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
Tony Hall is arguably the worst leader the Been has had since Thatcher, enraged at the Peacock Report's refusal to back BBC privatisation, appointed the free market zealot John Birt as director general.
His internal market reforms saw a bloated bureaucracy balloon as internal departments had to treat each other as commercial concerns, and tended for everything.
Hall has caved in to government pressure to agree to taking on a government welfare policy, free license fees for pensioners (the high-voting group it is prioritizing public spending on whilst slashing spending on the young), widely seen as a fundamental undermining of the BBC's supposed independence from government.
Now he's showing some awareness of this, albeit arguably belated and without diluting his own free market reforms, and cuts to youth-centred output (youth channel BBC3 will go off-air shortly, with rumours about Radio1 and Radio6).
He's arguing that the BBC should be externally regulated, that funding reviews should be by the decade not in five yearly cycles that make it easy for governments to exert pressure, that major shifts in BBC direction should require the assent of 2/3 of parliament, with online votes from the public over smaller decisions too.
It's a detailed article; here he is on how things seemed to have changed when he rejoined the BBC in 2013 after years away:
“The foundations of the BBC’s independence became weaker. The traditions and informal arrangements which protected it had been eroded. Politicians had not done this deliberately – it happened under all parties.“First, the licence fee was spent on things that were not directly to do with broadcasting. On digital switchover. On rural broadband and local TV. Then twice it was settled without a full process.”
The link is to a lengthy article - a great overview of what is a very useful case study to get into how media regulation works, both through formal regulators and media laws and informal power: private meetings, threats, controlling appointments and budgets.
It's a point I've made repeatedly in this blog: the notion of the BBC's independence is undermined by the government setting the license fee. Robert Savage's new book, and Greenslade's piece on this, highlights the very direct, explicit use of this threat by multiple governments to try and muzzle the Beeb's coverage of 'The Troubles'*.
(*That's a propaganda label which has achieved hegemonic status, successfully branding the violent conflict with aspects of a civil war as a mild outbreak of civil unrest.)
The wider parallel with the apparent assault on the BBC by the current incumbents is clear enough.
Greenslade's article is a great summary by the way of a complex but key case study in how media regulation works - including the informal, non-codified/statutory system of political pressure and influence.
Intriguing enough for me to order the book straight away!
[3am but did just that ... only to see its £70, one of these cynically priced books designed to milk library budgets. What a shame, sounds like a great read.]
Put me in mind of that great Day Today (Chris Morris) satire of the Broadcasting Ban an enraged Thatcher brought in when both ITV and the BBC defied her over coverage of the so-called Troubles:
UPDATE: Graham Stewart, author of the volume of the History of the Times (which I've read, and has been used as a prop in an AS film this year!), has hit back at Evans' claims, strongly arguing that Murdoch's was the only credible bid, without which both Times papers might have gone bust (much as he argues in the book).
Not a new story, Leveson was quite withering on Murdoch's apparent inability to remember a meeting of questionable legality with Thatcher that seemed to ensure his Times bid wasn't sent to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. There are parallels with the Murdoch meetings with Conservative ministers decades later when his bid to buy up remaining BSkyB was suspiciously waved through, only for Hackgate to torpedo this, and ultimately lead to Leveson, part of his brief being to investigate improper relationships between press and politicians.
The news hook - aside from a left-wing paper seeking to raise a right-wing spectre at election time - is the revised 5th edition of Harold Evans' excellent book on the press, a great read for a wider view of the press, and a useful counterpoint to Curran and Seat on, given Evans was a Tory-supporting Sunday Times editor.
I was aware of Robert Bork, but couldn't have pinned down his relevance to the media (de)regulation issue before I'd read this excellent article by John Naughton, intriguing enough to interrupt a time out in the fading sunshine!
The news hook is that the EU have announced an investigation into Google's practices, giving them 10 weeks to respond to an accusation of monopolistic strategy. Naughton highlights the stark contrast with the US, where the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), faced with the same data as the EU's competition commissioner (the US actually passed it on!), decided not to take a case ... despite several staff apparently arguing they should.
This is where Naughton draws on the writings and influence of Robert Bork, one of the foremost theorists of the neoliberal, deregulatory ideology that has slowly gained hegemony since the New Right movements of Thatcherism and Reaganomics took hold in the early 1980s.
This is a question which ultimately leaches into many areas of the debate around media regulation:
does it matter if effects cannot be proven? The BBFC explicitly justify their work by arguing that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"
given that publicity is what such terror organisations as Isis are seeking, should the media self-censor ...
... or be forced to censor the graphic videos that are causing worldwide headlines and making this organisation a global brand?
Should OfCom have the power to block (or censure/fine) non-UK media that enable this content over here? Fox News (USA) has caused ripples by re-posting a full, unedited video of a murder ... and this link has been widely passed around and promoted by Isis supporters
UK newspapers have embedded extreme
Mrs Thatcher memorably used the phrase "oxygen of publicity" to describe what terrorists desired - her solution, when TV regulators (both the IBA, soon scrapped, and the BBC: Death on the Rock and Real Lives rows) refused to bow to enormous pressure (a typical moral panic whipped up by her press supporters), was to ban 'extremists' from being heard on TV/radio
media resistance to this led to John Major quietly repealing the law ... will we see a similar approach in 2015 and beyond as clamour grows now for similar action to banish Islamic extermists from the 'airwaves'?
No, the post title wasn't an example of poor writing ... its a reference to the so-called 'Troubles' (a nice ideological, successfully hegemonic sleight of hand to diminish the status of the combat that took place in NI) and the issues that have been raised over the years whenever the terrestrial broadcasters tried to cover this in a fair-handed fashion.
Until the Scottish question, though, it was in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, that the tension between UK remit and viewers in a constituent nation was at its greatest. The word behind the BBC's first initial was explosive to many nationalist viewers and yet the loyalist audience was often appalled by what it perceived as republican sympathies in some programmes. These irresolvable pressures led to such crises as the events in the summer of 1985, when a documentary in the Real Lives series, which featured Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein, was postponed for four months by the BBC governors under pressure from the Conservative government. Three years later, the Thatcher government failed in its attempt to prevent transmission of the Thames TV documentary Death on the Rock, which investigated the killing by the SAS of three IRA members in Gibraltar, but, probably not coincidentally, Thames later lost its ITV franchise through a new Thatcherite bidding process.
Typical anti-BBC flak from the Mail elides public and the Mail (read more)
Its become a cliche - in most media, just not the right-wing press - that Thatcher's death and funeral has proven as divisive as her political career. We're also seeing both the press and broadcast TV engage in some informal self-regulation, with flak flying from a particularly gung-ho right-wing press (ie, every national daily bar the Indie/i, Guardian and Mirror) over any attempt to do other than celebrate and glorify the former PM and her contribution to national life.
I'll probably add more to this over time, but, writing before her controversial £10m funeral on Wednesday coming, here's a few pertinent points on this...
CLEAR BLUE LINES: HOW THE PRESS REPORTED HER DEATH
More below on the anti-BBC flak that featured in this, but you can see a very clear example of how the right-left binary functions in our national press through their coverage of her death.
You can view every front page here; analysis here. The Mail and Mirror fronts sum it up rather neatly: grim-faced, divisive figure v bright, effervescent saviour (apt, as Maggie is held up as a divinity by the likes of the Mail)
Dissenting voices were rounded on by the Mail et al - indeed, the Telegraph took the highly unusual step of banning all reader comments on Thatcher's death/funeral, after they discovered many of these were highly critical of her. Of course, Leveson didn't mention online press content, so had nothing to say on this topic.
RIGHT-WING PRESS v (INdependent???) BBC
IN BRIEF: The BBC was roundly attacked for featuring any anti-Thatcher views, its presenters not wearing black ties from the moment Thatcher's death was announced, and not banning the Ding Dong the Witch is Dead track
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.
The BBC complicates the picture of TV regulation: OfCom now oversee its compliance with 'standards and decency' regulations (cases such as Sachsgate and Chris Moyles' swearing + homophobic remarks, for example) while the BBC otherwise governs itself (in other words, self regulation) on organisational issues over budgets, technology, station policies etc.
Whilst every other channel is funded by advertising and/or subscription fees, the BBC is unique in being funded by the license fee, a form of tax. This makes it 'public owned' (effectively owned by the state); instead of being part of the 'private sector' it is part of the 'public sector'.
Right-wing dogma sees the public sector as inefficient and inferior to private enterprise, ie 'the free market'. Sky was able to develop satellite/digital subscription-TV because as a private company it is innovative. The BBC, according to this ideology, is an inefficient organisation which fails to innovate; it would be improved if it was privatised - sold off to business investors, traded on the stock market. That ignores the reality that the BBC, with Freeview, the iPlayer and its world-famous web content, not to mention its extensive programme sales to America and elsewhere across the world, channels such as BBC America, and much more besides, actually puts the BBC right at the top of any fair-minded list of broadcast innovators. The BBC also effectively acts as the main source of training for the engineers, editors, cameraman, presenters and suchlike that are then used by all the private media outfits in the UK.
So, the Conservatives, a right-wing party who believe in free market ideology, have long desired to see it sold off to become a private enterprise instead of a state-owned one. This is actually whats happened across most of Europe and America: if the state broadcaster hasn't actually been privatised, in most cases their funding has been slashed to make them a minor outfit instead of a serious rival to commercial, ad-funded broadcasters.
They have also routinely accused the BBC of having a left-wing bias: in the 1980s Tory Chairman Lord Tebbit famously called the BBC the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation (the Russian Communists were Bolsheviks), while in May 2012 Tory Lord Mayor of London Boris Johnson once more accused the Beeb of being left-wing.
In 1985 Thatcher appointed Lord Peacock to report on the UK TV industry, assuming as a right-wing free-marketeer he'd suggest privatising the BBC, or at least scrapping the license fee and making it rely on advertisers for revenue. Right-wingers see state-owned companies as distorting the free market, and providing unfair competition. Private media operators naturally agree, and would love to see the BBC scrapped, privatised or shrunk in size - one of the reasons the Daily Mail constantly attacks the BBC is thought to be down to its own company's ambitions to break into TV ownership. The 1986 Peacock Report shocked Thatcher by stating very clearly that an unregulated free market would be a disaster for UK TV: it would lead to an utter dumbing down of TV content. He said he disliked the license fee, but it was better than advertiser-funding which would also ensure standards would drop as higher audiences were chased rather than higher programme standards.
In the lead-up to the 2010 general election, the Tories, especially David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt, frequently stated their intention to tackle the BBC: to reduce it in size (including shutting several of its radio/TV stations), cut the license fee, ban it from bidding for many sports rights (if they did, the likes of Sky would save a fortune as there'd be less competition; fewer bidders), stop it paying for expensive American imports, reduce or even scrap its web content, force it to sell of profit-making subsidaries and some stations, and so on and so forth. Notoriously, in an act that looks all the worse given the accusations of collusion between Hunt and News Corp, Hunt and Cameron both stated their support for James Murdoch's speech (and said they would scrap OfCom, which Murdoch said should go) at the 2010 MacTaggart lecture. In office, both have continued to attack the BBC as 'bloated', oversized and inefficient, and Hunt broke with political convention by dictating, not negotiating, the BBC's budget for the next several years, including a large reduction.
Hunt has frequently indicated support for 'top-slicing': using some of the BBC's budget (from the license fee) to support other private broadcasters.
James Murdoch tonight launched a scathing attack on the BBC,
describing the corporation's size and ambitions as "chilling" and
accusing it of mounting a "land grab" in a beleaguered media market. News Corporation's chairman and chief executive in Europe and Asia also heavily criticised media industry regulator Ofcom,
the European Union and the government, accusing the latter of
"dithering" and failing to protect British companies from the threat of
online piracy.
Delivering the MacTaggart lecture at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival
20 years after his father Rupert, Murdoch described UK broadcasting as
"the Addams Family of world media", comparing it unfavourably with the
industries in India and France and complaining about the "astonishing"
burden of regulation placed on BSkyB,
the pay-TV giant he chairs. "Every year, roughly half a million words
are devoted to telling broadcasters what they can and cannot say," he
said.
However, his most withering comments were reserved for the
BBC. "The corporation is incapable of distinguishing between what is
good for it, and what is good for the country," he clamed. "Funded by a
hypothecated tax, the BBC feels empowered to offer something for
everyone, even in areas well served by the market. The scope of its
activities and ambitions is chilling."
MAY 2012: CAMERON'S PRESS SPOKESPERSON ACCUSES BBC OF ANTI-TORY BIAS: Just updating this post with an article which rather handily captures this point about traditional Tory suspicion of the BBC; their belief that it is not balanced but rather a leftie, biased news reporter. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/may/28/cameron-media-chief-rebukes-bbc-reporter?intcmp=239. The following vid may be taken down; it was up when I wrote this:
MAY 2012: BORIS JOHNSON ATTACKS BBC A fresh item from May 28th, in which Boris Johnson's press spokesperson directly threatens the BBC with flak from the right-wing press, to be partly organised by PM Cameron:
Boris Johnson's former communications chief threatened to use his contacts in the press to confront the BBC
over its coverage of the Conservative mayor of London, suggesting that
"good friends in No 10" could also be deployed against them, emails
leaked to the Guardian reveal.
The threat of a "huge public fight"
was levelled at senior BBC figures by Guto Harri, a former BBC
correspondent himself, who announced last week that he was moving to
become director of communications at News International.
Harri's
suggestion that Downing Street was also ready to put pressure on the
public service broadcaster raises questions about the Tories' tactics
against the BBC and the extent of the pressure City Hall has exerted in
its attempts to influence coverage.
Quipping that he had just fought an election campaign "in which I
sometimes felt that my chief opponent was the local [London] BBC news",
Johnson wrote: "The prevailing view of Beeb newsrooms is, with
honourable exceptions, statist, corporatist, defeatist, anti-business,
Europhile and above all, overwhelmingly biased to the left."
Free market ideology centres on the belief that state interference in (ie regulation of) business and 'the markets' is negative and will harm business interests and economic growth. This is central to the right-wing ideology, though all three of our major parties today, including the supposedly left-wing Labour, follow this ideology.
This is also the dominant ideology of our press: 6 of the 9 main national dailies are right-wing.
The classic narrative or history of press regulation centres on one key point: that we only gained a free press when free market conditions were introduced; the ending of the stamp duty, in creating a free market, finally meant that the press were truly independent from government and politicians, and could now fulfil the central democratic role of a 'fourth estate' holding politicians and governments to account.
Curran and Seaton (and Chomsky and Herman, with their propaganda model) argue this is an intentional misreading of what actually happened - and what was intended to happen. They argue that this supposed 'free market' was explicitly designed to favour right-wing views, quoting from parliamentary debate to evidence this (politicians of the time were explicit in their aims to prevent or discourage the poor/working class from reading or publishing newspapers, and doing everything possible to stymie the then-healthy and strong radical, leftist press). Advertisers became the de facto regulators of this 'free market', and remain so today, with rising production costs meaning that only the wealthy could aspire to publish a newspaper (today, it would cost close to £100m to launch and fund a new national daily paper for a year).
Despite this, broadcasting regulation was initially very strict: after the BBC's monopoly was broken with the creation of ITV, the scheduling and programming of ITV was very, very tightly controlled by the regulators (ITA, then IBA) who had a hands-on role that is scarcely imaginable today. The regulators acted like channel managers would today, intervening if they didn't like the scheduling or mix of programmes.
Although Thatcher would famously rig the free market to punish an ITV company (Thames) that dared to defy her and introduce strict censorship laws over the issue of coverage of Northern Ireland (the 1988 Broadcasting Ban), her election in 1979 marked the start of a gradual dregulation. Thatcherism centred on free market beliefs, and piece by piece, continued by Labour, broadcasting regulations would be relaxed, and the restrictions on ITV companies (their ability to merge, plus PSB requirements) were relaxed. The ITC would be launched as a 'light touch' regulator, and OfCom was explicitly introduced with a core aim written into its own regulations of deregulation. In both cases, the idea of creating a 'national champion' capable of competing with US conglomerates was cited as a key factor.
There have been a few bumps along the road, however: much to the outrage of the Tories in Opposition (ie when Labour were in government), OfCom expanded its role to launch its own investigations and suggest new legislation on a wide range of media issues, while the 1986 Peacock Report famously shocked Thatcher by failing to recommend privatisation of the BBC, or scrapping the license fee in favour of ads.
Finish up on yesterday's work: get together and pull together the distinctive arguments from yesterday's work
As part of this, check the list of pointers from the blog post: if there are any of these you haven't researched, keep reading until you can cover all of these points
Make sure everyone in the group has the same points written down so when I ask anyone from the group, any one can deliver some or all of your findings/arguments
Once that is comprehensively completed, you can move on to today's task, splitting the work up again if you wish, or working by yourself as you prefer. Using the http://mediareg.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/ofcomitc-key-docs.html post, and any other resources, make notes on:
how the history of TV regulation shows a narrative of initially tight regulation which began loosening once the 1979 Tory government took power
the key differences between the 4 commercial TV regulators
the major acts of legislation + reports that reshaped TV regulation since 1979:
1980 Broadcasting Act
1985 Peacock Committee/1986 Peacock Report
1990 Broadcasting Act
1996 Broadcasting Act
2003 Communications Act
info/speculation on the next major act...
You will find that 'free market' style deregulation start to take hold from 1980, leading to the 'light touch' ITC and then the explicitly deregulatory OfCom; Peacock is an unexpected exception to this, despite his free market credentials, his actual report shocking Thatcher who appointed him assuming he'd recommend privatisation of the BBC...
Wiki; Article excerpt (you may need to google title:Chasing the Receding Bus: The Broadcasting Act 1980 by Mike Elliott,The Modern Law Review,Vol. 44, No. 6 (Nov., 1981), pp. 683-692);
