Resources and analysis on the topic of media regulation, particularly for the A2 Media exam, Section B. Major case studies include the film industry, music video and the press, with major players such as Murdoch, OfCom and the government considered. If using materials from this blog, please credit the source - Dave Burrowes, Media Studies @ St George's School
Interesting to see if anything happens over this. A 'confession' of criminal activity is now in the public domain, though The Times' last statement on this illegal 'blagging' of Brown's financial details, from 2011, denies culpability.
Leveson2 might have unpicked and exposed systematic, anti-democratic abuse of power like this, but has been blocked by a government supported by Murdoch's papers.
The parties are different, but the interference in the democratic process has parallels to the Sun's destruction of Culture (then 'Heritage') Secretary David Mellor's career by publishing a classic 'sex scandal' that forced his resignation and killed his career.
Mellor's' crime'? He infamously pronounced the press was "drinking in the last chance saloon" - but after his sacking his Tory government refused to engage with Lord Calcutt's review (recommending statutory regulation). A familiar story.
Guardian: Gordon Brown calls for police inquiry into Sunday Times story
This is a topic I've frequently blogged on - use the tag cloud to find previous posts.
There are two ways to view the issue of privacy as it applies to media law and regulation:
There should be tougher, tighter restrictions on the media's ability to invade our privacy, as tabloid newspapers in particular persist in doing so on flimsy grounds
We urgently need to liberalise privacy law in favour of the media, as it is becoming increasingly difficult for UK media to publish information about the rich and powerful (those with access to expensive lawyers)
As ever, there are overlapping issues with digitisation:
UK-only privacy regulation/law is made absurd by the easy access to global online resources
As most of us permit websites and apps to track huge amounts of personal information about us, we increasingly undermine the argument that we have a right to privacy
There are cases from the press, TV and film that we can consider, but there is a further point we swiftly encounter, for example through the Max Mosley case:
Media regulation of single industries makes no sense, and is ineffective, when there is so much cross-media ownership
There's been a lot written in the last 24 hours about ex-PM Blair and his ties to the Murdoch press, following his appearance at the Leveson Inquiry.
The closeness of PMs to the press owners (press barons still?) has been an issue for at least a century (see Toynbee article below), but when PM Thatcher knighted/ennobled several right-wing proprietors and editors, it seemed the walls between the fourth estate and those it is meant to hold to account could not be brought any lower. We're seeing this come out every day in Leveson: our PM is close pals with various key Murdoch employees; the Culture Secretary and his special advisor swapping 100s of emails and text messages with News Corp's PR chief. Gordon Brown rather desparately brought together a motley crew:
The media mogul also recalled a time of better relations with the
Browns, when Sarah Brown, the then prime minister's wife, hosted a
"slumber party" attended by Brooks, Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, and his
daughter Elisabeth. Smiling at the recollection of the "pyjama party",
Murdoch sought to downplay the intimacy of the event, saying it was
"just a bunch of women, complaining about their husbands probably".
(This was from Murdoch's 2011 evidence to Leveson) None of them, arguably, went quite as far as Blair, who become godfather to Rupert Murdoch's child with his new wife.
This extraordinary level of closeness fuels the wide belief that our most senior politicians have made deals with Murdoch to gain his papers' support:
At the end of last year Lord
Mandelson said the Sun was supporting the Conservative party because News International had agreed a "contract" with David Cameron.
The Tories responded by saying that, if there was a contract, Mandelson
should explain what contract existed when the Sun supported Labour in
1997, 2001 and 2005.
Well, now we know what that contract was. Price explains in his book:
Blair
and [Alastair] Campbell took to heart the advice of the Australian
prime minister, Paul Keating, on how to deal with Murdoch: "He's a big
bad bastard, and the only way you can deal with him is to make sure he
thinks you can be a big bad bastard too. You can do deals with him,
without ever saying a deal is done. But the only thing he cares about is
his business and the only language he respects is strength."
Blair
and his team believed they had achieved exactly that. A deal had been
done, although with nothing in writing. If Murdoch were left to pursue
his business interests in peace he would give Labour a fair wind.
In the footnotes Price, who worked at No 10 as Campbell's deputy, attributes that final sentence to "private information".
Of
course, this makes Mandelson's claim (which the Tories deny) about a
"deal" of some kind between Cameron and Murdoch all the more plausible.
But we'll probably have to wait until we get the first Price-type book
from a Tory insider until we learn any more detail.
Where Powers Lies: Prime Ministers v the Media
covers all the premiers from David Lloyd George to Gordon Brown and it
shows that, in some respects, nothing much has changed since 1916. If
you don't believe me, try the prime ministers v the media quiz, which shows that journalist and politicians have been saying the same things about each other for almost 100 years.
Here's an excerpt from a review of that book; this backs up what Toynbee says below about the long, long history of press owners bullying seemingly all-powerful politicians. (If you read further in the article, there's an interesting point on how, in dumbing down political communication to the tabloid level of enquiring after Susan Boyle's health (Brown) or writing in a tabloid to call for the release of a fictional soap character (Blair), politicians have fuelled the decline in respect for politcians and political discourse).
Winston Churchill threatened to close down the Daily Mirror.
An utterly paranoid Harold Wilson punched a reporter in the stomach.
Stanley Baldwin denounced the press barons as harlots. John Major drove
himself demented by reading the first editions of the papers before he
went to bed and once called the editor of the Sun to Number 10 in order to whinge about a story alleging that he was using hair dye. Tony Blair was eulogised by most of the media when he arrived in Downing Street and departed denouncing it as "a feral beast". Gordon Brown is a journalist who now seems to hate most members of his former profession.
The relationship between prime ministers and the media is a complex
and combustible mix in which mutual fascination exists alongside
reciprocated fear and loathing. It was ever thus. Bill Deedes,
information minister under Harold Macmillan and later editor of the Daily Telegraph,
observed: "There is a great invisible struggle going on as to who
really has the most power – the government or the newspapers."
They included BSkyB's
aborted attempt to buy Manchester United, the establishment of media
regulator Ofcom, successive increases in the cost of the licence fee and
expansion of the BBC's channels and online offering.
...........................................
If we move on now to Polly Toynbee (famous left-wing Guardian columnist), she wrote an article which explicitly tackles the impact of the lack of political/ideological diverisity in our mainly right-wing press; are Labour leaders/PMs under greater pressure to strike deals with media magnates? There's a lot of very useful detail in the following excerpt from the full article (28.5.12):
The warped press is the single greatest obstacle to Labour gaining
power. Once having gingerly stepped inside, the party never feels secure
and fears its own shadow. Spin was in fact self-defence, using what
Blair called Labour's first professional media operation. Never forget
what Labour is up against: 80% of newspaper readership for a hundred
years has belonged not just to conservatives, but mainly to extreme
maverick press barons, using their power to control politics.
The next paragraph takes us back to the early 1940s, still in the era of the press barons such as Beaverbrook + Northcliffe; it then moves on to recent years (Conrad Black owned the Tele, now its the billionaire Barclay brothers [Gdn articles]):
Churchill
had to take Beaverbrook into his wartime cabinet to keep him quiet.
Northcliffe, asked for his formula, said he gave his Mail readers "a
daily hate" – and Blair was dead right to decide nothing could be done
about the Mail's poisonous hostility. Conrad Black, after years of
hectoring Labour with his off-the-scale neocon views in the Telegraph,
is only just out of jail.
The Barclay brothers are scarcely more reasonable, tax-avoiding in
their feudal fiefdom of Sark, while Red Hot TV owner Richard Desmond's
Express is beyond parody.Now Murdoch and his empire are at last in the
dock for the vile activities of his gutter press, as scrutiny turns to
his cat-and-mouse intimidation and manipulation of politicians.
There's the impact of the 1992 election campaign, widely seen as being won by the Tories because of hysterical press opposition to Labour, but also the way in which the more neutral TV news covers press stories, giving their biased agenda further publicity and influence (the Italy example: see my links list; imagine Murdoch owned even more of the press/TV AND was Prime Minister...):
Historians
underestimate the might of the media forces against Labour: apart from
Berlusconi's Italy, Europe's media is more balanced. Blair rightly says
our broadcasters' agendas are dragged along by the frenzy of sound from
the press. He talked of how deeply he and his entourage were seared by
the treatment of Neil Kinnock in 1992, with that "It's the Sun wot won it" gloat. "I was absolutely determined that we should not be subject to the same onslaught."
John
Major marked his downfall from the day Murdoch turned against him – the
day Murdoch gave Blair the thumbs up. What did it take? Blair was open:
whatever it took to placate, charm and persuade him to give Labour a
fair hearing. Did that include shaping policies to please Murdoch? No,
he absolutely denied it. No, he never gave Murdoch what he wanted
commercially either: not ITV, not sport's crown jewels or Manchester
United – nor did Labour cut back the BBC. And Murdoch detested the
strengthening of Ofcom.
That last point on OfCom is an important one: the 2003 Communications Act is widely seen as a stitch-up that rather suspiciously enabled Murdoch to buy C5 (he didn't, beaten to it by Desmond) BUT, even though OfCom was explicitly set up to deregulate, it still held much more power than Murdoch wanted - he'd surely love a TV regulator as weak as the PCC? Blair also makes the point we've talked about many times: any party that tried to regulate the press would face intense opposition from the press, and would struggle to win an election.
But once in power, why didn't Blair stand
up to Murdoch? "Frankly, I decided as a political leader that I was
going to manage that and not confront it." Since Margaret Thatcher set
aside media ownership laws to let Murdoch acquire 40% of readership plus
Sky, why didn't he break up overmighty empires? Impossible, Blair said,
for any government: he left his "feral beasts" attack
to his last days. Taking on the overmighty press would have meant an
"absolute major confrontation" lasting years, while the public wanted
action on health, schools and crime. "That's the political judgment you
have to make."
Tony Blair has accused Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers
of pursuing a "personal vendetta" against his wife, revealing that
their lawyers had sent more than 30 letters of complaint about the
paper's coverage over a five-year period between 2006 and 2011.
Blair, who once likened the media to a "feral beast", told the Leveson inquiry
that newspapers were guilty of an "abuse of power" by vigorously
pursuing people it did not like or disagreed with "full on, full
frontal, day in, day out".
"I think a certain amount of comment is
perfectly legitimate," said Blair. "Some of the papers, in particular
the Mail group, took it too far and it turned into a personal vendetta.
"You're
always going to feel sensitive about your own family but I thought and
do think that the attacks on her and my children were just unnecessary
and wrong.
"The fact is when you fall out with the controlling
element of the Daily Mail that is when you are going to be subject to a
huge and sustained attack."
Blair said he had asked his office to
analyse 50 Daily Mail stories about him after the 2005 general election,
and 50 stories prior to his departure from Downing Street. He said all
100 were negative.
You can read how the wider press covered his performance here.
I'm not often taken by surprise by media matters, but this one does come as a shock...
24 hours after the PCC announced its intention to dissolve itself, form an interim body (what a nonsense!), and form a new press self-regulator in time to try and pre-empt Leveson's report and recommendations, OfCom drops its own bombshell. According to R5 news this morning, it is set to formally investigate whether Murdoch meets the 'fit and proper person' test to head a broadcast media organisation.
While I think this is a laudable move (that perhaps should have happened some time ago), the surprise is that it comes now. The Tories openly spoke about scrapping OfCom and 'repatriating' (taking back) the powers of the independent regulator into the DCMS (government) during the election campaign, leading to OfCom - disgracefully I felt - abandoning the pro-active stance it had been developing and shrinking itself in advance of such Tory action.
So, two years into the Tory-led coalition government (the Culture [DCMS] Secretary is a Tory, Jeremy Hunt), this is effectively a fight-back by our 'independent' regulator (the extent to which they'd bowed to government pressure, and changes made by Hunt in office, have made the extent of the independence rather more questionable than before - though part of the Tories' hostility was that they felt OfCom chairman Ed Richards was a Labour place-man). Lets be clear though: the Murdoch issue is not confined to one party. Tony Blair went to extraordinary lengths to win Murdoch/News International's support for Labour; in 1996 he flew to Australia to address a News Corp shareholders conference and hold private talks with Murdoch, who shortly after had his UK papers announce their support for Labour (who then trounced the Tory government in the 1997 election). Labour desperation to retain that support seemed to influence their media policy, as it had the Tory Thatcher government before them, with new media laws seemingly designed specifically to advantage Murdoch's media empire. Even after Murdoch reverted to Tory-supporting in Sept 2009, Gordon Brown's Labour tried desperately to win back that support, leading them to back off ensuring a proper investigation was held into phone hacking (Brown himself was not only hacked but allegedly blackmailed by The S*n).
Video: Sun abandons Labour for Conservatives [PressTV news report]
That doesn't mean there isn't a left/right issue though: 'New Labour' was widely seen as a basically right-wing party, and Blair the real heir to Thatcher - the party Murdoch's papers supported was no longer a left-wing party, having concluded that with such a hostile right-wing press in the UK, there was no hope of left-wing policies getting them elected.
Talk to anyone in the insular,
self-regarding, oh-so-liberal London media world about Ofcom chief
executive Ed Richards and they will say he’s brainy, self-assured and
carries a vast amount of information around in his head. ...
But
more than anything, Ed Richards is a leading member of the New Labour
political establishment, an interconnected, back-scratching mafia that,
while bankrupting Britain, made its own members seriously rich.
For
Richards has done extremely well for himself — the total amount of his
salary and pension benefits since he took the helm of Ofcom in 2006 is
heading towards the £2 million mark. [...]
In a statement in the House of Commons Mr Hunt said he was minded to wave
through the proposed deal after News Corp undertook to spin off Sky News
into a new independent company.
Labour's Dennis Skinner called the decision a "disastrous day for
democracy", while Green Party leader Caroline Lucas said Mr Murdoch had
an "unhealthy influence" over Britain's media landscape. [...]
There were signs of the fightback from OfCom in January 2012: 'Ofcom chief: new regulatory regime could cover all media: Arguing for common standards across TV, web video and digital publishing is not call for 'super regulator', says Ed Richards' - Media Guardian report (and the proposal surely would merit the descriptor super regulator'?!) Wiki Indie reports on the story I heard on R5: 'Ofcom looks at stripping Murdoch of BSkyB: Mogul under scrutiny in 'fit and proper' test' (9th March 2012) Details 'Project Apple', under which OfCom is investigating whether Murdoch has failed the 'fit and proper persons' criteria required under the 1990 and 1996 Broadcasting Acts for anyone holding a broadcast license. 'Dancing around the inevitable: The Oxford Media Convention by David Elstein, 27 January 2012 Regulatory reform of Britain's media is coming: the question
is how, and when. This year's annual Oxford event brought the big
players together to wrangle over the future of the press.'
Interesting + useful site, not just the article; from the SpinWatch blog: 'Ofcom and BSkyB bid: We should have looked at News Corporation’s political influence' [1st Feb 2012]
Ed Richards, Ofcom’s chief executive, told Lord Justice Leveson that if given another chance to look again at News Corporation’s aborted bid for total control of BSkyB it would have placed more emphasis on the “risk to the democratic process.”
...
on reflection,
Ofcom now felt the proposed BSkyB takeover did raise the need for a
wider review of plurality because the conventional analysis of the
concentration of media ownership was based on the proportion of readers
and viewers and that was deficient because it did not measure the
influence on the political process which a company might exercise.
Lord
Justice Leveson said Ofcom’s admission that its regulatory regime “did
not do the job properly” with regard to the democratic process was
highly significant to the work of his inquiry. The judge is taking
evidence from politicians and media proprietors in May and he said he
would like to know before the end of June the scope of any
recommendations which Ofcom intended to make to the government; he and
his team of assessors intended discussing possible options by early
July.
Earlier in his evidence Richards explained that companies
could acquire “a very substantial share of the media market” not solely
by mergers or similar transactions but also by the sudden closure of
other media outlets.
“You could find because of organic growth
that a media company could have too much political power...the current
legislation has no means of assessing that...that is a very serious
deficiency in a highly dynamic market.”
After Lord Justice
Leveson said Ofcom’s investigation into the scope of its own regulatory
role “plays absolutely full square” into the work of his
own inquiry, Colette Bowe, Ofcom’s chairman, said the regulator would do
its utmost to ensure that the judge was supplied with details of any
proposals Ofcom intended to make to the government.
She agreed
with Ed Richards about the deficiencies in Ofcom’s power to look into
the impact of significant power in the media market; Ofcom already had
such powers in relation to the telecoms sector but did not have the same
powers with regard to media plurality and the impact on the democratic
process.
During their oral evidence neither the judge nor the
inquiry’s counsel Corine Parry Hoskins asked either Richards or Bowe
about the pre-election pledge given by David Cameron in June 2009 that a
future Conservative government would remove Ofcom’s policy-making
functions and return them to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
Cameron
said that in future Ofcom’s remit would be “restricted to narrow
technical and enforcement roles” because the regulator had become an
“unaccountable bureaucracy” which was taking decisions which should be
the responsibility of ministers “accountable to Parliament.”
The Sun
hailed Cameron’s announcement as the first sign that a new
Conservative-led government would curb the activities of the “Ofcom
busybodies.”
But Cameron’s promises to curtail Ofcom seem to
have been dropped in their entirety, along with News Corporation’s bid
to take total control of BSkyB – all part of the fallout from the
revelations about the hacking of the mobile phone of the murdered
schoolgirl Milly Dowler which resulted in the closure of the News of the World in July 2010.
