not least sport) viewing. The spread of exclusive content from Netflix, Amazon Prime to a growing number (Disney+, Peacock...) has meant facing multiple subscriptions - too many to pay for for many viewers who've instead switched to piracy, and maybe pay for one music service (Spotify or Apple Music mainly).
The emerging use of simultaneous streaming and cinema release has also made it easier for pirates to access high quality movie files. Guardian.
OFCOM 2021 ATTITUDE SURVEY: SWEARING OK, RACISM/TRANSPHOBIA NOT...UNLESS OLDER
Multiple useful takeaways from this, but the split over banning repeats of film/TV with aspects like blackface splits the younger (ban it!) and older (it simply reflects attitudes at that time).
Useful point too linked to Pogues case study, words like "faggot" 'were highly offensive and required a very strong editorial justification if they were to be included in a programme' Guardian.

STORY
OUTLINE
FB AWARE OF TEEN GIRL INSTAGRAM HARM EFFECTS SAYS WSJ REPORT----OCTOBER: US SENATE HEARS FROM WHISTLEBLOWER EXPOSING FACEBOOK DANGERS
Early October Guardian update: the Senate heard from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and now speak of breaking up or acting on Facebook like big tobacco companies were eventually reined in.
Late September update: Facebook executive faced a sceptical, hostile US Senate Committee that referred to the leaked internal Instagram research showing how harmful the app is to young females. Guardian.
Guardian; FB has already responded to the in-depth Wall Street Journal (like the USA's version of the Financial Times but more widely influential) - owned by Murdoch. It denies all.
Shocking stats - this eg is NOT centred on just Insta, though it's generally accepted as the main driver of body issues (porn content is also negatively impactful):
'Two in five girls (40%) aged 11 to 16 in the UK say they have seen images online that have made them feel insecure or less confident about themselves. This increases to half (50%) in girls aged 17 to 21, according to research by Girlguiding in its annual girls’ attitudes survey.'
'The head of Instagram risked fanning criticism of the app on Thursday with comments that compared social media’s impact on society to that of cars. “We know that more people die than would otherwise because of car accidents, but by and large, cars create way more value in the world than they destroy. And I think social media is similar,” said Adam Mosseri.'
SWEARING LOSING SHOCK VALUE - SCHITT'S CREEK etc
Guardian: 'Ultimately, despite a backlash to certain series, it seems that we’re finding “bad words” on television less gasp-inducing in general, according to Ofcom, and the number of people who bother to make official complaints about it appears to be on the decline as well. The regulator says just three viewers complained about the title The End of the F***ing World when it was broadcast, and 12 viewers when the trailer aired pre-watershed. These complaints “were assessed and not pursued”, it says. The last big fine imposed on a broadcaster for swearing was back in 2008 for MTV, which had to cough up £255,000 for “repeatedly airing swearing and offensive language” on its pre-watershed shows, including a trailer for the show Totally Jodie Marsh, in which the words “some fucking wanker from a modelling agency” were uttered.'
BBFC CONFIRM LONG-TERM NETFLIX ARRANGEMENT
Theyve deemed their self-rating trial a success. BBC
ADS BANNED FOR SEXISM, OBJECTIFYING
Staggering that these were passed by agencies and brands as okay! Guardian
GOVERNMENT TRY TO FIX OFCOM APPOINTMENT PROCESS TO INSTALL PAUL DACRE - BUT STRUGGLE TO FIND PROFESSIONALS WILLING TO RISK DAMAGING THEIR REPUTATION
This is the type of behaviour that made Trump's administration so notorious a questioned for its democratic legitimacy. Dacre was the long-term Mail editor well known for his hostility towards the BBC and C4. OfCom is supposed to be the neutral media regulator - this shows the power of making appointments (see also the multiple Conservatives now running the BBC). Guardian
OFCOM FOLLOW UP CGTN BAN WITH £200K FINE!
Having withdrawn their license because the company with that license wasn't directly controlling the editorial decisions - ultimately the Chinese government was - a sizeable fine has been added! (Aug 2021; license withdrawal Feb 2021)
'The regulator revoked CGTN's licence in February after an Ofcom investigation found the international English-language satellite news channel was controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, which is not permitted under UK broadcasting law' BBC
MURDOCH AUSTRALIA PAPERS 42 STORIES IN 2 DAYS ATTACKING ABC DOC ON FOX NEWS AS TRUMP TRUMPETER
It's hard to argue that Fox News was an agressive mouthpiece for Trump, enthusiastically cheering their man and his policies. Racism, sexism, craven celebration of ignorance - nothing could shake their fervent faith. Owner Murdoch would be outed as not a fan of the man when he lost the election - though of course Fox backtracked on their dismissal of Trump's stolen election fiction. But hard right-wing politics are precisely what Murdoch's global press empire pushes for day in, day out.
The Chomskian propaganda model filters of source strategy, concentration of ownership (he enjoys a near monopoly in the Australian press) and of course flak were all at play in this unsubtle attack against an ABC (the BBC equivalent) doc. Thin-skinned Murdoch has also launched an OfCom complaint against the BBC series The Murdoch Dynasty, which dates to unpick how he has parlayed his media empire into political influence, the decades-long kingmaker in not just British politics - never forget Tony Blair flew to a News Corp meeting in Australia to strike a secret deal before the 1997 election win.
'News Corp has published 45 articles in just two days attacking the public broadcaster across its Australian mastheads.
The ABC told Guardian Australia News Corp’s reaction was expected. “The Australian’s first column attacking the story was published before the first episode had even gone to air,” a spokesperson said. “Since then, the striking uniformity of the attacks from News Corp journalists, commentators and outlets across the nation has only further served to highlight the importance of having a range of independent voices in the Australian media.' Guardian
KHAN BRINGS NEW FTC ANTITRUST CASE AGAINST FACEBOOK, TARGETS MULTIPLE TECH GIANTS
Facebook tried to get her to recuse herself for past critical remarks about the social media behemoth. The refusal is indicative of a newly assertive FTC, which could see huge changes in the FAANGS-dominated new media sphere ... though the FTC lost an anti-trust against FB recently for failing to adequately show FB was a monopoly. Guardian.
FACEBOOK UK FORCED TO SELL GIPHY? CONTROLS OVER HALF UK DIGITAL ADS MARKET
Quite ludicrous how two companies are allowed still to control over 90% of the digital advertising market, but at last a hint of some action? 'The watchdog said the deal also removes a potential competitor from the £5.5bn UK digital display advertising market, where Facebook is the biggest player accounting for more than half the market.' 'The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an in-depth investigation earlier this year into Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy, the largest supplier of animated gifs to social networks such as Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, after identifying a number of concerns about the $400m (£290m) deal which was struck last year.'  Guardian.
BBFC JUSTIFY 15 FOR THE SUICIDE SQUAD
Quite a familiar rationale ... it's fantasy style, violence isn't sustained... Indie
BBFC MOCKS IT'S OWN 80s VIDEO NASTIES PAST, SPITTING SURVEY STATS TO JUSTIFY ITSELF AS HORROR FILM "CENSOR" REFLECTS ON THE MARY WHITEHOUSE/MAIL MORAL PANIC
Lots of useful material in this Guardian feature. Austin is BBFC chief executive....
'Ask Austin how he feels about the 80s BBFC and you might think he was talking about a late, disgraced elderly relative. The Video Recordings Act of 1984 gave the BBFC control over the films people watched at home; in the same year, the board dropped the word “censors” from its title. But, to Austin, a more profound change came in 1999. That was when the board switched from airing examiners’ hang-ups to transparent guidelines drawn from public consultation. Twenty-two years later, 10,000 members of the British public are still asked annually to gauge the level of sex and violence that should be viewable by, say, a typical 12-year-old. “I don’t just make up the standards in Soho Square,” Austin says. “Our standards are given to us by the public.”
Yet not everyone is at peace with the BBFC. In 2016, the film-maker Charlie Shackleton pushed back. His objections included its financial model: not profit-making, but reliant on distributors having no choice but to submit their films for certification – and to pay the BBFC to do so, for each minute of screen time. His provocative response was Paint Drying, a 10-hour study of a freshly painted wall. The classification fee was crowdfunded, the issue publicised. (The film got a U.) Shackleton remains a sceptic. “It suits the BBFC to highlight video nasties. They acknowledge the absurdity of their past and tell everyone they’re different now. Then they release another survey to justify their existence.”
(“And 88% of parents found it useful when Netflix started using BBFC classification,” Austin says.) But the relationship is unusual. Rather than submit content to examiners, the company uses an algorithm developed with the board. The bill is substantially cheaper.
Austin wants to work with other big streamers. But the real prize is the internet. If video nasties were an early freakout at rising individualism, online life is the world after the flood. Here, more than movies, is where the questions of the 80s endure. When does “I don’t want to look at this” attract the addendum “and no one else should” or “because they might copy it”? “That was video nasties in a nutshell,” Bailey-Bond says. “It came from people feeling everyone was morally shady, that we’re only ever one film from garotting someone with a shoelace.”
OFCOM THREATENS TO GET TOUGH WITH SOCIAL MEDIA FLR RACISM FAILURES - BUT DOES IT HAVE THE POWER?
OfCom will gain some control under the Online Safety Act, the power to fine. But NOT the power to remove licenses it has, and has used, for broadcast media, and the BBFC effectively has for film. Will these global giants really change in any meaningful way through fining?

FRANCE HITS GOOGLE WITH €500m FINE FOR COPYRIGHT THEFT FROM PRESS
France is taking a lead within the EU (Germany and Holland also passing their own laws) on beginning to regulate the new media giants. They've fined Google for not negotiating 'in good faith' with French media (especially press) for a formal system of compensation for featuring their content, as previously ordered by French courts. Google refutes this. Guardian.
OFCOM COMPLAINTS RISE 4-FOLD, ALL TOP 10 ITV, 3 PIERS MORGAN, 2 BLM
BBC. A 410% increase. I'd have to think that's reflective of the number of people under lockdown plus many watching shows like GMB they normally wouldn't. 
PHONE-HACKING + NOTW CLOSURE 10 YEARS LATER: JOURNALISTS REFECT

Looking back at the News of the World’s closure a decade on, Davies said a chance for real change had been missed: “There was an extraordinary period which only lasted a few weeks and it was like seeing the teacher chased out of the classroom. And just for a brief period, we didn’t have to be frightened of Rupert Murdoch and his dreadful newspapers and politicians were free to say what they thought and advertisers were free to tell him to get stuffed.

“But you know, power doesn’t relax its grip easily. And slowly and insidiously Murdoch got his bony fingers back around the throat of British public life and has kept them there.” Guardian.

MORE AUTHORITARIANISM: BORIS ALLY TRIED TO BLOCK BBC APPOINTMENT
Guardian. The advisor who came up with the media strategy on the race report (Britain isn't racist, yay! in summary) and worked on the right-wing TV news station GB News, warned the BBC not to appoint someone from the HuffPost. Which Boris was battling with after he okayed a minister using Twitter to bring thtreat to a journalist. He texted: 'the government’s “fragile trust in the BBC will be shattered” if she went ahead'.
Labour subsequently demanded the resignation or sacking of Gibb, former Communications Director for Theresa May as PM (Guardian). Alistair Campbell, Blair's media pitbull, had a colourful phrase to describe the Tory/Johnson attempts to shape and control the media, culling critical voices: "Putinism with posh accents". Gibb sits on the BBC Board; 'According to the corporation’s website, one of Gibb’s responsibilities as a non-executive director on the BBC board involves “upholding and protecting the independence of the BBC”.'
FRANCE: ISLAMOPHOBE TEEN PROTECTED, ONLINE ABUSERS CONVICTED
A hugely controversial case (Guardian) in which the right to attack religions has been legally safeguarded and judged as separate from racism, therefore not legally defined hate speech, whilst abusive online posters were convicted of hate speech and intimidation. The judge established online behaviour to be no different to physical interaction, and to be judged accordingly:
“Social networks are like the street,” presiding magistrate Michael Humbert said on Wednesday as he handed down his judgments. “When you cross someone in the street, you don’t insult, mock or threaten them. What you don’t do in the street, you don’t do on social media.”
OFCOM SAY GB NEWS OK...BUT BLAST JOHN LENNON PEACE VIDEO
BBC: It seems there's no going back from the radical reinterpretation of broadcast news balance/accuracy requirements. Much like IPSO + the PCC before it, opinion segments are getting extra leeway, while the inclusion of some/any counterviews, regardless of how they're presented or undermined, seems now to mean right-wing Trumpian/Fox-style 'news' shows are okay.
The Lennon case is about the use of 1 of 2 videos for Happy Xmas (War is Over) which features short clips of real war footage.
As with Indie social realist films getting hammered with high BBFC age ratings, it seems that reality/realism is not to be encouraged!!!

FLASH GORDON BBFC'S BIGGEST 2020 CONTROVERSY! KARATE KID RATING CHOPPED
A new DVD edition was uprated for its use of stereotypes, eventually leading to ... 26 complaints. Pinocchio was #2! FilmStories.
SkyNews is one of many other sites who detail the range of upratings like Star Wars and LotR, but also Karate Kid dropping down to 12.
FACEBOOK TRUMP ANTITRUST LAWSUIT; ABOVE THE LAW?
They joined Apple, Amazon, Alphabet/Google, and Microsoft as $1 TRILLION valued companies as their shares soared after the judge ruled the FTC had no case; they shouldn't have let it buy WhatsApp and Instagram if they wanted to argue it was a monopoly suppressing trade. Guardian.

CLIMATE GROUP PROTESTS PRESS BY DUMPING MANURE OUTSIDE THE MAIL
Their point being that the Mail is full of it. 
'Speaking for the [XR, Extinction Rebellion] group, Gully Bujak said: “For the British public, who’ve seen the criminal behaviour of this government and their cronies throughout the pandemic, the conclusion must surely be clear: the arenas of power in this country are rotten, and where the billionaire-owned press is concerned, corruption is the business model.

“It’s time they cut the crap and stop acting as though they are providing a noble service to the public, while greenwashing the climate crisis and stoking the culture war to divide people.”' Guardian

MURDOCH LOOKS LIKE HE'LL GET UK GOVERNMENT TO DUMP RESTRICTIONS
The limited, ineffective supposed block on Murdoch's interference in Times editorial + legal divide between the Times/Sunday Times were 'put in place in 1981 by Margaret Thatcher’s government as part of a compromise deal to allow Murdoch to buy the two papers without needing approval from monopoly regulators' (Guardian).
This is rather chilling: 'Extinction Rebellion said four female members were arrested on Friday at one of its east London warehouses where they had been creating art for the Free the Press march on Sunday.'

NFTs AND THE WEB 2.0 FATE OF TEXTS
From a long-read Guardian feature:
There is one big problem at the heart of meme NFTs. Whatever their advocates argue, in themselves they have no inherent value, being fundamentally non-monetisable at their core. The meme only assumes cultural capital through mass transmission, and mass transmission only takes place when the meme is free to share. You’d never pay to send a meme, any more than you’d pay to tell a joke, or send a nude. The meme is a gift from one person to another, spontaneously, voluntarily, without any expectation of financial reward. Memes belong to everybody and nobody. You can’t apply the principles of free-market capitalism to a meme because, by its very nature, a meme is not an asset class but a living organism.

“What is important and interesting about memes from a critical perspective is that they don’t belong to anybody,” says art critic Davis. “They are distributed among people, but it’s what thousands of people did with it – that’s the meme. And when you take a meme and treat it like a conventional art object by saying: ‘Here is the unique thing, you own it,’ it creates confusion about what is valuable about the meme. It’s not the image itself that is valuable. The image was just a container for a huge number of jokes.”

EU TO IMPOSE QUOTA ON BRITISH FILM/TV?
And so the great Brexit triumph continues... The UK music industry faces crisis as touring in the EU is made impossible (British drivers are only allowed to take tour vans to 3 venues then must return to the UK, with carnets, tax forms, required now too for all equipment).
The booming UK film/TV industry now faces a huge hit too. The EU are likely to impose a quota on UK productions to protect domestic European production and culture, echoing the quotas in place to protect against American dominance, or cultural imperialism. In France, for example, this applies across radio, film and TV.
One of several Guardian reports notes:
Good example of the clash of left/right-wing thinking, plus this government's determined attack on anything 'woke' (obviously argued one way through the Guardian lens): 
Under the EU’s audiovisual media services directive, a majority of airtime must be given to such European content on terrestrial television and it must make up at least 30% of the number of titles on video on demand (VOD) platforms such as Netflix and Amazon.

UK GOV TO PRIVATISE C4?
Good example of the clash of left/right-wing thinking, plus this government's determined attack on anything 'woke' (obviously argued one way through the Guardian lens): Guardian

ARE US NEWSPAPERS POST-DEMOCRACY ASSETS TO STRIP? HEDGE FUNDS STRIP THEM BARE AS 25% OF US LOCAL/REGIONAL PAPERS CLOSED SINCE 2005 - AND CLOSURE RATE ACCELERATES
See Guardian analysis.

MURDOCH LINKED TO KILLING; MET POLICE INSTITUTIONALLY CORRUPT FOR COVER-UP; POLICE CORRUPTION FOR MURDOCH PRESS LINKS ... REMEMBER UK CON. PM CAMERON BLOCKED LEVESON INQUIRY INTO POLICE/POLITICAL LINKS TO PRESS
This should be a political earthquake. IPSO should be springing into action.
But instead - the government immediately rejected the inquiry's finding that the Met Police commissioner should resign. IPSO, of course, said nothing and faces no political pressure to do so. It only reacts to articles, nothing else. Guardian June 2021.

FACEBOOK COLONIALISM? HOW DATA 'CHARITY' ENTRAPS COUNTRIES' USERS IN WALLED, NET NEUTRALITY-SMASHING SURVEILLANCE - AND WHY INDIA BANNED IT (think Andrew Keen...)
A lengthy but fascinating read (Guardian).
'India, the most important market outside of the west, where ungrateful critics perceived it an example of “digital colonialism” and it was eventually blocked by the country’s telecoms regulator on the grounds that it violated the principle of net neutrality by explicitly favouring some kinds of online content while effectively blocking others. Beyond India, however, Free Basics seems to be thriving, being used by “up to 100 million” people in 65 countries, including 28 in Africa.
Last May, Facebook launched a kind of Free Basics 2.0 called Discover. It’s a mobile app that can be used to browse any website using a daily balance of free data from participating mobile network partners. Effectively, it strips out all website content that’s data-intensive (images, video, audio) and displays a pared-down version of the site. “We’re exploring ways to help people stay on the internet more consistently,” explains the Facebook blurb. “Many internet users around the world remain under-connected, regularly dropping off the internet for some period of time when they exhaust their data balance. Discover is designed to help bridge these gaps and keep people connected until they can purchase data again.”
Sounds good, eh? But a recent study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, on how Discover works in the Philippines (where it has replaced Free Basics) found that not all websites seemed to be stripped for onward viewing. When accessing Facebook through Discover, for example, it wasn’t stripped much – just 4% of images were removed from Instagram, compared with more than 65% of images on other popular sites such as YouTube and e-commerce platform Shopee. The inference was that Discover rendered Facebook’s own services far more functional than those of its competitors. Charged with this, the company blamed a “technical error” that had since been resolved.

HOW BETTING COMPANIES FLOUT ADVERTISING RULES WITH DIGITAL ADS DURING EURO FOOTBALL CHAMPIONSHIPS
This topic is an interesting one given it suggests media effects are very real. There are many more articles on how betting (and alcohol and even tobacco) companies ab/use sponsorships and online marketing especially to target young audiences who are supposed to be protected from such ads. This Guardian feature looks specifically at how betting giants are exploiting unregulated space.

GB NEWS LAUNCHES EVEN AS MURDOCH HESITATES - IS BRITAIN GETTING ITS OWN FOX NEWS?
In short - yes ... and no. Murdoch's US Fox News is a commercial juggernaut, attracting huge advertising revenues for its comically, demonically far-right proselytizing; this venture, even with a Trump-like UK Prime Minister, is unlikely to gain either the commercial of cultural importance. But it seems a large degree of newspaper style bias will be okayed by OfCom. See Guardian analysis:
Contrary to popular belief, there is no legal requirement for British broadcasters to give equal time to both sides of a political debate. Instead, GB News will simply have to ensure its broadcasts meet Ofcom’s standards of due impartiality. This would enable a host to express a strong opinion on a culture war topic as long as viewers are later exposed to alternative viewpoints.

Stop Funding Hate, the Twitter-centric campaign group that puts pressure on rightwing news outlets by targeting their advertisers, has already launched a campaign against the channel. “GB News may now be trying to shake off the Fox News label – but if to be ‘woke’ is to be anti-racist, then by branding themselves an ‘anti-woke’ TV channel, they seem to be making their intentions quite clear,” it said.

MURDOCH'S HUGE SUN LOSSES: LEGALLY DECLARES VALUE AT £0; PHONE HACKING PAYMENTS; OVERTAKEN BY MAIL AS UK'S BIGGEST; TIMES DOING BETTER
Guardian reports on NewsUK's market update.
The New European provides a deeper dig into whether Murdoch and his print empire are done.

BBFC 2021 SWEARING FINDINGS: NO MORE AT 12 SAY PARENTS - WHILE THEY SWEAR MORE THEMSELVES!
Guardian. 'The report coincides with the BBFC’s first guide to what terms parents can expect to hear in differently classified TV shows and films. It says that for a U-rated film such as Monsters Inc, “look at the big jerk” will be as strong as it gets.

In Back to the Future, a PG film, Marty McFly exclaims “holy shit!” when armed terrorists approach in a van, but the word is not used again.

Bohemian Rhapsody is one of the 12/12A-rated examples: “Freddie fucking Mercury,” says Mercury in a scene in which he reveals to his bandmates that he has Aids. “You’re a legend,” says the drummer Roger Taylor. “You’re bloody right I am,” Mercury replies. The BBFC says viewers would have been expecting “sex, drugs and strong language”.
The report also touches on acronyms and concludes that the meaning of an example such as WTF is rarely lost on viewers, whatever age. “Therefore, the BBFC will classify acronyms as if they are a use of strong language in full.”'


UK GOV LOSES COURT CASE TRYING TO AVOID FREEDOM OF INFORMATION. DCMS ADMITS AVOIDING SCRUTINY BY USING SELF-DELETING MESSAGES: ANOTHER COURT CASE LOOMS.
Guardian reports on the extraordinary efforts of the government to thwart and frustrate FOI requests, seemingly in clear breach of court rulings. Despite the latest court ruling it's at best uncertain that the increasingly authoritarian UK government will comply. Days later it emerges, from an FOI request, that the DCMS (responsible for overseeing the archiving of government messaging for legal scrutiny) is facilitating the use of self-deleting messaging (Guardian).
'Transparency campaigners have expressed alarm at a culture of “government by WhatsApp”. The Citizens has threatened legal action, saying use of such functions makes it impossible to carry out required legal checks about whether a message should be archived for posterity. Information that could be useful to a public inquiry, or otherwise fall within the scope of an FOI request, may be lost as a result.'

WILL FAANGS DEFEAT TAX AVOIDANCE PROPOSAL? AND BOOK ON AMAZON'S BEZOS REVEALS HE REFUSED TO FUND WAREHOUSE AIRCON...UNTIL NEWSPAPERS EXPOSED AMBULANCES WAITING OUTSIDE FOR COLLAPSED WORKERS
Jeff Bezos' personal fortune has risen 7-fold from 2013-21. And 70% since the start of the pandemic in January 2020. 'When one of his executives proposed a modest investment to air-condition his warehouses, Bezos dismissed the idea as too costly. But then the Morning Call of Allentown, Pennsylvania reported that workers were passing out in the Lehigh Valley warehouse, then being transported to the hospital by ambulances the company kept waiting outside. Only then did Bezos approve $52m for air conditioning – “establishing a pattern of making changes only after he read criticism in the media”, as Stone puts it.'
Stone being the author of 2 books about Bezos - the new one: "Amazon Unbound". (Guardian). Sounds rather like Andrew Keen...

Meantime the G7 (a group of 7 economically powerful nations) have started the process of creating a minimum global corporation tax of 15%, still a historically low rate, to tackle the use of tax havens like the Caymans, Luxembourg and more to avoid paying tax. 'Amazon is one of the largest businesses in the world, with a market value of $1.6tn (£1.1tn) and sales of $386bn in 2020. A Luxembourg subsidiary paid zero corporation tax in 2020 on sales income from across Europe of €44bn (£38bn), making Amazon a prominent target for politicians campaigning for changes to the global tax system.' BUT...under the terms of the proposed tax change they still won't pay any more tax .. (Guardian)

MUSIC RIGHTS NEW MONOPOLIST: HIPGNOSIS 
DB ANALYSIS: Elberse did a very convincing job of destroying the credibility of the long tail theory in her Blockbusters book, showing that a small number of tentpole hits (in books, games, film, music) account for the vast bulk of sales. Since she wrote this the same has been observed of Spotify. However - that overlooks the revenue from back-catalogue music (and TV/film through multiple global channels) from radio, TV, film and games licensing ... not to mention advertising. So perhaps Malcolm Gladwell's concept has some meaning after all?
Guardian. 'The London-listed company, which earns royalties every time one of the 65,000 songs to which it owns the rights is played, said that revenues climbed 66% from $83m (£59m) to $138m in the year to the end of March.

Hipgnosis, which spent $1bn buying 84 new song catalogues last year, said the increase in streaming while the live music sector remained shut down fuelled a 50% increase in profits to $107m.'

CHINA: JOHN CENA APOLOGIZES TO PREVENT MOVIE FLOPPING; CENSORING TIANAMEN SQUARE SEARCH RESULTS OUTSIDE CHINA TOO
Google bowed to pressure from its staff and risk to its image (though does anyone still think their corporate motto 'don't be evil" is anything but a sick joke by now?) by pulling out of China in 2010 rather than agreeing to censor it's results. Murdoch pulped (last British Governor of Hong Kong) Chris Patten's autobiography and wrote off the £1m advance, and dumped the BBC from his Asian satellite TV network Star to protect his access to China. NBCUniversal made wrestler/actor John Cena apologize for correctly referring to Taiwan as a country - like Tibet and Hong Kong, China insists it isn't, it's simply part of China (and is increasingly open about threatening military invasion to enforce this). Do a 'china' word search in this post to read more.

Into this picture of craven Western media bowing to China's notorious censorship demands stumbles Microsoft. Their search engine is compliant with the great firewall of China, the extraordinary operation to block critical (what Gramsci calls counter-hegemonic) content - like any reference to Tianamen Square. They've been caught out applying this censorship in the West now too (they blamed this on "human error"). But this isn't an entirely new development...

'In 2014, the Guardian reported that Bing was censoring results for Chinese-language users in the US for many of the same terms that Bing censors inside China, such as Dalai Lama, Tiananmen Square and Falun Gong.

In 2009, the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a column about receiving seemingly censored results on Bing when he searched for topics such as the Dalai Lama, Tiananmen Square, and Falun Gong using simplified Chinese language characters.' (Guardian)

It's worth emphasizing that the basic Western democracy v Chinese dictatorship binary isn't so clearcut. Trump made clear he admired several dictators and attempted to trample on US democracy. Boris Johnson is doing the same in the UK, while Poland and Hungary barely qualify as democracies any more. Many western governments were caught out secretly spying on their citizens with the Wikileaks publication of Chelsea Manning's leaks and the Guardian/New York Times publication of Alex Snowdon's leaks. The British government sent in police to literally destroy the computers Guardian journalists were working on. Democracy?!?! (read more)

Western 'democracies' secretly have their own operations - Andrew Keen covers this in his books reflecting on web 3.0, describing how Google/Facebook have brought about surveillance capitalism.

MAY 2021

MORE PHONE-HACKING LEGAL CASES LAUNCHED

£125k LIBEL PAYOUT: £6k PER TWEETED WORD BY CELEBRITY DR ATTACKING DUP LEADER ARLENE FOSTER
Arlene Foster has been the DUP leader and First Minister of Northern Ireland for some years. A TV celebrity doctor with over 300k followers tweeted gossip that she'd been having an affair with her bodyguard (see Belfast Telegraph). He now accepts this is untrue but rejected repeated calls at the time to apologise publicly, leading to the court case and the major damages outcome.
There have been multiple cases of people jailed for racist hate speech on Twitter in the UK, and of course we've seen examples like former deputy Prime Minister John (Lord) Prescott and Dwayne Johnson take to social media to demolish untrue press stories.
So we await proper regulation of social media, but libel laws and its use as an alternative to a failed press regulator are also part of the complex picture.

SKY NEWS AUSTRALIA: RACIST HATE SPEECH IS FINE - ITS NOT OUR JOB TO POLICE YOUTUBE COMMENTS; COMPARE TO ANTI-BBC FLAK 
There is a serious point/principle at play here, not unlike the hypocrisy-soaked shrieks of outrage that greet any attempt to raise meaningful press regulation: it is a potential threat to democracy to have statutory press regulation ... but of course the (right-wing) press love to pile on calls for tougher regulation of all other media.

Australia has been working through political attempts to make new media giants Google and Facebook legally liable to compensate news media for content they use, exploit, distribute, share, publish - the exact term you'd use has big legal consequences. Is Google a publisher? If so, it must pay for content and be legally responsible for libel and meeting regulatory standards. This includes user comments....

SkyNews Australia has been accused of a Fox News-style ultra right-wing agenda. Note: it's UK equivalent isn't seen in this way, as an OfCom-compliant news channel. The Guardian reports on the mass of racist comments under a short news clip, posted on YouTube, on the shooting of a BLM activist in London. The clip is fine - but News Corp Australasia ) Murdoch's local subsidiary) insist they are not the publisher of the comments - Google is; it's their responsibility to police racist hate speech!!!

They do have a point - but to performativize this to the extent of refusing to delete (or simply block all) comments is unconscionable. 

'After this story was published on Thursday, YouTube advised Guardian Australia they were now “actively” removing comments that violated community guidelines.' Prompted by the paper's claim that much of the hate speech remained, I checked for myself on 27.5.21 - and sure enough, there remains a dominant thread of repugnant racism in the comments underneath. Check for yourself here.

So, who is responsible for policing user comments online??? Is it Google/Alphabet in the case of YouTube? Or the account-holder uploading and publishing the video, and not only permitting comments but not either vetting (selecting the moderate all comments before publication option) or moderating comments? 'spokesperson said. “Sky News Australia is not the author of user comments on the YouTube platform. We suggest you direct your inquiries to Google.”'

There IS a HUGE principle at stake here, so I can understand the rationalisation behind this stance. But I have a channel with many 100s of videos, I'm rather busy ... but I vet all comments before publication. Same for Blogger, on which I've had over a million post reads across multiple blogs. I'm not prepared to risk hateful comments. I'm certainly not going to rely on Google's ability/will to enforce 'community guidelines'.

Both SkyNews and Google are monetising that BLM shooting video. Advertisers pay more when there's evidence of user engagement, so the racist hate speech is driving up revenue. How can BOTH these conglomerate giants get away with refusing or failing to police hate speech on their own channel/platform?

Another angle on this centres on OnlyFans, a UGC site that has been hailed for its explosive growth as an exemplar of the future of new media. The BBC article itself warns that some readers might find some of its report disturbing, as it covers exploitation of teens posting explicit content, and I'll reiterate that. If you want to read more, it is a lengthy, detailed report covering reports from schools, police, parents and teen uploaders plus analysis of UK proposals (now 2 years old and still with no definite timeframe for enacting) to fine companies up to 10% of global revenue for posting illegal content featuring under-18s. The BBC investigation suggests that the site's vetting procedures to prevent under-18s from registering are failing; the company repeatedly points to an updated registration process.

WHITHER DEMOCRACY - ATTEMPT TO BREACH UK GOV SECRECY OVER PSB PLANS
Words fail me on this. Appalling.

UK TORY GOVERNMENT BLOCKS PRESS-POLICE INQUIRY ... AGAIN!
With David Cameron blocking the wish of the rest of the House of Commons to continue with Lord Leveson's official press standards inquiry (the next stage would have investigated corruption and links between police, politicians and the press), now another Tory PM has followed suit. A court case is likely to challenge the block on an official report into the suspicious circumstances, including press (specifically Murdoch's NoTW), political and police corruption, of a journalist in 1987. Such long delays between events and reports, never mind actions, can be viewed as a standard government technique to diminish the impact from any harmful or critical findings. Guardian.

UK TO REGULATE SOCIAL MEDIA? CIVIL RIGHTS CONCERNS
The classic regulation issue: 
The online safety bill, introduced to parliament on Wednesday, hands Ofcom the power to punish social networks that fail to remove “lawful but harmful” content. The proposals were welcomed by children’s safety campaigns, but have come under fire from civil liberties organisations. (Guardian)

UNIVERSAL ITALY USES MAN TO DUB TRANS WOMAN
The practise of using deep-voiced CIS men to dub a trans woman's voice is also seen in Germany and Spain. Social media outrage has seen Universal apologize and pull the Italian version of Promising Young Woman and delay the release until they replace the transphobic overdub. Guardian.

BBC CENSORS RU PAUL PRINCE ANDREW JOKE
Curious 'logic' of protecting the public from offence given how widely loathed the subject of the joke is since his disastrous BBC interview on sex offences. Even more so as they left in another joke about his tastes. 
The Guardian speculates this reflects the Tory government imposing a Tory Director General on the BBC.
'The edits to Drag Race came at a time when the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, is battling with a government trying to stamp its authority on the national broadcaster, with Conservative MPs accusing the BBC of being unpatriotic and failing to promote the union flag in its publications. Davie was also accused of curbing leftwing comedy programmes that have been unpopular with leading Tories.'

DISNEY'S CANCEL CULTURE ISSUE GOES MUCH DEEPER THAN PRINCE CHARMING'S NO CONSENT KISS: EXTENSIVE RACISM
People tend to overlook that Walt Disney himself was a rabid racist. Good Guardian article that runs through some examples of the racism in Disney classics. 
"streaming services such as Disney+ and the UK’s Now TV have recently added disclaimers to films such as Peter Pan and The Aristocats, making clear that the much-loved animations feature outdated and potentially offensive stereotypes.
It’s a clumsy approach, but the alternative would be to go through each movie frame by frame and excise everything that upsets modern-day sensibilities. The result would be the eventual destruction of these films, a sort of death by a thousand final cuts. Or Disney could just remake everything, which seems to be happening behind the scenes in any case."

FOX NEWS MADE ME DO IT - LEGAL DEFENSE?!
Not necessarily a hypodermic syringe application, it's as much two-step flow (being influenced by people or organs with status). One of the Trump supporters who invaded the American Congress has used the persistent Fox News coverage pushing the line that Biden had stolen the election from Trump as his legal defense. 
It's also notable that the US has fairly weak media regulation after years of deregulation through the FCC, advertisers having at least as much influence over TV and radio content. Subscription TV like HBO carries much more explicit drama series like The Sopranos that the ad-funded national networks wouldn't run. Guardian.


APRIL 2021
AUSTRALIAN PRESS SELF REGULATOR TO BE BOYCOTTED BY JOURNALISTS
There has been talk over the years of the NUJ taking action against the UK self-regulators, but in the case of Australia the journalists' union actually part-funds their equivalent regulator. Journalist union action may be a future source of change in the weak UK system, which suits the owners (who fund and run IPSO) just fine. Guardian.

FOOTBALL BOYCOTT SOCIAL MEDIA OVER RACIST ABUSE - HIGHLIGHTS LACK OF REGULATION
While there seems to be a clear mood within the UK government and parliament to finally create a social media regulator, despite threats of economic sanctions from the US government, there is no timeline on this. Meantime, racist abuse of footballers, unpunished and allowed to continue by Twitter etc, has prompted a 4 day switch off of social media by all English professional clubs and players.
Maybe this will build pressure for belated statutory regulation?
'Two years ago a number of footballers took part in the #Enough campaign – a 24-hour social media boycott in protest at a similar spate of abuse. The new boycott is significantly broader in scale and ambition.
[Football groups] urged that the government ensured its online safety bill would bring robust legislation to make social media companies more accountable for what appeared on their platforms.'  Guardian
As always, the reality may be that there is no easy fix. A proposed Australian law that would require all search links, social media mentions etc of any film that get an RC (Refused Classification) rating, would be a massive curtailment of free speech and see the government there define what is unacceptable in sexual practices. Guardian.

HOW FACEBOOK ENABLES AUTHORITARIANISM - GUARDIAN SERIES
This example considers the case of Azerbaijan. Despite being reported to Facebook as early as 2012 they continue to allow government troll accounts to dominate online discussion.

ITALY FINALLY SCRAPS 1914 RELIGIOUS FILM CENSORSHIP
The last major application of the laws was 1998, but it's still quite shocking that a major Western democracy would still have such regressive laws on the books in 2021. The removal will no doubt annoy religious conservatives though. Guardian.


MARCH 2021

FREEDOM OF PRESS BATTERED BY UK POLICE
It's been easy to tut at the overtly fascist trampling of media freedom to report by police under Trump in the USA, but that shouldn't be taken as exceptional for the western democracies. While PM Johnson predictably focused on condemning protestors (against a government attempt to give the police extraordinary powers to ban protests!) and the UK Opposition leader remained silent, not only were protestors battered by police, so were journalists. Again. Despite displaying their press credentials which gives them legal protections to report on such events. For all the hand-wringing over authoritarianism within the hallowed EU (Poland and Hungary), rule 101 of democracy, a free press, is being battered even within leading democracies. Guardian.


FAANGS CLAMP UP AT CONGRESS HEARINGS AS STATUTORY REGULATION LOOMS
It looks ever more likely that Facebook et al will lose their unregulated position in the near future - the US Representatives questioning the likes of Zuckerberg in March were unimpressed with the answers they got to questions about social media role in the pro-Trump insurrection (Guardian). 
Meantime Amazon faces pressure over its appalling working conditions, with a battle underway in Alabama to unionize the workforce (bitterly resisted by Amazon), and leaks conforming that the company know it's drivers often have to urinate and defecate into water bottles and bags to make their delivery quota ... while Amazon pushes for AI constant monitoring of these same drivers (Guardian).
MPs CRITICISE GOVERNMENT USING LICENSE FEE THREAT TO WEAKEN BBC
Guardian. Unusually strong language from the Culture Select Committee (which has MPs from a range of parties, including Tories, the party of government): 
The committee also criticised the government for floating the idea of decriminalising non-payment of the licence fee last year, a proposal that has now been dropped.

They raised concerns that the threat had been used as a bargaining chip by government to change BBC policy and “thereby [to] undermine one of the core principles of public service broadcasting: that it should be removed from government interference”.

COYID MEGHAN WINFREY INTERVIEW IMPACT (LACK OF) UK PRESS REGULATION? ALSO: SOCIETY OF EDITORS TURMOIL
(Harry/Meghan have now complained to OfCom about Piers Morgan's comments on Good Morning Britain, Metro)
International Women's Day gets an annual debate in the House of Commons and a group of 70 female MPs who wrote a 2019 letter condemning 'colonial undertones' to some press coverage have called for tougher press regulation.
Labour MP Holly Lynch 'said there needed to be the beginnings of a conversation about further press regulation if there was not a culture change in how sections of the media were operating. “We are legislators – we should be able to work together to find solutions. We have a responsibility to intervene,” she said.'
Meantime, in the week that Piers Morgan's comments implying Markle lied sparked over 40,000 complaints to OfCom and he resigned, the Society of Editors have drafted a 2nd statement in the aftermath of the now-resigned chief executive's appalling performance on a BBC interview, talking over presenter Victoria Derbyshire to aggressively deny the UK press has a racism problem.
Their annual awards show, hit by increasing boycotts, has been postponed from the end of March, with the organisation set to acknowledge the significant failures of the UK press on race.
These twin stories, both linked to the spotlight the Winfrey interview has thrown on the alleged racism of the press' treatment of Markle, could lead to a new crisis for the cosy voluntary self-regulation system backed by the government which benefits hugely from the predominately  right-wing, therefore friendly, press.
The Millie Dowler phone hacking revelations a decade ago led to the PCC scrapping itself and IPSO launching - to near zero effect? It certainly hasn't done anything to challenge or change the often racist reportage of immigration and ethnic minorities - some of the most disgusting examples being written by the current Tory Prime Minister. The impact, the effect, could be seen with the predominance of immigration in the ultimately successful Brexit campaign. 
30 years ago the death of Harry's mother, Princess Diana, after a chase by paparazzi in Paris, led to the Press Council being scrapped and the PCC launched. Just as a right-wing Tory PM, David Cameron, blocked Leveson from completing the Leveson Inquiry's work and blocked his proposals for tougher regulation - leaving it to the free market (the highly monopolised industry), maintaining a deregulated laissez-faire approach, so the Tory PM John Major blocked the Calcutt Committee's main proposals in 1991 and it's 1993 recommendation that statutory regulation be brought in.
The then Heritage Secretary (these days named Culture Secretary, heading the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, DCMS) David Nellie 'interviewed in December 1991 on the TV programmne Hard News following the establishment of the Calcutt Review inquiring into Press Standards. Mellor claimed during the interview that "the press – the popular press – is drinking in the Last Chance Saloon"[7] and called for curbs on the "sacred cow" of press freedom.[8]' (Wiki)
The press famously killed his career by splashing his extra marital affair in a Sun front page, Photoshopping him into a Chelsea football shirt and falsifying lurid details: 'The Sun, relying on material supplied by publicist Max Clifford, made a number of lurid claims about the relationship that de Sancha later admitted in a newspaper interview were entirely untrue:[10] this was subsequently confirmed by David Mellor in 2011 at the Leveson Inquiry into Press Behaviour.[11][12]'
Will the Markle case, with its link to Diana, finally bring meaningful change to the status of press regulation?
There's another, supremely ironic, wrinkle in this tale... From a Guardian analysis of how Meghan disrupted the unspoken contract between royals and the press they despise, but host at private parties:
The final nature of that rupture was further reinforced when it emerged that the couple had complained to Ofcom about Piers Morgan’s discussion on Good Morning Britain of their interview, having already complained to ITV. It came as Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail, wrote to the US broadcaster Viacom CBS over what it said was the “indefensible” use of images during Oprah Winfrey’s interview with the Sussexes that had been “doctored or presented as headlines when they were not” to suggest racist coverage.

USA DESTROYING PRESS FREEDOM? REPORTER IN COURT DESPITE FALSE ARREST
In democracies journalists have certain freedoms. The freedom to report on events such as protests is a very, very basic one. A free press is a basic requirement of a democracy. Trump may be gone but the abuse of reporters by police and courts continues under Biden. In a case where a reporter states she was pepper sprayed and zip-tied then arrested for covering a BLM protest. The policeman failed to switch on his bodycam, a legal requirement, to record his actions. Not an isolated case:
The CNN journalist Omar Jimenez, and his crew were arrested live on camera while covering a protest in Minneapolis. The NBC journalist Ali Velshi was shot in the leg with a rubber bullet, also live on camera. Donald Trump called what happened to Velshi “the most beautiful thing”.
According to the US Press Freedom Tracker, 127 journalists were arrested or detained in 2020, compared with nine arrested or detained in 2019. Sahouri is one of 13 to face criminal charges.

MARKLE CASE: JUDGE FORCES MAIL FRONT PAGE RULING!!! FIELDING WINS NOTW PHONE HACKING COMPENSATION
Guardian. The DGMT owners will surely appeal this (I suspect they'll win an appeal against being directed to do this, but they were refused the right to appeal on the issue of guilt). The court also made history with this:

Mail Online has also been ordered to publish the statement on its homepage for one week, with a hyperlink to the full judgment. Meghan had sought for the online statement to be on the website for up to six months “to act as a deterrent to future infringers”, but the judge, Lord Justice Warby, was “not persuaded of the case for prolonged publication”.
........
IPSO has made much of its agreement to introduce limited financial sanctions (never used!) and front page IPSO rulings (almost never used), but this court ruling is a massive blow to any claims it has to be an effective regulator. Simply put, if it was there would be no need for any court cases. An opinion piece also sharply analyses the racism of British media treatment of her. 

This comes in the same week that celebrity Noel Fielding won compensation from Murdoch's press company for phone hacking by the NotW. Remember, the PCC actually attacked the Guardian for its report that the NotW was guilty of this - it's abysmal failure on phone hacking later acknowledged when it disbanded itself and launched the remarkably similar IPSO. Which was seemingly enough for Tory PM Cameron to block (despite most other parties supporting Leveson) nearly all of Leveson's recommendations AND the 2nd/3rd phases of his Inquiry - which were set to investigate police and political links with the press.

FEB 2021

UK GOVERNMENT TRUMPIAN CULTURE WAR ON FAKE UNIVERSITY BANS
Based around a fake report by a pal of the Education Secretary the UK government is pushing to pass a law preventing universities from blocking speakers. Guardian report lays bare the falsehoods the Tory campaign is based on.

THE LAWYER WARRIOR TAKING ON FACEBOOK ETC AND CONTROL BY ALGORITHM
A long but inspiring read on the lawyer who, as part of a group called Foxglove, has been challenging the social media giants and governments use of algorithms to produce pre-designed outcomes like barring immigration from certain countries. Guardian.

ASA REFUSE TO BAN GAY KISS CHOC AD
Article from the ad trade magazine, Campaign, sets out why the ASA rejected complaints against the Cadbury's Creme Egg ad.

TOBACCO USING INFLUENCERS TO FLOUT BANS AND TARGET TEENS
I've lived through the shift from tobacco being the biggest, most visible sports sponsor (snooker players would smoke like chimneys with freebie packs in tournaments often named for tobacco firms) to outright marketing bans spreading across the western world. Even if Germany persists in permitting indoor smoking, cigarette smoking has become increasingly anti-social.
But, the empire strikes back... Vaping has clearly been sold to teens with its range of sweets-like flavours. And nicotine pouches are being squarely marketed to kids from Sweden to Pakistan through the use of social influencers, as this article examines.

FACEBOOK LENIENT TO RACIST ABUSER
After all, there's money to be made from racists?! The Football League condemned the move. Guardian.
BLASPHEMY RESURRECTED IN POLAND
With Trump's America not so long gone it'd be wrong to overdo the exceptionalism of this - but still, blasphemy is a rare cause for censorship in modern Europe ... not so Poland. MetalInjection - NB: quotes some strong language.
...RAPPER ARRESTED FOR INSULTING SPANISH MONARCHY!!
It's not just the anti-democratic eastern fringe of the EU that's attacking free speech in a draconian way...
'Police have fired teargas, rubber bullets and sound bombs at thousands of protesters in Madrid, the day after a rapper was arrested on charges of glorifying terrorism and insulting royalty in his songs.' Guardian.

DUCHESS/MEGHAN WINS MAIL PRIVACY COURT CASE
Highest profile case since Max Moseley, with press again losing. Damages penalty yet to be determined. Guardian.

GOVERNMENT UNDERMINING FOI ACT - EDITORS' JOINT LETTER
6 national newspaper editors note their concern that the government is actively campaigning to undermine the act, with increasing numbers of requests ignored or refused, a shadowy organisation within government co-ordinating responses, and a 41% drop in the Information Commission's Office budget in the past decade while it's caseload has increased by 46%. Guardian. Let's not forget Blair called it his "greatest mistake" as PM and the right have always been opposed to it.

UK POLICE ARREST PRESS PHOTOGRAPHER - IGNORE JOURNALISTS LEGAL PROTECTIONS
It's easy to assume attacks on media freedom are limited to non-democracies like China, but the UK has a far from glowing record. The right to protest has been dramatically reduced over recent years and the legal protections for journalists to report and to protect sources have come under pressure - from a state with a poor record on Northern Ireland, other war reporting, use of the Official Secrets Act and notorious libel tourism that allows corporations and the rich to use courts to gag critical reporting. This latest story, where the police refused to apologize or acknowledge their 'mistake', is concerning for anyone who believes in press freedom. Guardian.

NEWS UK TV LAUNCHES - FT

OFCOM BAN CGTN - CHINESE GOV STATION
This joins Iran's Press TV (with much Tory pressure to dump Russia Today in there too) on the banned list. BBC.

UNIVERSAL UK EARNS X2 FROM VINYL THAN YOUTUBE!!!
This is perhaps the single most killer stat I've yet seen...
'Earlier this month David Joseph, the UK chief executive of Universal Music, home of stars including Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and the Beatles, told the committee that 70% of his artists’ music is watched and listened to on YouTube but the royalties only account for 5% of the company’s revenues. In 2019, UK record labels earned just £35m in royalties from YouTube, almost half the £66m received as a cut of sales of vinyl records.'

TORY GOVERNMENT PUTS DAILY MAIL IN POWER
Surely the UK won't fall into such an anti-democratic pit as Trumpian USA... Johnson said to be appointing the Daily Mail's Paul Dacre to head OfCom, which he can use to eviscerate the BBC. Even the Daily Mail itself now sees Dacre as just too right-wing! Guardian.

JAN 2021
ARISE LORD MURDOCH? CANCEL CULTURE HYPOCRITE?
So, the Dirty Digger got an official sounding award that turns out to be from a savvy fossil fuels lobby group. Sparking a fracking* ex-PM of Australia to accuse him of being the originator of cancel culture (he basically describes Chomskian flak!). Guardian.
* interextualising with Battlestar Galactica (which used that in place of 'the f word'), + the environmental catastrophe of fracking...

ITALY BANS TIKTOK OVER COPYCAT KID DEATH
The era of unregulated new media looks to be fading fast. Italy has given TikTok a month to prove all its users have authentically proven their age (13+) after a young girl died from 'playing the choking game'. Choking yourself to get a high has been a recent TikTok trend, not exactly the first dangerous concept to spread through the app (+ wider social media to be fair) with so many people desparate for their 15 shares of fame. 
Copycat behaviour is of course a primary concern for and factor in BBFC age rating - generally with a thin basis of evidence behind it, but perhaps social media is backing their analysis? See Guardian.

TELEGRAPH GUILTY ON EDITORS CODE CLAUSE 1: TOBY YOUNG COVID COLUMN
The piece was published in July 2020, the ruling comes in January 2021. Yes, the DT is to publish a correction (and has removed the story from its website) but how does that in any way address the damage this column did in fuelling anti-lockdown opinion? Guardian.

TORY DONOR TO BECOME BBC CHAIRMAN
No comment needed?! Guardian

YOUTUBE BANS RADIO CHANNEL OFCOM SAYS IS OK!
TalkRadio has had its channel removed for including anti-lockdown views. OfCom has noted that this is YouTube's decision and that TalkRadio's content remains fine within its UK license conditions. Guardian
UPDATE...Within 24 hours YouTube reversed its decision! Murdoch (who owns the station) will be pleased - hurrah!


DEC 2020
OFCOM FINE INDIAN NEWS CHANNEL £20K

2 USA ANTI-TRUST SUITS THREATEN TO BREAK UP FACEBOOK
Guardian. Both the federal government, through the FTC (Federal Trade Commission, the equivalent of the UK's CMA, Competition and Markets Authority), and a coalition of almost state governments have launched lawsuits against Facebook. Both seek to force the split of Facebook under anti-trust laws, alleging that they have bought rivals to stifle competition. (Another detailed breakdown analyses the likelihood this could take years to come through)

FACEBOOK OWN THE 4 MOST POPULAR SOCIAL MEDIA APPS FROM THE LAST DECADE!
The facts on that are hard to argue against. Together with Google they control 90% of the global online advertising market, a fact which is devastating the print industry and undermining the broadcast industry too. Furthermore, Facebook owns the 4 most popular social media apps of the last decade (FB, FB Messenger, Instagram + WhatsApp were the most-downloaded from 2010-19: BBC).

UK TO REGULATE GOOGLE/FB USE OF MEDIA 'SNIPPETS' WITH POWER TO FINE UP TO 10% OF GLOBAL REVENUES
That this is coming from the most right-wing government in British history (therefore ultra free market, anti-regulation) makes it doubly astonishing. The lobbying power of the 2 global titans is immense, and the US government under Trump and Obama has threatened European governments with retaliation for any restriction on these US corporations. The UK government is desparate to make a free trade deal with the USA.

This is NOT law yet, it is a proposal from the government industry regulator:
'The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which will host the new dedicated Digital Markets Unit (DMU), has advised the government that the new regulator must have the power to impose huge fines as a final “backstop” or it will be unable to ensure tech companies abide by the new rules, which are designed to create a fairer market for smaller rivals, newspaper and magazine publishers, and consumers.'
'The CMA proposals were published as it was revealed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that Mark Zuckerberg, the social network’s founder and chief executive, threatened to withdraw investment from the UK if the government did not soften its “anti-tech” stance towards his company.

The recommendations on the scope of the new DMU’s powers also includes beefed-up rules regarding mergers and acquisitions by tech giants. The report points out that between 2008 and 2018 the big tech giants – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple – made 400 acquisitions but “only a handful” were reviewed by competition regulators and none were blocked. The new rules will not allow the DMU to “implement full ownership separation” by breaking up a tech giant, that will be for the CMA, if necessary.'

OFCOM CENSURE RADIO STATION OVER COVID CONSPIRACY + FORCE BROADCAST OF RULING
A fine is being discussed too (Guardian). The contrast with IPSO (have given themselves the power to fine the papers that signed up... but have never used it) is striking. If the likes of the Mail were forced to feature rulings on its front page/lead story on the app/web page would they really continue to break the Editors Code? That would be very damaging. 

NOV 2020

A SLAPPPPPP IN THE FACE
Exaggerated to emphasize the SLAPP detail...
Guardian. Is the UK STILL being used for defamation censorship???

MAIL ACCUSED ASIAN PROFESSOR OF INCITING RACE WAR ... FORCED BY COURT TO PAY £25K. NO IPSO...
The irony of the Mail accusing someone of racism backfired as they lost a libel case, with the judge setting £25k of damages.
Professor Gopal sought remedy from the courts, NOT IPSO - a clear-cut example of failed regulation. Clause One of the Editors' Code required newspapers to observe ... Accuracy!
Given that UK newspapers openly flout their political bias, it is immediately clear that the regulator fails to meaningfully impact on this basic expectation or issue.

QUOTE>>>>However ... the Mail covered this defeat by putting a short correction statement within its corrections column, buried well inside.
Platell’s false claims appeared in the Saturday edition of the Daily Mail, which is by far the biggest-selling edition of any print newspaper in Britain, with more than 1.5m sold every week. The apology appeared in a substantially smaller position in the newspaper’s corrections column on Friday.

IPSO's main 'power' (as a voluntary, not statutory, regulator, it cannot enforce this; remember The Guardian and FT simply refuse to join it!) is arguably to require front page apologies and acknowledgement of IPSO rulings.
Even this is really a missed opportunity. If these cases took up all or most of the front page instead of small portions, the deep reputational damage to a newspaper's brand would force actual behavioural change.
Note that IPSO, which replaced the PCC in 2014 (a successful attempt to undermine pressure from the Leveson Inquiry for tougher regulation), gave itself the power to fine up to £1m in 2016.
Like the 1960s law that required the government to approve the sale of any newspaper business (they have NEVER refused ANY!), this isn't (yet?) evidence of any real change as IPSO hasn't been using this power.
Guardian on the Gopal libel ruling.

The pressure group website HackingInquiry.org had this to say about IPSO's much-hyped power to fine (March 2020):

IPSO has not fined a newspaper so much as 50p, let alone a million pounds.

 

The reality is that IPSO was set up as a sham from the outset: a body designed to provide the perception of accountability, whilst shielding its members from any meaningful regulation.

...