OFCOM C4 seek to fight political attack

Here's a new twist on media regulation: C4 have responded to a strongly worded attack from parliamentary authorities, condemning its exposé of senior politicians' alleged corruption as an unwarranted, unethical invasion of privacy, by calling in OfCom themselves.

C4's move is clearly intended to rebut the political attack, a novel approach.

Both the BBC and C4 appear to be under threat of privatisation from a Tory government (and right-wing press) that perceives both these PSBs as leftie, liberal outfits biased against the Tories, social conservative values, free market ideals etc

Ofcom asked to investigate sting on ex-foreign secretaries.

Channel 4 has asked the broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, to investigate a cash-for-access sting on two former foreign secretaries after criticism over its reporting of the allegations.

The parliamentary commissioner for standards cleared Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw, and said the damage done to the former MPs could have been avoided if Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Daily Telegraph had accurately reported the exchanges they had filmed.

The broadcaster has issued a defiant statement defending its journalism and took the unprecedented step of asking Ofcom to look at the case.
The move will put Channel 4 on a collision course with Straw, Rifkind and the parliamentary authorities, who have been quick to claim that the programme was the result of shoddy journalism.

David Cameron issued a statement through Downing Street welcoming the fact that “Sir Malcolm, and his family, can now put this distressing episode behind them”.
Insiders at Channel 4 maintain that it is in the public interest to expose politicians who are happy to use their positions for private gain.

Daniel Pearl, editor of Dispatches, said: “This programme raised important questions which concern voters about how senior politicians are able to use their public office for personal financial gain. This is a matter of public interest and was a legitimate journalistic investigation.
“We’re confident in our journalism and have decided to take the unprecedented step of inviting our statutory regulator Ofcom to investigate the report.”

Peter Preston has since written an interesting opinion piece on this for The Observer.

Rifkind and Straw are cleared, but parliament’s rules remain murky.

The Independent Press Standards Organisation has its own rules about stings. You can’t just trawl around for dirt without reasonable cause for specific suspicion. (That’s why those same rules against trawling stung the Telegraph when Vince Cable was a victim a few years ago). And Ofcom - a statutory regulator, remember - has different rules again, which Channel 4 traditionally applies with added rigour. There has to be evidence-gathering in initial investigations: no trawling. Two exhaustive stages of form-filling - first for filming, then to secure permission to broadcast - must be completed through the production process. Two lawyers sit on top of it throughout. This isn’t the wild west, or an excuse to run wild around Westminster. 

So here’s the rub. You can quite see why Rifkind and (especially) Straw felt themselves hard done by. You can understand why the MPs’ committee Hudson reports to clambered onto a high horse. But you can’t quite see why the film shown and the offers made weren’t assessed as multimedia, not just as print transcripts. Nor is it easy to understand a process where the ombudsman meets in person with aggrieved parliamentarians, but doesn’t seek personal appearances from the journalists involved. Seven years after the Telegraph’s revelations about MPs’ expenses, and 27 years after “Cash for Questions”, parliament is still doing its own regulatory thing. Channel 4 is right and feisty to take its case to Ofcom. Ipso, anxious to set standards as well as hear complaints, might prod the Telegraph to do likewise.

FUTURE Could Corbyn reintroduce ownership limits?

It is abundantly clear that a right-wing government able to rely on generally favourable coverage from a UK press which is also largely right-wing, and which has undermined the BBC's finances so radically, will have no desire to regulate on media ownership.

Quite the opposite: should we expect Murdoch to resurrect the buyout of the 60% of BSkyB shares his conglomerate doesn't own - so inconveniently halted by public outrage over his paper's phone hacking of Milly Dowler? Probably, yes; despite the protests of the Culture Select Committee and others, the Tory Culture Secretary was set to wave it through pre-Leveson.

Now we have a left-wing Labour leader, will there be a sharp end to the consensus over free market, laissez faire media regulation? Again, probably.

Corbyn has said little on this yet, but his one utterance directly attacked concentration of ownership and many perceive Murdoch's empire as a target.

Let's not forget that Tom Watson, who doggedly pursued News International and the phone hacking story even when directly threatened by the Murdoch press, and at the cost of his marriage, is now deputy leader.

The Blairite right-wing Labour MPs will doubtless argue that Labour needs to court the likes of the Mail and the S*n - after all, Tony himself flew out to Australia to genuflect before the great man in advance if the 1997 election.

Such arguments will surely now be rejected, and we can expect to see a sustained, vicious barrage of flak to shoot down this counter-hegemonic force.

The largely hostile coverage in the Guardian suggests that there might be friendly fire too, even if Greenslade thinks the paper will be neutral.

Greenslade also states that Corbyn has to become PM to change media policy, but that isn't necessarily so. We saw under the coalition government that the backbench Select Committee undertook the scrutiny that the responsible government minister, Jeremy Hunt, appeared reluctant to, including Watson famously describing James Murdoch as a Mafia boss.

With some cross-bench support (ie, Labour, Tory and others) its recommendations could still be enacted, though whether it will put forward any radical changes, other than eviscerating the BBC, does seem unlikely.

We have also seen plenty of examples of backbench bills getting close enough to passing to force government to act.

Whatever now happens, the cosy consensus and hegemony of deregulation will at least be up for debate, marking a distinct shift in 36 years of both major parties cutting media regulation.

Jeremy Corbyn versus the media - will he take on Murdoch? 

The current Tory Culture Secretary could face charges for leaking anti-BBC briefings to the Sunday Times: John Whittingdale accused of misleading parliament over BBC story in Sunday Times.

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.

FILM WEB PIRACY Contrast protest over MPAA with UK ISP Torrent bans

Quite a contrast...

In the US a combination of mass (including street) protest and tech-corporate lobbying (including paying for ads) stymied an attempt, led by Hollywood/MPAA, to make it easy to isolate websites accused of copyright infringement.

Move on 3 years and the likes of Google have swiftly jumped on a new attempt by the MPAA to bring this in by the back door - this time they're focussed on one site, MovieTube, but succeeding in cutting it off would establish the principle.

Here in the UK we have no triple democratic lock (House, Senate, Supreme Court in the US), just a supine Lords to check the power of a Commons which the PM can operate as an "elective dictatorship" (Lord Hailsham's infamous phrase, then attacking a 1970s Labour government) when a single party has an overall majority.

Here, ISPs already block a wide range of websites which serve as search engines for Torrents (a means of linking with multiple users globally to download often copyrighted material).

PM Cameron, to the delight of the likes of the Mail (which loves media regulation or censorship ... just as long as its not of the Press), is pressing ahead with proposals to enforce age ratings on music videos online, to make every online adult to state whether they're opting in or out to adult material (always a difficult definition), and have already enforced a ban on a wide range of adult categories.

Against the backdrop of an overwhelmingly right-wing press, traditionally in favour of conservative, censorial campaigns (so long as it doesn't impact their businesses), there's been little protest here - at least, little that the public might hear about through the mainstream media.

Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo claim MPAA is trying to resurrect Sopa.

Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo have accused US film studios of attempting to resurrect the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa), which was defeated in Congress in 2012. 

The US technology companies joined together to file a brief (pdf) with New York courts urging judges to strike down a preliminary injunction filed by six film studios of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which calls for a blockade of the alleged piracy site Movietube.  

Sony, Universal, Warner Bros, Disney and Paramount are seeking to remove Movietube from the internet and stop internet companies linking to or providing services to the site, including search engines and social networks. 

“Plaintiffs’ effort to bind the entire Internet to a sweeping preliminary injunction is impermissible. It violates basic principles of due process ... [and] ignores the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which specifically limits the injunctive relief that can be imposed on online service providers in copyright cases,” the technology companies write in the amicus brief. 

They state that they do not condone the use of their services for copyright infringement and that they work with rights holders to tackle issues, but that the “proposed injunction is legally impermissible and would have serious consequences for the entire online community”.

TWITTER Beckham ignores IPSO over Mail kids intrusion

(lord) John Prescott did it, forcing the Sunday Times to quickly withdraw an inaccurate story.

David Beckham is taking the same approach, but will the mighty Mail bow to social media pressure...

The PCC and now IPSO face being ignored by those powerful enough to have a social media, especially Twitter, presence sufficient to impact on public opinion.

The Mail, the most complained about paper of all, not only ran pictures of Beckham's 4 year-old daughter, contravening the Editors' Code, they also criticised their parenting.

Now this is the same paper that rages and fulminates against the nanny state itself turning (ninny) nanny, a similar state of hypocrisy and cant to its endless moral panics over sexual content in broadcast and other media ... which it gleefully, salaciously features in large, multiple pictures (not forgetting it's notorious sidebar of shame).

Obviously as the Beckham girl is an elected official with an important influence on our democracy ... Hmmm. Okay, so the legal public interest defence is out, unless you re-heat the fatuous line Murdoch has used for decades (if the public chooses to buy papers with this content, they're interested and the market should cater for them), and Richard  Desmond trotted out at his cringeworthy Leveson appearance ("ethics?").

The Editors' Code, as the Mail will know, doesn't provide a public interest exemption for the children clauses.

Sterling work from the Mail then. Beckham would have a good case if he took it up with IPSO, but tweeted instead. Neither the Mail nor press self-regulation come out of this looking good.

'No right to criticise': David Beckham hits back at Daily Mail coverage.

BBC cuts by government a Murdoch plan?

An incendiary post by Jukes (via a tweet by Nick Lacey, well worth following), though can anyone informed about the media landscape really be surprised at this apparently ongoing relationship between the Murdochs and a government/party when they both share a core neo-liberal, low tax, 'free market' ideology?

I've often blogged on the right-wing hostility towards the BBC and PSB generally, and how the sustained flak both from right-wing papers and politicians (often quoted in such coverage to beef it up or keep a story running) has looked ever more likely to finally down the BBC as a publicly funded large-scale broadcaster.

Jukes takes this point a step further, writing about an actual deal between Murdochs and senior Tory government ministers to work together to kill off the BBC as an organisation able to compete with the likes of Sky.

This is a short extract - its worth reading more.

As I've detailed in my 2012 book, [T]he Fall of the House of Murdoch, the plan to shrink the BBC by 30% was part of a four year dance between Cameron, Osborne and James Murdoch, as he vied to cement his succession at News Corp by buying the whole of BSkyB, and amalgamating News International and Sky in a digital hub at a new base in Isleworth.  

Called Operation Rubicon, the deal would have sealed the Murdoch family as owners of Britain's most lucrative TV channel and its biggest newspaper group - a virtually unassailable position in the media landscape. Their only real (non commercial) competition was the free news service provided by the BBC both in broadcast and online.

Read more.

Jukes' book.

FILM MPAA R rating as commercial kiss of death

'Many cinemas refuse to show R-rated films and they tend to struggle at the box office.'

Nothing new or startling here, just a handy direct quote on this point  - that as many major retailers and exhibitors essentially boycott R-rated films (likewise CDs with the explicit lyrics 'parental advisory' sticker), producers are heavily incentivised to get lower age ratings. My past posts on the impact of BBFC 18 ratings covers similar ground - and looks at the alleged favouritism shown by both BBFC + MPAA towards studio productions. The higher NC-17 rating is considerably worse - Miramax's Harvey Weinstein describes it as "economic suicide" (quoted in Julian Petley's Censorship)

Executive producer Gabe Hoffman, who bankrolled early screenings of the film with his own money, complained to industry magazine Deadline that, while Berg had granted some print interviews, she had turned down “dozens” of requests from broadcast news networks.

...

An Open Secret has had a tough time gaining traction, despite receiving lots of press from print publications, like the Guardian. It was given an R rating by US certification body the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Many cinemas refuse to show R-rated films and they tend to struggle at the box office. Hoffman wrote an open letter to the MPAA’s chairman Christopher Dodd, asking for the ratings body to reconsider their decision.  

“We were extremely disappointed to find our film – which discusses these issues maturely and carefully – thrown into the same category as films which display gratuitous sex and violence,” he wrote. 

“If just one single teen … finds their inner strength, and is able to escape their current abuse situation because of your decision, wouldn’t that make your time spent personally reviewing the film, and its rating, all worthwhile?”

Producers of Hollywood child abuse documentary criticise director for not promoting film.

D-notice: the unseen hand of government censorship

I've cited this a few times before, but its worth looking at individually - a great example of the often arcane nature of official censorship in the UK, bypassing the voluntary self-regulation system.

Greenslade: The D-notice system: a typically British fudge that has survived a century.

Peter Preston defends the system as great value at £250k a year: D-Notices: the best security show in town at a bargain price.

Greenslade's history of the D-Notice

The D-notice system is a peculiarly British arrangement, a sort of not quite public yet not quite secret arrangement between government and media in order to ensure that journalists do not endanger national security. 

In his official history of the system*, a former D-notice committee chairman, retired Rear Admiral Nicholas Wilkinson, explained that it “emerged amorphously across three decades of increasing concern about army and navy operations being compromised by reports in the British (and sometimes foreign) press.” 

It was finally created in 1912 in the runup to the first world war, when the fiercely anti-German press barons of the era were only too happy to prevent the enemy from accessing useful intelligence. 

At the outset, therefore, it was largely viewed as a sensible and pragmatic arrangement that did not inhibit press freedom. Editors and journalists appear to have accepted it without demur up to and including the second world war, when self-censorship was the order of the day for Britain’s press. 

At the outset, therefore, it was largely viewed as a sensible and pragmatic arrangement that did not inhibit press freedom. Editors and journalists appear to have accepted it without demur up to and including the second world war, when self-censorship was the order of the day for Britain’s press. 

The first major controversy occurred during Harold Wilson’s administration, in 1967, in what became known as the D-notice affair, thus bringing the system’s existence to wider public attention for the first time. 

Wilson accused the Daily Express and its defence correspondent, Chapman Pincher, of ignoring D-notices by revealing that the secret services were scrutinising thousands of private cables and telegrams sent from Britain without obtaining the necessary Official Secrets Act warrant. 

The prime minister called for an inquiry and set up a tribunal to decide whether Pincher had breached the system. It prompted the Daily Mirror editor, Lee Howard, to resign amid mutterings of censorship. Then, to Wilson’s embarrassment, the tribunal cleared the Express. 

But the effect of this affair had far-reaching implications. Editors were bolstered by the fact that the tribunal had underlined the voluntary nature of the system. Governments became hesitant about being overly heavy-handed about using D-notices to prevent publication that could be shown to be in the public interest. 

Four years after the Wilson fiasco, all existing D-notices were cancelled and replaced by what were called “standing D-notices”, which gave general guidance on what might be published and what should be discouraged.  

The fact that such notices were recommendations to editors, without any legal status, resulted in them being renamed in 1993 as DA (defence advisory) notices. 

One of the interesting features of the system has been the press-friendly nature of several of the officials chosen to head the committees, former senior servicemen such as Wilkinson and Colonel Sammy Lohan. 

And it is truly ironic that Wilkinson’s history was itself subjected to censorship. Five chapters had to be excised prior to publication in 2009 after Whitehall officials invoked a rule that official histories should not include matters concerning the administration in power. It is being republished with new chapters this month. Famously, editors have also got away with bypassing the D-notice system altogether by refusing to alert the committee to stories they feared might lead to injunctions. 

The Observer kept secret its 2004 revelation about a memo showing Britain helped the US conduct a secret and potentially illegal spying operation at the UNin the runup to the Iraq war.  

The result? An almost identical system but a change of name: DA-notices become DSMA (Defence and Security Media Advisory) notices. Nothing, it seems, works quite so well as a British fudge that allows the press to keep its freedom while volunteering to protect national security. 

* Secrecy and the Media: the Official History of the United Kingdom’s D-Notice System by Nicholas Wilkinson (Routledge, 2009)

Preston's reflections on the D-Notice system and changes

D-Notices, now called DA-Notices, have been around for more than 100 years – and still many people, including a prime minister waving them in the wake of Edward Snowden, remain grumpily ignorant of what they’re really about. Perhaps changing the name to National Security Notices (as just recommended by a review committee) will help Mr Cameron concentrate.

The notices are not censorship with Whitehall bovver boots. They’re an extremely light-touch, voluntary system that helps press people – often at local level – who think they may have stumbled on a story make sure they don’t sprawl full length by inadvertently reporting something that endangers British security. You ring up an amiable retired air vice-marshal in the Ministry of Defence who checks around and tells you where and if peril lies. A committee of editors and civil servants meets twice a year to monitor and discuss.

And that, essentially, is what will happen post-review too, with a few tweaks and modernisations – plus one economy to lighten George Osborne’s load. The whole apparatus, operating 24/7, costs around £250,000 a year, a bargain basement safety net. And what would happen if the system didn’t exist? More press calls to M15, who employ three staff officers to deal with media inquiries. More calls to M16, with two press officers. More to GCHQ, now with a press office and expert manager. More to the phone-answering legions of the MoD, Cabinet Office and Home Office.

I was interested to sit on the review, fascinated by the different attitudes, from draconian to complaisant, different departments of state manifested; and happy to discover the cheapest effective security show in town (or probably anywhere). Every little helps, prime minister.

ADVERTISER POWER Gawker editors quit as ad boycott threat sees article banned

Useful example of one of Chomsky's 'five filters' at work as it shows this is as true of new media as it is of dinosaur media (60s Times, NoTW closure, Telegraph HSBC non-reporting)

Just as with the case of the Daily Telegraph's Peter Oborne quitting in protest at articles critical of HSBC bank being pulled to protect advertising revenue, so we have another case which shows how the fabled free press is actually heavily influenced by advertisers and commercial considerations (so Murdoch pulled the BBC off his Asian satellite TV network Star and pulped the hardcover [expensive!] copies of Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten's autobiography when China complained, safeguarding his access to the huge Chinese market, and ensuring Tiananmen Square would get no mention, and critics of Chinese Communist rule were silenced).

Perhaps this case isn't as clear though - there are ethical considerations (though, as with the UK press using the public interest defence this may be simply convenient to mask the real commercial calculation?):

Gawker Media’s top two editors resigned from the news and gossip site on Monday, in response to the company’s decision to remove a controversial post. The post, published last Thursday, concerned a publishing executive who is married to a woman and who allegedly attempted to book a gay escort. 

The post was described by some critics as a form of blackmail and widely condemned in the media. At least one advertiser put ads on hold in protest....Gawker’s founder Nick Denton defended his decision to take down the post on Monday and said that the managing partnership should not make editorial decisions. He took full responsibility for the removal of the post.  

“Let me be clear. This was a decision I made as founder and publisher – and guardian of the company mission – and the majority supported me in that decision,” he said. “This is the company I built. I was ashamed to have my name and Gawker’s associated with a story on the private life of a closeted gay man who some felt had done nothing to warrant the attention.”

Gawker's top editors quit in protest over removal of a controversial post.

ADS AUSTRALIA Fanta app targeting tweens banned

Australia has a voluntary self-regulation code on marketing junk food to under 12s, part of its response to the obesity crisis sweeping the Western world.

The contrast with the UK is stark: the Tory-led coalition government rather preposterously set up an advisory panel on food health regulation dominated by the food industry. Naturally enough, this has seen little movement on marketing or producing junk food.

So to see major corporations pull an expensive TV ad and app campaign is an intriguing example of seemingly robust self-regulation.

Fanta ad and app pulled for breaching guidelines on advertising to children.

A TV commercial and an iPhone app for the soft drink Fanta has been pulled after the Advertising Standards Board deemed its cartoon-style “Fanta Crew” characters were directed at children as young as nine. 

Under the self-regulation of advertising rules, junk food may not be advertised directly to children under 12. One 450ml bottle of Fanta has about 14 teaspoons of sugar. 

The commercial featured animated characters known as the Fanta Crew at the beach and riding rollercoasters while talking about the great taste of Fanta which to them is like an “awesome ride”, a “bubble explosion” and makes them feel like “busting out to my favourite beats”. 

The Fanta Fruit Slam 2 app and the Fanta “Tastes Like” TV ad were designed to sell an unhealthy product which “should not be promoted to children,” Jane Martin from the public health advocacy group, Obesity Policy Coalition, said on Wednesday.

BBC In-depth 2015 analysis of its likely future

I've blogged in some depth and detail on the Beeb myself: this article is a good starting point if you're new to the debates around PSB, Reithian values, and the market imperative in broadcast media.

You can't disconnect politics from media regulation. Being from The Grauniad, the writing is slanted towards maintaining a viable BBC, where a right-wing paper might advocate banning services which 'the market' or 'commercial sector' already provide - or just straight up privatisation.

The battle for the BBC.

BBC Independence 'myth' in tatters?

There have been so many, wholly predictable (I did just that before the election!), big news stories about the free market/small state Tory attack on the publicly funded BBC that I've been waiting for something concrete before blogging on this again.

In the space of a week we have the story that the PM threatened to shut down the BBC, angered at what he saw as liberal/leftie bias, and Chancellor George Osbourne very bluntly questioning the future of the BBC in its current guise and scope.

Today comes action which ties together all the speculation over what Tory hostility might mean in practice. With a Culture Secretary outspoken on his attacks on the BBC before the election it comes as little shock that the Beeb has just meekly accepted an extraordinary funding cut just days after confirming the closure of BBC3 and announcing many 1000s more job cuts were planned.

Providing free licences for the over 75s is an instant cut of 20% of the budget. TWENTY percent!

WEB Right to be Forgotten attacked by BBC

Julian Powles makes a difficult argument well - defending the "right to be forgotten" created by an EU ruling against Google in Spain that gives EU citizens the right to ask Google (and other search engines) to effectively hide hits/results that highlight from their past they do not want seen.

He points out that this includes people whose names bring up crimes ... that they were acquitted of, but you don't get that info in the top results, just the more sensational coverage of the accusations.

There are clashing principles here, both enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights:

• freedom of speech
• right to privacy; a private life

Why the BBC is wrong to republish ‘right to be forgotten’ links.

ASA enforce OfCom rules on alcohol, slam MTV

Having generally not blogged on ASA, along come two useful rulings in one day - the rejection of complaints about the 'beach body' ad (albeit with some restrictions imposed), and now this: MTV sharply criticised for the high proportion of alcohol ads during the Geordie Shore slot.

That oh-so-familiar theme of protection of children is to the fore once more...

MTV argued that the show is "clearly" an adult show, but ASA data rather straightforwardly contradicts this by revealing the high proportion of under-18s forming part of the audience.

Of course the brands advertising their alcoholic goods in this slot would deny this - it is outlawed after all! - but access to under-18s is surely an attractive element of the audience for these advertisers? Furthermore, it would be odd if MTV hadn't provided their ad sales agency with detailed demographics of the audience; advertisers, and the buying agencies who negotiate fees and place their ads, will always want to know who they're spending money to target - if you're selling a stairlift, retirement homes or pensions you're hardly likely to want to spend money on ads during a youth-oriented show!!!

Read the full article - link below the line.

ASA Beach Body Ready ad cleared; inoffensive???

Interesting case that sparked a large petition, and a defacement campaign that went viral - but the advertising regulator the ASA ruled the ads were within the rules and so needn't be removed.

Protein World's 'beach body ready' ads do not objectify women, says watchdog.