OfCom and Russia Today which is the state stooge?

OfCom is a quango - like the BBC, supposedly a fully independent entity, the government appoints its leadership. PM Johnson acted outside democratic norms by trying to force the committee selecting the next OfCom chief to pick the notorious Paul Dacre, recently pushed out by the Daily Mail as too extreme for their audience - though now brought back in as his more moderate successor Paul Grieg is  undermined.

That committee refused to pick Dacre saying he was clearly unfit, didn't meet the job criteria. The response? Johnson's government rewrote the job criteria and put forward Dacre's name again, ruling out any other candidates, though there had been something of a boycott by many qualified candidates. The outpouring of media horror was too much even for the combative Dacre, who remarkably pushed the mid-market Mail to the top of the circulation pile and stunning global online readership figures. He pulled out.

The outspoken anti-BBC right-wing ideologue didn't manage to take control of OfCom then. But the government has been keen for Russia Today (RT) to follow the road of the banned TV news stations Press TV and CGTN, seen as agents of Iran and China's governments.

How autonomous is the quango then? They fined RT £200k for its reportage of the Salisbury poisoning case, but refused to ban RT without firm evidence it was a state agent - and are holding to that line now ... at least until Johnson succeeds in ab/using his powers of patronage. Nothing new in this - the BBC Chair personally donated over £400k to Johnson and his chancellor. Thatcher installed the free marketeer John Birt to the same post, and threats on the license fee were used by Blair's Labour government after mild coverage of Iraq War criticism as much as by Cameron, May and more. Though Johnson is going ahead with financially devastating the BBC, leading to huge cuts in its news operations.

So, is OfCom independent? For now, yes - until the government managed to install a supporter as its chief. The newspapers may abuse the democracy argument to justify their weak self-regulation, but the source doesn't mean that the point, the principle isn't valid. How would the tiny remnant of a left-wing press (or an exposé of expenses corruption from a right-wing paper like the Telegraph) fare when the PM appointed a supporter as the chief of a statutory press regulator?

Should OfCom ban RT? That remains a complex question with strong points on either side. But there are also questions about how effective a ban is when clips would still circulate on YouTube and Facebook, the connected challenges of globalisation and digitisation to national media regulators.

Guardian, Feb 2022, quotes: 

“There is too much focus on the television channel – its impact is minimal,” said Prof Stephen Hutchings of the University of Manchester, who is writing a book on Russian media that focuses on RT. “The television channel almost has symbolic value. They can’t claim to be an international broadcaster on a par with CNN and BBC without a television channel. But really their most impactful output is online and on social media and YouTube.”

The media regulator, Ofcom, which in extreme circumstances can revoke the licences of television channels, is actively monitoring RT’s output for potential breaches of the broadcasting code. But there is no ban on partisan current affairs broadcasting in the UK, as long as viewers are also exposed to some alternative viewpoints – the same rule that allows a channel such as GB News to broadcast with a rightwing slant.

Kevin Bakhurst, Ofcom’s content boss, told the Guardian he did not have any “substantial evidence” that RT was being directly controlled by a foreign state, which could force it to give up its licence. He insisted it was perfectly legal for British television channels to have the worldview of the country that they were funded by: “You’d expect that. However, they need to respect the broadcasting code.”

It was RT’s failure to meet these standards in its coverage of the Salisbury poisonings that led to it being fined £200,000 by Ofcom in 2019 – but deciding where to draw the line is an art rather than a science. The regulator also takes into account viewer expectations of a channel when considering how to enforce its rules – essentially making the assumption that if you are watching RT then you are expecting to see a strong pro-Russian viewpoint reflected in its coverage.

there would be nothing to stop RT continuing to produce online content for a British audience, free from regulation, while claiming to have been silenced.