CONCENTRATION OF OWNERSHIP due to Google Facebook ad dominance

The newspaper industry has been based on ad revenue since the scrapping of stamp duty (tax) in 1851 led to a sharp increase in professionalism, with production (and distribution) costs exceeding revenue from cover price. As Curran and Seaton argue in great detail in Power Without Responsibility, this led to a mass closure of ‘radical press’ titles and consolidation and concentration of ownership by wealthy individuals who pursued right-wing agendas such as low business taxes and attacking trade unions/workers rights.

The modern-day online migration of ad revenue (one major consequence of disruption from digitisation, the other being the youth market almost disappearing as a paid-for print media market: steep circulation decline) is an important factor in any possible change to press regulation.

The industry is struggling for survival, so tougher regulation, especially that proposed by Impress, linked to the Royal Charter idea that Leveson proposed, which would see newspapers routinely charged for the legal fees of accusers even if their complaints were ultimately rejected, could result in mass closure and a further loss of pluralism.

Guardian: Newsquest targets Archant as newspaper consolidation gathers pace.

“Consolidation is inevitable,” Ashley Highfield, chief executive of Johnston Press, owner of the Scotsman and Yorkshire Post, said last week. “It’s the obvious and necessary road ahead and smaller publishers increasingly cannot survive without being part of bigger groups to bring economies of scale and shared content.”
Last year, Johnston Press, the UK’s second-biggest regional newspaper group, paid Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Evening Standard and Independent websites, £24m for national newspaper the i to bulk up the publisher’s scale. It also was one of a number of suitors, including Lebedev, to look at buying national freesheet Metro when DMGT, which owns the Daily Mail, tested market appetite for a sale.

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The shift of readers away from printed newspapers, which have traditionally provided the bulk of revenues and profits through sales and advertising, has been profound over the last decade.
Total weekly regional newspaper circulation fell by half from 42m to 22m between 2009 and 2016 , with paid-for copies falling from 26m to 13.8m, according to Enders Analysis. Similarly, the national newspaper market has shrunk from selling 9.3m copies per day in 2009 to 5.2m last year.
On Tuesday, investors in Trinity Mirror, the publisher of the Mirror titles, will vote to approve a £200m takeover of Richard Desmond’s Express and Star titles as the national newspaper industry faces the same issue of the need to build scale to survive in the battle for advertising against the tech giants.
The impact on publishers’ bottom line has been further affected by lower rates for digital advertising, exacerbated by giants such as Facebook and Google hoovering up to 90% of all new ad money being spent online.
Since 2008, almost £800m in ad spend has been stripped from national newspapers, from £1.54bn in 2008 to £757m last year. The impact is even more stark in regional newspapers, which have seen ad revenue fall from £2bn in 2008 to £723m last year, according to figures from Group M.
“In order to survive, consolidation is key to compete with the online players and retain some share of digital advertising,” says Alice Pickthall, media analyst at Enders.
“As the digital market grows, publishers aren’t seeing a proportionate amount of share gain. Facebook has had an especially big impact on the local market. If a local business is offered a lovely shiny [presence] on Facebook who wouldn’t use it? The largest [traditional] players in the market will win, they will continue to pick up smaller publishers to maintain scale in a shrinking market.”

Mass media doomed, democracy too with churnalism?

Roy Greenslade recently opined that UK newspapers have reached the cliff edge, and could die out en masse very quickly now. The spark was a dreadful set of annual returns showing even the juggernaut of the Daily Mail struggling with print advertising.

Read article here.

Curran and Seaton looked back to the supposed liberalisation and birth of a free press with the 1853 scrapping of tax on newspapers, highlighting the role that advertisers played in deciding which papers survived the shake up. They found that it was mostly radical (left-wing) papers that closed, with advertisers effectively boycotting titles that spread news or views that undermined their parent businesses capitalist prospects (for instance by spreading knowledge of the trade union movement and fostering a working class consciousness).

Chomsky included advertisers as one of the five filters removing counter-hegemonic ideas and information from mainstream media in his propaganda model.

The role that advertisers can play in shaping editorial was shown when Telegraph columnist Peter Oborne revealed the paper had spiked pieces critical of major advertiser HSBC.

Today's very right-wing S*n newspaper grew out of a left-wing Daily Herald that faced secret services harassment but ultimately folded because they couldn't win sufficient advertising, despite offering the largest newspaper circulation in the country (at one stage the world!) at a time.

What do IPSO, the press regulator, have to say on this? Nothing.

Is this time of extreme pressure a good one to toughen up regulation of the press, with Impress if recognised and granted a royal charter threatening to bring huge fines to the table?

The BBFC arguably showed with their refusal to re-rate Postman Pat to PG that they wouldn't create such financial, business issues for film distributors once a film is in cinemas (all the marketing material, and even the trailer and actual film prints, would need replacing!). Perhaps then it is right if similar leniency is shown to a financially struggling industry ... or maybe the basic principles at stake are just too important to dilute?

Either way, without professional journalism, what hope has democracy got? The churnalists of the Daily Mail website are controversial as they largely rewrite other papers work and re-present it as their own. Google and Facebook are likewise feasting off the expensive product created by mass media papers.

Mass media is over, but where does journalism go from here? (Greenslade, 2016)

With advertising being so utterly dominated by just two online giants, how can a press pay for its content in future? The Times and S*n have both shown that newspaper online subscriptions are a very, very hard sell indeed.

Advertiser power and Daily Telegraph HSBC scandal

IN BRIEF: The Daily Telegraph's Chief Political Correspondent resigned, claiming the paper's management spiked a series of critical articles on HSBC rather than lose out on the extensive advertising revenue from HSBC; HSBC had previously made a clear link (see Greenslade and others below) between a paper's coverage and continued advertising 'support'. The nature of the billionaire Barclay brothers' ownership comes into this, as do questions of the role of the press/media in a democracy. The case gives backing to long-established critiques of some Marxist academics who have analysed the impact both of conglomerate/billionaire ownership and the de facto licensing power of advertising (cf. 60s Times, 50s Observer, 00s Mirror and NoTW cases). [YOU CAN FIND A TASK OUTLINE HERE]

Who's this Peter Oborne chap?
Peter Oborne is the hero of the piece. Who is he? An avowedly right-wing 'chief political commentator' for the Daily Telegraph (although Greenslade, a target himself of Oborne, notes that Oborne doesn't always follow the right-wing playbook: criticising the pro-Israel lobby, praising(!) Ed Miliband, supporting the Human Rights Act...). He resigned in disgust at the paper allegedly blocking negative reportage of HSBC, the subject of recent revelations about its efforts in facilitating tax avoidance.

The Telegraph, lets be clear, angrily deny doing any such thing. (Or do they? 'The paper’s editorial on Friday, an illogical mix of bluster and obfuscation, appeared to accept that the breach had occurred.')


Read more - Grauniad/Greenslade bias?

BBC's coverage is less extensive but useful

The fallout from this continues - so look to read more on this, don't just depend on this post (written a week into the scandal on 22.2.15)! With Roy Greenslade following this closely, theguardian.com/media/dailytelegraph is a good source to use - you can decide for yourself if you think the potential benefit of doing down a broadsheet rival, or the left- v right-wing aspect of this are problematic with this coverage. I've used extracts from several, but I've also benefit of reading every article in full - you could too! The Indie doesn't boast quite as good a line-up, but has some quality media coverage (The Times is behind a paywall).
The BBC is a good alternative, though you'll need to do a search such as 'BBC telegraph oborne' to find articles; they don't make it so convenient to find linked articles.


Does This 'Prove' Curran + Seaton/Chomsky's Point?
Curran and Seaton, as well as Noam Chomsky, have plenty of critics who dismiss their analysis as the frothing of lefty, indeed Marxist thinkers. Both have argued that advertisers exercise a de facto licensing system over newspapers, and wider media, and that advertiser preferences invariably mean that radical, counter-hegemonic (yes, Gramsci) content is marginalised. This is hardly a controversial view within Media Studies, but can hardly be considered as mainstream thinking beyond this academic field. Free market advocates would simply counter that the public gets the media content and outlets it wants through the market mechanism.

Tele deny Oborne's claims; condemn reportage of story; attack News UK [Murdoch press] as worse!!!
As the BBC reported,

The Daily Telegraph has published an editorial saying it "makes no apology" for its coverage of the HSBC tax scandal. 

Indeed, part of their response has been to condemn the BBC and Guardian for inventing this story, and even managing an attack on Labour/Ed Miliband! [source: PR Week]

In a promise to its readers published last night on its website, the newspaper makes no apology for the way it has handled allegations made against HSBC – allegations that were "so enthusiastically promoted" by certain media outlets.
The statement questions the editorial impartiality of the BBC, The Guardian and The Times over their dismissive response to MPs' expenses claims, which was revealed by The Telegraph in 2009.
The article then launches an attack on the Labour Party, accusing Ed Miliband of jumping on the HSBC allegations and using them as a "weapon against the Conservatives" to further fuel Labour's "deep-seated hostility to business".

The Tele was bullish in its initial response (PR Week article)

They then went on to attack News UK (Murdoch's newspaper operation) for causing the suicide of two advertising workers in their operation:

The Daily Telegraph has published an anonymous story on its front page suggesting that two suicides at a rival newspaper could be connected to pressure to hit commercial targets, days after its chief political columnist quit alleging that editorial decisions on the Telegraph were being influenced by commercial decisions.The article, which appeared on the bottom of the front page of the paper with the byline “Daily Telegraph Reporter”, said News UK, which publishes papers including the Times and the Sun, had launched an internal investigation into the deaths.The article claims there are “fears that staff are being put under unreasonable pressure to hit targets” in its commercial department. In an article on Friday night, Buzzfeed UK reported a source at the Telegraph saying: “I don’t think any journalist at the Telegraph agrees with what’s going on at the moment.”On Saturday, it published an update based on further contacts with Telegraph staff, who it said were “disgusted and bewildered” by the story’s publication. It added:

Three individuals with knowledge of the newsroom claimed the reporter who wrote the anonymous piece did not bring in the story themselves but was given it to write by their superiors at the newspaper. One source in the newsroom saw the reporter arguing with the news desk over the story, while a second described a newsroom culture where journalists could not veto stories they did not want to write.

(Dominic Smith, Guardian, 21.2.15)


Wider than HSBC coverage: Despicable Me 2, China, Russia...
Newsnight (BBC2's flagship news show) editor wrote a feature for the BBC on this issue summing up their findings:

Daily Telegraph journalists have said they felt discouraged from writing uncomfortable stories about a range of advertisers and commercial partners.

These included the governments of Russia and China, a film distributor and RBS, BBC Newsnight has learned.

Somewhat bizarrely (but thus memorably!) Despicable Me 2 has been drawn into the row, with the original 2-star rating upgraded to 3-star after the distributors bought extensive advertising for the film.

So ... is this corrupt practice endemic to our press? The role of circulation decline
Lets be careful about assuming or accepting that this practice is limited to the Tele alone - all papers are suffering the double-barrelled impact of circulation decline, as older readers die off without many newer readers taking their place and advertising revenue (along with readership) migrating online; many of the previous mainstays of press ad revenue have been largely lost to online rivals, while their websites generate a lot less per reader than the print editions.
We've just seen the Mirror hold its hand up and acknowledge it has been guilty of phone hacking, a practice popularly associated with the Murdoch tabloids, so lets not assume it is just the Tele indulging in this.
As ever, Greenslade has interesting comments on this. He is scathing on the Tele's editorial:

“We are drawing up guidelines that will define clearly and openly how our editorial and commercial staff will co-operate in an increasingly competitive media industry.” Rival publishers could have been forgiven for laughing out loud. No national newspaper owner has previously thought it necessary to codify one of the key planks that maintains a newspaper’s credibility. Despite threats from advertisers, editors revel in the opportunity to show they cannot be bought.

He notes examples of editors standing up to valuable advertisers:

When Distillers pulled its advertising from the Sunday Times during its 1960s campaign on behalf of thalidomide victims, the editor, Harold Evans, was supported by his advertising chief. Years later, when the Sunday Times had passed into Rupert Murdoch’s hands, Mohamed al-Fayed threatened to remove £3m of Harrods advertising from the paper because he didn’t like an article about his renovation of a house in Paris. Its then editor, Andrew Neil, turned the tables on him by telling him he was banning him from advertising, a move enthusiastically endorsed by Murdoch.

He gives another example from 1984 of a freelance scoop on BT, which was undergoing privatisation and spending a fortune  on associated advertising, being at first taken up then spiked by both the Mail and then the Express.

60s Times; Chomsky's filter; ad boycott campaign kills NoTW
So, having looked at how the narrative of press freedom through deregulation and government withdrawing from the press industry can be re-written as a cynical exercise in ensuring the "right people" were in control of the press (a phrase commonly used in contemporary Parliamentary debate over repealing stamp duty on newspapers); the 1960s case of The Times being compelled by unimpressed advertisers to ditch its new working-class (or C2DE) readership; Chomsky's contention that (dependency on) advertising operates as one of the five filters of the 'propaganda model'; and the extraordinary reaction of one of the world's most powerful media groups when advertisers, threatened by a series of Twittersphere boycott campaigns, began to pledge to withdraw all advertising from the NoTW ... now we have an even clearer, even more recent example to utilise. Ian Jack (below) adds a further historical example he claims shows the long-term and continuing impact of advertising preference: the decline of the Observer, once the dominant Sunday quality paper.




Suddenly, the press wakes up to its own elitist, hegemonic nature?!
This seems to have sparked critical comments the likes of which are rarely witnessed in our press about our press, such as Owen Jones' opening paragraph:

By and large, Britain does not have a free press. Our media is not run by the government, and nor does it engage in widespread censorship. Instead, the media is run by a tiny group of politically motivated moguls, themselves in league with other private interests through advertising or personal networks. Journalists from non-privileged backgrounds are filtered out through unpaid internships and expensive post-graduate qualifications, ensuring the media is a closed shop for the well-to-do. According to a report published by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission last August, over half of the top 100 media professionals are privately educated. News coverage all too often reflects the priorities, concerns and prejudices of this tiny sliver of the British population. Rather than being a means to hold the powerful to account and fairly report issues, the media is the ultimate political lobbyist for our elite.

('Peter Oborne's resignation shows that the media shouldn't just serve the rich', 20.2.15, Guardian)

Ian Jack: Observer slumped after advertisers rejected its 1950s radicalism
Ian Jack provides an interesting perspective, attacking his own profession for the haughty disdain with which they've (and he includes examples of his own behaviour) held the advertising section that financially underpins the editorial enterprise. He gives as an example of how the Observer suffered by alienating advertisers: being seen as too radical in the 1950s (Jack argues) led to the Sunday Times overtaking it in circulation and advertising. The Observer had strongly condemned the 1956 British invasion of the Suez (cheered on by Israel), leading to condemnation in parliament and other media. You may see a strong parallel here with Piers Morgan's editorship of the Mirror, brought to an end over his strongly anti-Iraq War line.

“Patriotic” British companies wanted nothing to do with such an apparently treasonous paper; English Electric was still refusing to advertise in it 10 years later. Also, as Astor later wrote, “the loss of Jewish advertisers was very marked”. The paper had always been supportive of Israel, and according to Astor, had a higher proportion of Jewish readers than most newspapers; now the Observer’s implicit criticism of Israel for its part in the operation “caused the strongest possible agitation among Israel’s supporters”....In commercial terms, morality didn’t serve the Observer well. Its anti-apartheid stance sent South African advertisers elsewhere, and only in 1958 did it lift a ban on alcohol (with a decorous advert for dry sherry) after research showed that strong drink provided the Sunday Times with an extra 29 columns of advertising, enough to give it a four-page advantage over its rival. Today the Sunday Times outsells the Observer four-to-one. You can argue the merits of their journalism – which has the livelier, the better written, the less vulgar, the more politically appealing – but the roots of their relative success and failure lie in decisions made by newspaper advertisers 60 years ago. The reach is very long.

('Reporters hold their noses about advertising in newspapers. But history shows the risk that purists take', Guardian, 20.2.15)

Jenkins
Simon Jenkins often seems to be a right-winger placed in the Guardian to provoke that all-important reader/user interaction, and I note below a counter to his arguments in his column on the Tele. He makes a variety of useful, insightful points here:

HSBC had stopped advertising in the Telegraph in 2012 over a similar story to the Guardian’s, about tax evasion in Jersey, and the management was frantic to see revenues restored. In other words, HSBC was not just illegal and unethical but also a bully. The Guardian also recently had its HSBC ads “paused”, but declined to yield. That HSBC was chaired by an Anglican priest who took the government shilling as an ennobled minister merely illustrates the many-splendoured architecture of the British establishment.An American newspaper is said to have carried the ironic motto “As independent as resources permit”. Any student of the press knows what this means. A business page protocol ordains gentle treatment of proprietorial interests. Fashion pages would not exist without kickbacks, or travel pages without “contra” deals on hospitality and mentions. I remember perfume firms threatening to withdraw ads after stories on animal cruelty.

So, there is a certain degree of shamelessness in other papers clamouring to attack the Tele, a fair point.

He notes a famous, notorious even, example of the Murdoch press being muzzled to aid his wider empire's ambitions - he doesn't mention how Harper Collins pulped the hardback copies of Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten's memoirs, for which he'd been paid a 7-figure advance; or how the BBC was kicked off Star, News Corp's Asian TV network, both seen as being to protect Murdoch's prospects of doing business in China. He does tackle this though - and get in a dig at his own sainted paper too:

Rupert Murdoch was robust in backing investigative reporting at Times Newspapers, especially on the Sunday Times. He did so to a fault in the case of the phone-hacking News of the World. But his Times undoubtedly restrained its China coverage when he was struggling for a media deal with Beijing.Even the Guardian cannot be regarded as immune from such pressures. In March 2007 Labour’s short-lived Pathfinder scheme, involving dire housing demolitions in the north, was inexplicably eulogised in a Guardian supplement in return for an undisclosed payment from the government. Today its “branded content partner zone” is occupied by Unilever, “whose sources of revenue allow us to explore, in more depth than editorial budgets would otherwise allow, topics that we hope are of interest”. Hence this week’s frothy promotion, under the Guardian masthead, of a “green sex sustainable” condom – though it’s also fair to point out that the Guardian columnist George Monbiot launched a withering attack on the partnership in these pages.

If you read papers you advertorial

Prof. Brian Cathcart rubbishes Jenkins... Prof. Horder cites Bribery Act
Cathcart has written some key books on the press; he wasn't impressed with Simon Jenkins' arguments, and wrote a letter to the Guardian to say so...

Newspapers are a medium of information and if the information is false the reader is duped. Jenkins suggests that plurality protects us, yet with a few exceptions our national press operates as a cartel, papers covering up each others’ faults. The result is that uncorrected lies pile up in our public space, polluting debate and warping policymaking.
Two other points. As Oborne reminds us, newspapers have “a democratic duty to tell readers the truth”, and, as Leveson reminds us, they have an obligation not to “wreak havoc in the lives of innocent people”. These are responsibilities. Sadly, the corporate press refuses to take responsibility for anything.
Professor Brian CathcartKingston University London

On the same letters page, a (law) Prof. Holder argues that the Tele's actions, if true, might constitute a crime under the 2010 Bribery Act, a useful reminder + example: wider law fills in a lot of the gaps for the seemingly deregulated press.

Key Themes

[written in 2012]

The idea of the paragraphs below is that these could go straight into exam essays; there's no extraneous material.

The themes I cover are:

• AUDIENCE THEORY
• FORMS OF REGULATION: STATUTORY [OFCOM], CO-REGULATION [BBC/OFCOM], SELF-REGULATION [BBC/PCC]; STATUTORY-BACKED SELF-REGULATION?
• COMPARED TO OFCOM, IS THE PCC ACTUALLY A REGULATOR?
• GLOBALISATION, DIGITISATION: NEW/SOCIAL MEDIA + WEB 2.0 
  
• FREEDMAN 2012 [longer post] + HEGEMONY OF FREE MARKET IDEOLOGY
   

AUDIENCE THEORY

There is a highly confused, inconsistent and generally irrational approach taken to the notion of media effects. Much of the commentary over media controversies reflects outmoded ideas and thinking developed by sociologists as far back as the 1920s and 1930. The often German Jews of the Frankfurt and Chicago Schools partly framed their ideas from personal experience of Nazi propaganda, developing concepts such as the hypodermic syringe model (the idea that the values contained within a media text could easily influence the thinking of an audience). From the outcry over Brass Eye to the more recent fuss over Rhianna/Christina Aguilera’s flimsy costumes and sexual dance moves, there is little effort to seriously investigate how children actually respond to material deemed inappropriate. As Maire Messenger-Davies, and David Buckingham, have explored in their academic work, we seriously underestimate the sophistication of children’s responses. There is a curious link between the press and the broadcast media on this issue: the press, so viciously opposed to regulation for itself, continually seeks tighter restrictions on TV/radio content –especially BBC/C4 content! As Stanley Cohen, Martin Barker and others have shown, the press continually generate moral panics by hysterically over-reacting to and exaggerating the harmfulness of singular events. Nowhere in most press reportage (at least amongst the red-tops, tabloid and mid-market alike), is there any thought given to the long development of advancements in thinking over audiences, and the growing appreciation of the ‘active’ state of the audience. The Daily Mail exemplifies this, its crude efforts at whipping up moral panics over today’s youth, causes of cancer (in one month, as BBC comedian Russell Howard documented in the YouTube hit “The Cancer Song”, they claimed being male, female, black, white and so on gave you increased chances of getting cancer!) reflecting a simplistic view of media effects that’s little-changed from the very earliest attempts at theorising audience effects.

Its worth noting, however, that Marxist media critics are also guilty of over-simplifying the issue of audience effects. Curran & Seaton focus on political and economic analysis to construct their view of the media in a way Chomsky would recognise, arguing that it works not for ‘the people’ and the public interest in a democracy, but for the hegemonic elite and their narrow interests, seeking to convince the many to support ideas that favour the few. They don’t directly tackle the issue of how diverse audiences are, or the scope for polysemy, or negotiated/oppositional readings that Stuart Hall and other semioticians have shown an individual audience member might construct, depending on their individual background and knowledge.

See this post for the Russell Howard vid and more.

FORMS OF REGULATION: STATUTORY [OFCOM], CO-REGULATION [BBC/OFCOM], SELF-REGULATION [BBC/PCC]; STATUTORY-BACKED SELF-REGULATION?
Republic of Ireland has press self-regulation, but unlike the PCC (Desmond withdrew without sanction [punishment]) its not a voluntary regulator, its set up by statute and has legal powers to enforce its sanctions. The government does not run or appoint the Irish regulator, the Irish press does, but government power, in contrast to the wagging finger of the UK's PCC, backs up its rulings. I note this because Labour leader Ed Miliband stated to Leveson this week (June 2012) thats what he wants to see here. This is described as statutory-backed self-regulation; we currently have voluntary self-regulation.
BBC self-regulates its strategic decision-making (which channels to run, how to spend the budget etc) although, unlike the press, it is 'statutory-backed', but OfCom regulates BBC content in terms of taste, accuracy and decency: UK TV therefore is co-regulated by a self-regulator and a statutory regulator.

It seems highly likely that the future points to press self-regulation continuing: Leveson made it clear when Tony Blair appeared last week that he does not wish to scrap self-regulation. However, the idea floated by Roy Greenslade and many others, and backed this week by Labour leader Ed Miliband when he appeared before Leveson, of copying the Irish model of statutory-backed self-regulation looks likely to be adopted. The PCC's cynical decision to announce its own abolition, handily pre-empting Leveson's recommendations, will help ensure that the press can successfully argue to be allowed to continue drinking in the last chance saloon (the new PCC replacement won't have had time to be tried out the argument will go). The example of Richard Desmond, withdrawing from the PCC without any consequence, in future is likely to see a punishment of VAT being applied to such papers, effectively a huge fine.

COMPARED TO OFCOM, IS THE PCC ACTUALLY A REGULATOR?
Only in a very limited sense: its very name reveals that it deals only with complaints. Whereas OfCom proactively engages in in-depth research into various strategic areas, for example its reviews of public service broadcasting, the PCC is reactive, dealing only with complaints. Given the greatest press scandal of modern times, Hackgate, the PCC's response was worse than poor: it actually attacked The Guardian, who broke the story, for damaging the reputation of the press, and its 'investigation' into News International's operations went no further than asking a few senior figures if they knew of hacking. When told, 'no, it was just the one "rogue reporter"' (royal correspondent Clive Goodman, jailed for arranging the hacking of royals' phones), the PCC accepted the line and reported that there was no further issue. When Lord Hunt announced the PCC's plan to abolish itself in March 2012, their failure over Hackgate was seen as a key factor (though many also feel this is a ploy to pre-empt Leveson and safeguard self-regulation). At best then the PCC is only a partial regulator, and even its handling of complaints has been very poor - as the 2010 Culture Select Committee noted in their highly critical report, the PCC has the power to investigate third party complaints ("in exceptional circumstances") written into its Editors' Code but routinely refuses to do so [the schoolgirl skirt-slut eg is good eg; blogger complained + rebuffed by PCC as third party; story + pics remain on Mail website].

What about OfCom then? Currently its running a formal investigation into Rupert Murdoch. If they decide he does not fit their "fit and proper person" test (a legal test as they are a statutory regulator remember), he will be forced to sell or greatly reduce his shareholding in BSkyB - otherwise they would lose their license to operate in the UK. Given that two ex-Prime Ministers, Gordon Brown and John Major, accused Murdoch of lying in his evidence (under oath) to Leveson and to the Culture Select Committee (a criminal act) just this week, that seems increasingly likely. The press licensing system was abolished in 1694. Other than Murdoch there have been many recent examples of criminal press proprietors [owners]: Robert Maxwell (Mirror) and Tiny Rowland (Observer) in the 1980s and Conrad Black (Telegraph), just recently released from a Canadian jail. It says a lot about the corrupt relationship between press and politicians that Black was made Lord Black before his criminal conviction.

Lets take another aspect of regulation: taste, accuracy and decency. OfCom regulates both commercial TV and the BBC on this; in theory at least, the PCC regulates the press over this. The contrast is almost laughable however. OfCom issues fines for breaches of the watershed rules (eg swearing by Chris Moyles on the BBC), and issued a warning after all the complaints over Rhianna and Christina Aguilera's scantily clad [wearing v little], sexualised performances at the 2011 X Factor final, reminding broadcasters of their legal requirement to protect children from explicit material before the 9pm watershed. The BBC announced in 2009, following the 'Sachsgate' scandal, its intention to tighten up and effectively extend the watershed with bleeped swearing through to 10pm.

Its worth asking if both OfCom and the BBC (who in 2004 reacted angrily to OfCom proposals to tighten up the watershed) were responding to political pressure (the Tory Party is hostile towards both organisations)? In the 1980s the IBA and the BBC stood up to intense pressure from Mrs Thatcher to ban documentaries on Northern Ireland and 'The Troubles' (Real Lives and Death on the Rocks). The entire broadcast industry fought against the 1989 Broadcasting Act which banned the voices of Irish Republican spokesmen (notably satirised in Chris Morris' The Day Today), which was quickly repealed [the ban was lifted] when John Major became PM. Thames TV paid a heavy price though: having produced Death on the Rock, they were the only major ITV company to lose their license under the new system brought in by the 1990 Broadcasting Act. Indeed, the IBA was arguably scrapped for doing too good a job as an independent media regulator, representing the public interest and not that of the media industry or of politicians - it was scrapped and replaced by the ITC through this same Act.

Politicians learned from the example of David Mellor, the Heritage Secretary now remembered for toe-sucking his Spanish mistress wearing only a Chelsea football top after he dared to warn the press it was "drinking in the last chance saloon", not to mess with the press (Tom Watson, the Labour MP who alone kept pushing the Hackgate story in Parliament, was directly threatened by News International). It seems the TV industry and its regulators have also learned not to mess with powerful politicians. When the BBC dared to (correctly) question the 'dodgy dossier' used to justify the UK's war on Iraq a furious Labour government saw to it that both the senior BBC executives resigned (Dr Kelly's 'suicide' followed); the pro-monarchy coverage of the Jubilee by the BBC in June 2012 suggests it has lost much of its independence. As Chomsky might argue, the 'flak' (one of the five filters in his propaganda model) it received ensured it reduced its broadcasting of counter-hegemonic material. The BBC has always been vulnerable to political pressure, with the government setting the license fee and thus directly controlling its budget, and they weren't the only media organisation to backtrack from criticism of Labour's war on Iraq (advertiser pressure ensured Piers Morgan was sacked as Mirror editor over a doctored photo; he had led an anti-war campaign through the paper, which was immediately abandoned once he was sacked). Even OfCom have shown why they are accurately labelled a quango - quasi-autonomous. Even before the 2010 election, they began reducing their activities and cutting their budget in response to Tory criticisms.

As I'll discuss in more detail later, such moves are highly questionable given the digitisation of TV and radio; Playboy's UK managing director (albeit having just been fined 'fined £110,000 by Ofcom for airing "adult sex" chat advertisements that featured sexually provocative footage') is one to have argued, in December 2011 [giving such dates helps show your examples are up to date] that UK-based companies were losing out to unregulated foreign web operators and that Tivo and other 'time-shifting' recording devices rendered the watershed an obsolete concept ("the watershed is a nonsense" were his precise words). Given that pornographer Richard Desmond runs two national newspapers and C5, we can't simply dismiss his argument because of his background.

The Daily Mail, typically, sought to stir up a moral panic (Stanley Cohen's concept of distorted media coverage exaggerating the frequency and threat of antisocial actions, later explored in greater detail by John Springhall) over the issue ... but its own coverage of the X Factor final included photos more explicit than those actually broadcast! The PCC, of course, was silent on this, but blogs such as TabloidWatch and even other newspapers (Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker made the point that the Mail's website lacks any age restrictions but is filled with explicit imagery) picked up on this. This is not an isolated example [take your pick from these egs], from use of upskirt photos of the 15 year-old Charlotte Church and the "isn't she chest swell" story about her the Star ran alongside its hyperbolic [OTT, exaggerated] condemnation of C4 and the regulator ITC for allowing Brass Eye's "Paedogeddon Special" to be broadcast, through to the "schoolgirl told 'you look like a slut in that short skirt'" article the Mail ran (with helpful pictures of the 13 year-old's thighs) in 2009, clear breaches of Articles 6 and 7 of the Editors' Code are commonplace but ignored by the PCC. A blogger complained about that last story, and was told by the PCC that as he was a third party his complaint would not be investigated.

The hypocrisy goes further: while the press attacks any proposal for tighter press regulation as anti-democratic, the red-tops (tabloid and mid-markets) incessantly [frequently] call for tighter regulation of broadcast media. The Mail condemned OfCom as toothless [see here for egs of fines issued by OfCom] over its handling of the X Factor final 'scandal' of Rhianna/Aguilera's costume, and loses no opportunity to attack the BBC, even if that requires a blatant lie to do so (eg the 2011 'story' about the BBC ditching the BC/AD descriptors which was simply untrue). As the Guardian's media commentator Steve Hewlett argued, this is typical of the Mail's contradictory approach to media regulation: attacking TV regulation as too soft, using explicit images to illustrate articles on TV it claims to be angry about - images which, if the PCC was ran like OfCom, it would not be allowed to run ... but then press regulation is an attack on democratic freedom! The Mail manages to agree with the MumsNet report (discussed below) calling for lads mags to be covered with paper bags whilst somehow ignoring its own explicit imagery, let alone that of the tabloids with their daily page three, subject to no age restriction whatsoever.

There is a further social issue here, and a further question mark over how effective media regulators are. Somewhat absurdly, in 2010 the Prime Minister commissioned a conservative, pro-censorship pressure group, MumsNet, to report on concerns over sexualisation of children through media content. Unsurprisingly, it concluded that there needed to be tighter censorship, not least stronger application of the watershed. PM Cameron welcomed the report and said he would implement its recommendations. Having stated its intention to scrap OfCom (rather suspiciously, just days after James Murdoch's 2009 Edinburgh speech, using similar words, called for the same thing) before the 2010 election, its not surprising that the Tory Party would seek to use like-minded right-wing organisations to 'investigate' the media rather than OfCom. OfCom have independently investigated a range of media issues since their creation through the 2003 Communications Act, often drawing upon academic experts (such as Maire Messenger-Davies and David Buckingham for research into children's use of the media). As Freedman concludes in his 2012 book, The Politics of Media Policy, media policy (both here and the US; he examines both) is not governed by rational thought and research but rather by political calculations. The daily revelations in Leveson reinforce Freedman's conclusions.

Indeed, we should by now have a new Communications Green Paper, but the scandal surrounding Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, and PM Cameron's links to Murdoch through Rebeccah Brooks, his former media advisor Andy Coulson and direct meetings with the Murdochs, has ensured that plans to further deregulate UK media (more than likely benefitting Murdoch yet again in the process, just as previous Labour bills also did; the 2003 Communications Act was dubbed by many as the Murdoch Act as it loosened cross-media ownership rules ... ironically, it was Richard Desmond who benefitted most from this, adding C5 to his Northern and Shell empire of porn plus the Star and Express).

We could also ask if advertisers are not in fact the de facto press regulators. When the News of the World was closed by Murdoch, it may have been a strategic move but it was the series of announcements by advertisers that they would boycott the paper that caused its closure. Its noticeable again that the public did not turn to the PCC to raise their concerns or disgust about the paper; it was campaigns on Facebook, and trending on Twitter that pressurised major advertisers to withdraw. Newspapers cannot survive without advertising revenue, as the cover price (already reduced by distribution costs and retailers' margin) does not come close to covering the production cost, never mind offer a profit margin. Its advertising that makes newspapers profitable or not. When the 1960s Times put on a large new C2DE readership it actually lost a lot of money: advertisers targeting ABC1s refused to pay any more for these unwanted readers, so the paper became ever more right-wing to try to lose these new readers. Curran and Seaton in their classic study of UK press and broadcasting, Power Without Responsiblity, argue that the conventional history of the press is distorted. The 1985 Peacock Report into UK TV directly cited [quoted] the creation of press freedom through the 1851 creation of a free market as a model to follow (stamp duty was scrapped in 1851, ending formal government oversight of the press and leaving it to the 'free market'). Curran and Seaton detail the parliamentary debates of the time which show the clear intention of using a supposed free market to limit the working-class readership of papers and undermine the prospects of left-wing papers, then enjoying an equal market share with more right-wing papers. Just as Chomsky also argued (advertisers are one of his five filters in the propaganda model), the patronage of advertisers would decide which papers would thrive and which would fail. As advertisers represent businesses generally in favour of low wages, low taxation, weak unions etc, they're less likely to favour left-wing papers. Even the third Royal Commission on the Press (1977), in contrast to its 1949 and 1962 predecessors, concluded that the right-wing focus of our press needs to be addressed.

GLOBALISATION, DIGITISATION: NEW/SOCIAL MEDIA + WEB 2.0
As UK audiences increasingly use the likes of Pirate Bay and BitTorrent to (often illegally) access TV and film content online, irrespective of age ratings, and global social media forums such as Twitter are perceived to operate beyond our laws (eg the 75,000 Twitter users who broke a superinjunction by tweeting the names of Ryan Giggs and Imogen Jones in January 2011), is media regulation relevant or even feasible in 2012? Newspapers are in steep decline with circulation falling fast as the web increasingly becomes the default news source, including many non-UK sources freely available online. As the web 2.0 theorists (not least O'Reilly, 2004) argue, the line between audience and producer is collapsing in our digitised, new media age; it could be argued that the evidence emerging through Leveson of the too-close links between politicians and press marks the end of an era. In the future will the bias of a tabloid matter as much as opinions trending on Twitter?

Twitter, and its users, are arguably already a more effective informal regulator than the PCC. When Lord Prescott (former Labour deputy PM) read quotes in the Sunday Times he knew he hadn't said, he didn't ring the paper or the PCC; he tweeted. Within two hours he'd received an apology and the article was removed from the Times website. Prescott argues that the traditional media have grown so large and powerful they no longer the democratic 'fourth estate' or public sphere function; they have actually become part of what we need protection against. He says that Twitter reaching 10m UK accounts makes it more likely that accurate information will be available to UK citizens. (It seems TV audiences are also as likely to take to Twitter as to contact the formal regulators: while the BBC got 3,000 complaints over its Jubilee coverage, there were more tweets about presenter Fearne Cotton alone - her response to "being bullied" became just as big a story, a good example of how far tabloidisation has gone [BBC pro-royal bias should have been the story, but instead the blonde celebrity was more widely covered]).

Having seen off the challenge from AtVOD, the online-TV regulator created by EU law, to also regulate the multimedia content on newspapers' websites, and given that it runs a detailed website, the PCC could be seen as responsive to the challenges of the new media age. However, it actually details only a small minority of the complaints received, and manages to ignore the daily distortions of the press, whether thats the Express telling its readers that the EU wants to merge France and the UK (not an April Fool's story!) or the Mail, as satirised by Russell Howard in "The Cancer Song" (a much-viewed YouTube clip), telling its readers that being male, female, black, white (... and many more factors over a single month in 2011) increased your chances of getting cancer. The PCC ignores these distortions and obviously made-up stories, and also turns a blind eye to the ideological bias of the press. You could argue then that its actually blogs such as MailWatch, TabloidWatch, The Murdoch Empire and his Nest of Vipers and more that actually effectively scrutinise and expose the shortcomings of our press.

[this point already covered above] There's a challenge for OfCom and the BBC here too. After OfCom's December 2011 warning to all UK broadcasters over breaches of the watershed, the BBC responded by proposing to effectively extend the watershed, stating that there shouldn't be a sharp, sudden swift to adult fare; more adult fare should be kept for 10pm or even later.

FREEDMAN 2012 [longer post] + HEGEMONY OF FREE MARKET IDEOLOGY:

Freedman 2012 compares US + UK media regulation and finds that both are dominated by neo-liberal, free market thinking BUT both nonetheless share significant gov intervention over content (FCC/OfCom’s decency rules) and markets (sets limits on market share). So, free market/laissez faire approach dominates here + US but each follow varieties of neo-liberalism says Freedman: ‘Neo-conservatism and third way politics could be said, in this context, to be two different variations of neoliberalism.’ (p.223)

He argues media policy is made according to political needs, and the might of media corporate lobbying:  ‘It is hard to sustain an argument that the development of media policy is a bounded, rational process that is open to multiple voices representing disparate interests. Instead, media policy appears to be a rather slippery process that favours those who share an ideological disposition towards free markets and free enterprise, rather than a commitment to public service and a conception of communicative activity in which profits and economic value are not the decisive values.’ (p.221)