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
'Deal or no Deal' could be ruled illegal; the Gambling Commission has new powers to define gameshows or elements of TV shows with no element of skill as gambling, a topic OfCom has no formal position on. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/mar/13/deal-or-no-deal-gambling-c4
Prese
The Gambling Commission will meet senior executives at Channel 4 in the next few days to discuss concerns that its hit teatime gameshow Deal or No Deal may constitute gambling.
To be banned? I'll give you evens it survives...
The commission is due to publish new advice on the implications of the Gambling Act for broadcasters and producers next month.
It
is understood to have particular concerns about the Noel Edmonds
gameshow, which broadcast for the first time on Channel 4 in 2005.
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)
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.
Last post for this morning, again coming from a Tabloid Watch blog report. It speaks for itself, but note that it reflects that tawdry reporting values are not a left/right issue: this eg comes from a Sunday paper published by Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN):
The natural father of Peter Connelly (Baby P) has been awarded
substantial damages after The People accused him of being a sex offender
who had been convicted of raping a 14-year-old girl.
Mr Justice Bean ordered Mirror Group Newspapers, publisher of the
People, to pay an initial £30,000 in damages plus costs of £35,000. The
damages payout will rise to £75,000 if the publisher loses permission to
take the ruling to the court of appeal.
The allegations were
contained in two paragraphs in a crime supplement in the People about
Baby P's mother, who had separated from the child's father, referred to
in court as KC. They appeared in a 19 September 2010 article headed
"Tortured to death as mum turned a blind eye"...
Bean said in his
written judgment: "It is difficult to think of any charge more
calculated to lead to the revulsion and condemnation of a person's
fellow citizens than the rape of a 14-year-old girl."
KC said in
his witness statement that he was "shocked and upset beyond words" by
the false libel, which he first learned about in phone calls from close
friends.
The judge said the appropriate starting point for the
damages was £150,000. But he reduced this by half, to £75,000 because
Mirror Group Newspapers moved swiftly to apologise and correct the
error.
Heather Rogers QC, appearing for MGN [Mirror Group Newspapers], told
the High Court hearing: "This was a mistake that MGN regrets and it has
apologised to the claimant, and I repeat that apology on its behalf in
this court."
However, she denied KC had been badly treated, or
that MGN had conducted any kind of "campaign" against him, or dismissed
his legitimate complaint.
Today, Ms Rogers argued that MGN should
be allowed to appeal on the grounds that the compensation order was too
high and "disproportionate".
The Tabloid Watch blog is a great source for specific examples of how our press routinely flout the Editors Code they're supposedly governed by, article one of which governs accuracy.
Two recent egs which neatly sum this up: obviously invented 'reports' in the Star about Russell Grant, and then Atomic Kitten, being picked for the UK's Eurovision entry.
At http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/2012/03/swamped-with-complaints.html you can read of how the Mail labelled 3 complaints about the BBC as 'swamped', a good eg of the anti-BBC agenda/bias that is evident in most of the national press, whose owners are ideologically opposed to 'public sector' or state control of any business and would benefit commercially if the BBC was privatised or simply ceased to exist.
Incredible admission by OfCom, our 'super-regulator' of the broadcast industries: two porn stations carried on the Freeview system (and thus free-to-air, available to anyone of any age) are beyond its jurisdiction. The Dutch-run porn channels don't fall within UK control they say, in an interesting echo of the political fix that allowed Murdoch's News Corp to stretch credibility by claiming to be based in mighty Luxembourg (a tax haven, conveniently, with a smaller population than Leeds) and thus avoid the regulations that apply to 'terrestrial' broadcasters BBC, ITV, C4 + C5.
Very useful article/issue/case study for the European dimension to UK regulation, which I've blogged on previously. Read http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/mar/07/freeview-porn-ofcom-action for more.
Extraordinary news - and, arguably, extraordinary cynicism: seems the PCC is set to shut itself down ... but, like the News of the World, re-emerge under a new badge. This could happen around April/May - well before your exam, so will be a key event to look out for.
You're asked to be able to intelligently speculate on the future of media regulation, so the key question here is will this gambit work? Will the largely right-wing press be able to effectively escape the tougher regulation that Leveson will surely recommend - and that a right-wing government might be reluctant to implement? The history of press regulation in the post-war era has been of critical reports but very limited implementation of recommendations from these, down to a combination of ideological bias (why would right-wing governments shackle a right-wing press?) and fear of press retribution (all 3 major parties clearly fear the consequences of making enemies of a powerful press; both Labour and the Tories have gone to great lengths to court Murdoch/News International).
Read more in this excellent Indie article: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/press-complaints-commission-to-close-itself-down-in-fasttracked-programme-7544474.html.
The Indie doesn't have such an extensive tagging system as The Grauniad (common nickname for the Gdn), but here's its page for Hackgate (including Leveson) stories: http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/PhoneHacking
While the Gdn is centre-left, the Indie is seen as more centrist in its ideological perspective.
When teaching this year there was already an intimidatingly long list of names to grasp, to which we can now add yet another: Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers. Her testimony to Leveson on 27.2.12 quite directly dealt with a co-ordinated fightback from The S*n (followed up by stablemate The Times plus the Mail) which had cried foul: in a leading article senior political editor Trevor Kavanagh, who goes back a long way with Murdoch, claimed police tactics were excessive and undermining the free press. Specifically, he dismissed payments by S*n journos as small amounts for stories in the public interest.
Nick Davies, Guardian crime correspondent generally seen as the person whose work broke this Hackgate scandal, argues that Akers' response, and the refusal of the Met to back down (which it had done so many times, so suspiciously, in the past) this time, denotes a significant decline in the fiercesome power of the press to bully and dictate to our public services including the law.
Kavanagh and others' arguments, flawed as they are, are useful material for prepping essay arguments about free press theories - and Davies, below, is excellent on picking this apart.
Keep delving into this material, keeping a particular eye on Roy Greenslade's column.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers
challenged the assumption on which recent attacks on Scotland Yard were
founded. Photograph: Guardian
The phone-hacking scandal never was simply a story about journalists behaving badly: it was and is about power.
On
Monday, in an outbreak of peculiarly destructive evidence, Lord Justice
Leveson's courtroom became a battlefield for two parts of a defining
power struggle.
The first was short term. In the past few weeks,
those who lost some of their power last summer, when the facts of the
scandal finally erupted, have been trying to reclaim it. In 20 minutes
of deftly understated evidence, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers sent them packing. Rupert Murdoch's
Sun had led the attempted coup with an outburst of the kind of tabloid
fist-waving which has itself been part of the distortion of power. The
paper's associate editor, Trevor Kavanagh,
reacted to the arrest of 10 of his colleagues by launching a ferocious
attack on Scotland Yard. It was full of the rhetorical flourish of great
reporting but almost devoid of facts.
Crucially, Kavanagh's claim
that the Yard was engaged in a witch-hunt against legitimate journalism
was based on a bold assumption that, in the Sun's
history of paying sources for stories, "there is nothing disreputable
and, as far as we know at this point, nothing illegal". Never pausing to
question that assumption, the Daily Mail joined in, reporting the
arrests under the headline "Operation Overkill" and running a column by
Richard Littlejohn which compared the police to the Stasi engaging in "a
sinister assault on a free press".
Interesting article/PCC ruling: The Guardian broke the PCC's Editors' Code BUT as they comprehensively addressed the grievance of the complainant (the Met Police/IPCC) the complaint was NOT upheld. See full article below.
PCC rules Guardian's Mark Duggan headline was misleading
However, press complaints body finds paper's apology and correction were sufficient
The Guardian's headline on a story about Mark Duggan was misleading, the PCC has ruled. Photograph: Rex Features
The Guardian has been found to be in breach of the Press Complaints Commission
code of practice over a headline and subhead on an article published by
the newspaper in November regarding the circumstances of the death of
Mark Duggan, whose shooting by the police prompted the summer riots.
However, the PCC also ruled
that the combination of steps taken by the Guardian to remedy the error
met the requirement of the editors' code. The complaint was therefore
not upheld because the mistake had already been corrected.
Confirmation of what both the Despatches (C4) and Panorama (BBC1) docs on Hackgate flagged up last year: the hacking was NOT restricted to mobile phones/answer messages, but also emails and computers (including agents in Northern Ireland as well as a range of Labour government ministers.
Restrictions have just been lifted on reporting the conviction of Philip Campbell Smith; here's an extract from a Guardian report (full article here):
A man at the centre of allegations that computers were hacked for the News of the World has been convicted of conspiring to illegally access private information for profit.
Until Monday legal restrictions meant that what is known about Philip Campbell Smith's alleged involvement in computer hacking could not be reported.
Smith
is alleged to have hacked the computer of a former British army
intelligence officer in 2006 as part of a commission from the News of
the World. In a tape recording, Smith says he was in contact with Andy
Coulson, the former News of the World editor who went on to become David
Cameron's director of communications. Smith also claimed Coulson was in
his mobile phone directory.
Smith is understood to be under
investigation by a Scotland Yard inquiry, Operation Kalmyk, which is
examining allegations that email hacking may have been used against
several dozen targets.
The allegations against Smith highlight
growing concern over computer hacking. Met officers are known to have
approached leading members of the Labour party as possible victims,
including Gordon Brown, the former No 10 communications chief Alastair
Campbell, the former Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain, and Tom
Watson, the backbench Labour MP who has been particularly vocal in the
phone-hacking scandal. If any of the Labour figures were targets, it is
not known who carried out the hacking and for whom.
The computer that Smith is suspected of hacking belonged to the former British intelligence officer Ian Hurst.
The
computer hacking involving Smith is alleged to have been carried out in
July 2006 by sending Hurst an email containing a trojan virus that
copied Hurst's emails and relayed them back to the hacker. It is claimed
this was commissioned by Alex Marunchak, who was a senior editor on the
News of the World when it was edited by Coulson.
The material
accessed by the hacker included messages concerning at least two agents
who had informed on the Provisional IRA: Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed
Stakeknife, and a second informant known as Kevin Fulton. Both men were
regarded as high-risk targets for assassination. Hurst was one of the
few people who knew their whereabouts and the emails contained
information capable of disclosing this.
Whilst the PCC has had it fairly easy (at least until Hackgate blew up and their assurances that all was okay looked absurd) from their brothers in arms of the press, OfCom has been an object of bitter attack by Fleet Street's finest.
Why might this be?
While the PCC essentially let the press off with murder, with any wrist-slapping carried out with a feather, OfCom has frequently frustrated the cross-media ambitions of media magnates and conglomerates, looking for synergies, or horizontal/vertical integration, through expansion into TV, radio and web. Its OfCom that holds the power to refer proposed purchases of one media company/outlet by another for legal scrutiny, and much of the press bitterly restrict this - even though this OfCom has been hugely reduced with the deregulation/pro-free market reforms that started under Thatcher in the 80s, carried on under New Labour and threatened to be completed by the coalition government until Hackgate made the News Corp buyout of Sky (which the Tory minister has okayed) a huge scandal.
Papers like the Daily Mail take a typically hypocritical line here: constantly attacking OfCom for being too powerful and interfering in the free market whilst constantly demanding OfCom uses more power to stop sex, violence and all those bad things you never read about (with helpful pictures) in the Mail...
This highlights a real dichotomy in the debates over media regulation: issues over ownership and the debated need for regulation of a free market on the one hand, and debates over media content and freedom to/restrictions on publishing on the other.
The right-wing press (ie, most of it!) constantly bemoan the interference in a free market of media ownership ... but attack the perceived failure to interfere enough on media content (especially if, like Sachsgate, the naughty party happens to be the BBC, loathed by free marketeers who see it as diminishing their potential for profit). The left-wing press (all two of them!!!), whilst also nervous and antagonistic about any prospect of a new licensing regime, tend to report more favourably on criticisms of the concentration of ownership, and barriers to new entrants (basically, you need to be a billionaire), whilst being pro-BBC and much less likely to froth at the mouth at the latest saucy C4 drama.
THEORY TIP: Hopefully that description rang a few bells ... the way the right-wing press cover OfCom is akin to flak, one of the five filters Chomsky argues shoots down media messages which go against the interests of the most wealthy and powerful.
Here's one recent example of the Mail firing flak at OfCom - and note the typically mealy-mouthed, low-profile 'apology' (hardly a ringing endorsement of the PCC that this sort of daily propaganda is seen as acceptable in the UK; in a paper such as the New York Times this might cause a fair degree of uproar at the lapse in journalistic standards):
An article on Saturday about children dialling up pornography on mobile phones suggested that Ofcom could not explain why filters to block adult material on BlackBerrys would not be available for at least six months.
We
are happy to clarify that Ofcom’s response, that the ‘project is highly
technical and software filters need to be developed from scratch’ was
omitted from the article due to a production error.
The blog this is taken from - Tabloid Watch - is written in a very caustic manner but is nonetheless an absolute goldmine as regards your exam preparation; it has a huge archive of stories on such inaccuracies which you can use to bolster your notes on the PCC (and its failings) in particular.
Stephen Abell, the outgoing PCC director. Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian
Stephen Abell, director of the Press Complaints Commission for the last two years, is leaving. He will leave at the end of the month.
His
departure, which has been under discussion for some time, is
unsurprising given that the PCC will almost certainly be reconstituted.
Abell,
who has spent more than 10 years with the commission, has been in
charge during its most difficult period, culminating in the controversy
over phone hacking.
He oversaw the early departure of its previous
chair, Lady Buscombe, and has worked alongside her successor, Lord
Hunt, since his arrival in October last year.
Hunt said he and
Abell had agreed that they would work together until they "were in a
position to propose a new structure for self-regulation of the press."
He added:
"I have valued Stephen's assistance in
this, and his professionalism in leading the PCC's staff as they
continued their important work...
It is testament to him that
the service to complainants, both those in the public eye and those
without claim to celebrity, has improved and expanded over the last few
years. I wish him success in all his future endeavours."
Abell, 31, is to become a partner with Pagefield communications consultancy, where he will assume responsibility for media relations and crisis communication.
He
said: "I decided last year that it was time for a new challenge. First,
I wanted to work with David Hunt in the development of positive
proposals for a new structure of self-regulation... I also wanted to
give a full account of the work of the PCC to Lord Justice Leveson."
He said he remained "a firm supporter of enhanced self-regulation for the press", adding:
"My
greatest professional satisfaction at the PCC has been in our
establishment of a bespoke 24-hour service to help complainants obtain
redress, stop harassment and prevent the publication of inaccurate or
intrusive material.
I leave a great team of people, who have much to offer in the changing world ahead."
It
appears that Abell's PCC job, as its is currently constituted, may not
be filled. Instead, the commission has appointed Michael McManus to be
"director of transition."
McManus, pictured left, has been a long-time associate of Hunt's. They worked together for six years at the law firm Beachcroft, where he dispensed political and legislative advice to clients.
Hunt and McManus co-wrote an article for The Guardian in September 2010 in which they praised Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg for forging a "strong" coalition with the Conservatives.
McManus
spent years as a special adviser in parliament and also ran Edward
Heath's Westminster private office. Most recently he has worked at the
PR firm Bell Pottinger.
McManus
said: "I am delighted to be joining the PCC at this crucial juncture in
its existence. All my work in journalism and politics has convinced me
that self-regulation of the press can and must be made to work.
"I
relish the challenge of playing such a senior role in the urgent and
crucially important task of creating a new, independent press regulator
with real teeth."
A further senior PCC appointment is expected shortly. Sources: PCC/Personal knowledge
There's plenty in the links list but here's a few recent articles of note:
