TV HISTORY PM Heath used ITV for political ends

Most of the examples we look at relating to TV regulation show the TV regulators to be resistant to government pressure - something that went into steep decline from the moment Labour declared war on the Beeb over its 'sexed-up dossier' report, leading to the curious death of Dr Kelly (see Guardian; Wiki; BBC).

This google search provides lots of articles on the Blair Labour government's attacks on the BBC, leading to its two leaders quitting the BBC - even though the reports that Blair was so furious over were essentially accurate.

This one shows up overt government manipulation of TV for political ends.

Previously unseen documents that implicate former prime minister Edward Heath in a concerted attempt to influence the jury in one of the most controversial prosecutions of trade unionists in British history will be revealed to parliament this week. 

It is understood that a dossier of newly unearthed papers suggests that some of the most senior members of Heath’s 1972 Conservative cabinet and members of the security services commissioned and promoted an ITV documentary entitled Red Under the Bed that was screened on the day the jury went out to consider the case against the “Shrewsbury 24”. One of the previously unseen files shows that Heath, on seeing a transcript of the film ahead of the trade unionists’ conviction, informed the cabinet secretary: “We want as much as possible of this.” 

Twenty-four men were arrested and charged with offences ranging from conspiracy to intimidate to affray following the first national building workers’ strike in 1972. The strike lasted for 12 weeks and won workers a pay rise, but the union’s picketing tactics enraged the construction industry and the government. Six men – including Ricky Tomlinson, who later found fame as an actor and starred in The Royle Family – were sent to prison. Tomlinson served 16 months of a two-year sentence. 

Another striker, Des Warren, was jailed for two years and eight months. His death in 2004 from Parkinson’s disease has been linked to his time in prison, in particular to the use of a “liquid cosh” – a cocktail of tranquillisers – that was administered to inmates at the time.

Revealed: Ted Heath behind TV documentary used to sway jury in trial of Shrewsbury trade unionists.

Freedom of Information law undermined by advisory panel?

This is a key piece of wider law signifying the UK as a liberal democracy, and perhaps ironically commended by Tony Blair's contention that passing it was one of his biggest regrets.

The law, in theory at least, compels public bodies to publish information upon request.

In practice, the foot dragging this often brings is akin to King Kong with a limp. There have been numerous high profile court cases, something financially struggling newspapers are wary of.

PM Cameron appointed an advisory panel which appears to be made up of critics and opponents of FoI, as this article details.

The Guardian view on the freedom of information commission: a very British farce.

IPSO Unfair says Blair as Mail complaint rejected

Tony Blair, alongside his attack dog Alistair Campbell, was seen as a master manipulator of the media, winning Murdoch's support and that of The S*n after he notoriously flew out to Australia to privately meet with Murdoch and strike a deal.

Now a former PM, he complained about a Daily Mail story on his refusal to follow Parliament's demands to submit to questions over 'comfort letters' sent to IRA men, a form of legal guarantee against prosecution.

IPSO rejected his complaint and the argument that the Mail had breached Clause 1: Accuracy.

Okay, he's a Labour ex-PM, but this still shows IPSO standing up to very powerful forces.

Tony Blair attacks 'major failure' at Ipso after Daily Mail complaint rejected.

WIDER ISSUES: Privacy

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:

1. 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
2. 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

Churchill to Blair: history of PMs + press owners

How Guardian's Steve Bell covered Blair's appearance

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.

This comes from an article about Lance Price's (former press spokesperson for PM Blair) book:

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.

Steve Bell cartoon from back in 1998. See this Indie article from the time: "Murdoch's courtship of Blair finally pays off"

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."

Blair responded to Price's claims at Leveson, arguing that 6 major decisions went against Murdoch's interests:

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."

.....................
Leading off that last point, Blair accused the Mail in particular of pursuing a personal vendetta against him and his family:

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.

2003 Commns Act: Blair-Murdoch deal?

For now, just this:

Leveson inquiry: Tessa Jowell quizzed Tony Blair over Murdoch deal

Former culture secretary sought assurances from then prime minister that there had been no backdoor deal with Rupert Murdoch on cross-media ownership rules

• Dan Sabbagh
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 21 May 2012 11.32 BST

Tessa Jowell gives evidence to the Leveson inquiry

Tessa Jowell, the former culture secretary, has told the Leveson inquiry that she sought assurances from then prime minister Tony Blair that there had been no backdoor deal with Rupert Murdoch when she was given the job in 2001.
The former Labour cabinet minister had the task of reviewing cross-media ownership law as part of the Communications Act that was due to go before parliament at that time – and wanted to be assured she had a free hand in rewriting the rules.
Giving evidence before the judicial inquiry into press standards on Monday morning, Jowell said she saw Blair "within a couple of days of my appointment".
She asked the prime minister about whether his relationship with the media mogul would colour her thinking.
"I asked him whether or not any deal had been done with Rupert Murdoch on … the cross-media ownership rules. He gave me an absolute assurance which I completely accepted that there had been no prior agreement," she said.
Given that, Jowell said that she told Blair that it was best "if you don't see the parties", by which she meant any interested media owners, and that it was her job to "take this and come back to you with proposals". She told Lord Justice Leveson that Blair was content with this approach.
Jowell steered through the Communications Act, which eventually saw a partial relaxation of cross media ownership rules – allowing US groups such as Disney and Murdoch's News Corporation to buy British free to air broadcasters. That could have allowed News Corp to buy Channel 5.
The former culture secretary also told the inquiry that Blair asked her to see if cross-media ownership rules could be relaxed to the point where News Corp could have bought ITV or Channel 5.
Jowell had presented proposals that would have prevented News Corp, or any UK newspaper owner with a market share of more than 20%, from taking over ITV or Channel 5.
However, at a private meeting in March 2002, Blair asked for "further discussion of the merits and effects of the different approaches we could take to the rule preventing anyone owning 20% of both the national newspaper market and a Channel 3 [ITV] or Channel 5 service", according to a note prepared by officials at Jowell's Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Jowell told the inquiry that said she had no detailed recollection of the conversation at the meeting. But she acknowledged that when it came to cross media ownership rules Blair's "instinct in relation to this were, I think, more deregulatory than mine".
Shortly after, a second meeting between Jowell and Blair concluded that it was appropriate to allow News Corp to buy Channel 5 – but not ITV. An official note from April 2002 confirms this final, agreed position.
Jowell said the change in thinking was an example of the normal policy development process and that the proposed change in rules as regarding Channel 5 was not a big development.
The Channel 5 proposal went forward and became part of the Communications Act which was passed by Parliament, while the ITV restriction remains today.

More to follow

DailyMash: PM lipsyncs Blair

Be warned that the site carries some adult ads, but the Daily Mash is a skilful satire of some of the rubbish we see in every paper (yes, including the Guardian!) day in, day out; its name is closest to the Mail, but there's no left/right agenda here, just 'a pox on all your houses'. (Lest any of you are somehow unaware, a mash-up is a term made popular by bedroom DJs double-tracking 2 songs and playing both at once)
Here's a rather topical example:
Cameron Iran speech 'lip-synced' to video of Blair on Iraq
(with thanks to Mr Thompson for bringing this to my attention)

Read More:
Wikis: mashup (video); mashup (digital); mashup (music).
The Daily Mash is a UK equivalent of the now giant US spoof news site, The Onion

OfCom gets tough on Murdoch!!!

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.

Some further reading:
'Snouts in the trough: 'Independent' media regulator costs taxpayer millions and holds Middle England in contempt' - classic right-wing pov from Daily Mail in 2011

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. [...]

www.politics.co.uk/reference/ofcom - Brief but solid outline
'Jeremy Hunt's links with Rupert Murdoch empire under scrutiny' - D.Telegraph report, Dec 23rd 2010
'MPs attack Sky News spin-off to clear way for BSkyB bid: Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, came under fire from MPs for his decision to clear the way for Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation to takeover BSkyB.' - D.Tele report 3rd March 2011 (with a video report on the page):

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.