MURDOCH US newspapers racist boycott

He closed the flagship NotW after a highly effective advertiser boycott threatened to spread to his US media (and with the PCC so disgraced by its mishandling of the Murdoch press' phone-hacking, condemning The Guardian for reporting it, that it disbanded itself! Some press regulator...).

Now Murdoch faces a potentially crippling boycott of his paper that once again shows how pressure from outside the formal press regulators can be much more effective than the regulators themselves.

The S*n has long been banned across Merseyside for its hateful portrayal of Liverpool fans as drunken hooligans responsible for the deaths of nearly 100 Liverpool fans at Hillsborough, eventually apologising for this decades later after official public enquiries trashed it's claims.

Now it's an unsubtle attack by the New York Post that has attracted a retail boycott. Up to 5000 Yemeni-owned outlets will cease selling the paper after what they see as a clearly racist front page attacking 1 of the just 2 Muslim Congresspersons. They say it endangers US Muslims by encouraging anti-Islam hatred.

KEY POINT: Consumer campaigns, especially pressurising advertisers with boycott threats, + distributor/retailer boycotts can be much more effective than a formal regulator.

Yemeni bodegas boycott New York Post over attacks on Ilhan Omar.

CONCENTRATION OF OWNERSHIP due to Google Facebook ad dominance

The newspaper industry has been based on ad revenue since the scrapping of stamp duty (tax) in 1851 led to a sharp increase in professionalism, with production (and distribution) costs exceeding revenue from cover price. As Curran and Seaton argue in great detail in Power Without Responsibility, this led to a mass closure of ‘radical press’ titles and consolidation and concentration of ownership by wealthy individuals who pursued right-wing agendas such as low business taxes and attacking trade unions/workers rights.

The modern-day online migration of ad revenue (one major consequence of disruption from digitisation, the other being the youth market almost disappearing as a paid-for print media market: steep circulation decline) is an important factor in any possible change to press regulation.

The industry is struggling for survival, so tougher regulation, especially that proposed by Impress, linked to the Royal Charter idea that Leveson proposed, which would see newspapers routinely charged for the legal fees of accusers even if their complaints were ultimately rejected, could result in mass closure and a further loss of pluralism.

Guardian: Newsquest targets Archant as newspaper consolidation gathers pace.

“Consolidation is inevitable,” Ashley Highfield, chief executive of Johnston Press, owner of the Scotsman and Yorkshire Post, said last week. “It’s the obvious and necessary road ahead and smaller publishers increasingly cannot survive without being part of bigger groups to bring economies of scale and shared content.”
Last year, Johnston Press, the UK’s second-biggest regional newspaper group, paid Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Evening Standard and Independent websites, £24m for national newspaper the i to bulk up the publisher’s scale. It also was one of a number of suitors, including Lebedev, to look at buying national freesheet Metro when DMGT, which owns the Daily Mail, tested market appetite for a sale.

Advertisement

The shift of readers away from printed newspapers, which have traditionally provided the bulk of revenues and profits through sales and advertising, has been profound over the last decade.
Total weekly regional newspaper circulation fell by half from 42m to 22m between 2009 and 2016 , with paid-for copies falling from 26m to 13.8m, according to Enders Analysis. Similarly, the national newspaper market has shrunk from selling 9.3m copies per day in 2009 to 5.2m last year.
On Tuesday, investors in Trinity Mirror, the publisher of the Mirror titles, will vote to approve a £200m takeover of Richard Desmond’s Express and Star titles as the national newspaper industry faces the same issue of the need to build scale to survive in the battle for advertising against the tech giants.
The impact on publishers’ bottom line has been further affected by lower rates for digital advertising, exacerbated by giants such as Facebook and Google hoovering up to 90% of all new ad money being spent online.
Since 2008, almost £800m in ad spend has been stripped from national newspapers, from £1.54bn in 2008 to £757m last year. The impact is even more stark in regional newspapers, which have seen ad revenue fall from £2bn in 2008 to £723m last year, according to figures from Group M.
“In order to survive, consolidation is key to compete with the online players and retain some share of digital advertising,” says Alice Pickthall, media analyst at Enders.
“As the digital market grows, publishers aren’t seeing a proportionate amount of share gain. Facebook has had an especially big impact on the local market. If a local business is offered a lovely shiny [presence] on Facebook who wouldn’t use it? The largest [traditional] players in the market will win, they will continue to pick up smaller publishers to maintain scale in a shrinking market.”

LEVESON buried as government goes for Google

UPDATE: Former Labour Leader Ed Miliband (or 'Red Ed' as the right-wing red-tops would have it of this very 'centrist', at least politician who opposes Jeremy Corbyn's left-wing policies) has called for Leveson2 to happen.

Great quote on IPSO - he wasn't impressed when the Mail branded his father a traitor. He tweeted and gave media interviews to counter that rather than trying IPSO.

The Leveson inquiry must be completed. The victims of phone-hacking deserve nothing less

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/08/victims-phone-hacking-leveson-inquiry?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

UPDATE2 A vote could back Impress as the compulsory regulator, and another make papers pay legal costs whether they win or lose any case.  

Government faces possible defeat on press regulation votes

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/may/08/government-facing-possible-defeat-in-press-regulation-votes?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard

Nor can we take comfort from the response to Leveson part one. The press declined to set up the kind of independent regulator that both Leveson and parliament wanted to see. Instead we have Ipso, a toothless organisation that, despite bold promises, has yet to impose a single fine or deliver a single equal prominence front-page correction in a national paper. There are also significant issues around the lack of rules or redress around much of the news on social media.

Greenslade's view that the press inquiry announced by UK PM May marks the death, or at least the long-term parking (surely a Labour victory would see Leveson resurrected?) of Leveson2 seems about right.

His Guardian column is occasional rather than daily these days but always worth looking out for. As a former national newspaper editor himself he reliably skewers the realities of this cantankerous industry and it's billionaire figureheads, gladhanded as they are by regimes of a non-socialist bent.

Interesting that the press' extreme aversion to political scrutiny means it mostly failed to imbue May with lavish praise for meeting a long-term demand, an inquiry into the leeching of the new media titans of press content and finance.

This is, nonetheless, a strong sign of the press' continuing current grip over their ideologically matched right-wing Tory government. Obvious echoes here of the timid burial of Calcutt2 nearly 30 years ago when a declining Tory government took years to respond to Calcutt's demand for a new review, as agreed in his original report, when he noted that press behaviour had not substantially altered, then quietly announced there would be no such review.

Here's a snippet:

For years, they have been calling for something to be done about Google and Facebook, arguing that both steal their content while luring away their advertisers. The result has been falling profits for “old media” and consequent closures of regional and local titles accompanied by a sizeable reduction in the number of journalists, rightly described by May as “a hollowing-out of newsrooms”.

This is hardly a new story, and there has been plenty of political lobbying from publishing organisations in order to persuade the government that their industry’s decline requires attention.

These pleas for action have been couched in terms of a warning that the nation is in danger of losing its “free press”, which, to quote the Daily Mail, therefore represents an “insidious threat to British democracy”. A free press, eh? Would that be the press owned and controlled by rich men – yes, men – or profiteering conglomerates that have been propagandists for a “free market” and opposed all regulatory intervention?

Would that be the free press that has traditionally championed business competition and praised the virtue of technological innovation in other industries where jobs have been wiped out?

It was noticeable that May also ignored such ironies when contending that the decline of newspapers is “dangerous for our democracy” and that the loss of “trusted and credible news sources” makes us “vulnerable to news which is untrustworthy”.

Given that untrustworthy news has been the stock in trade of national titles like the Mail for generations it was hard not to laugh at her disingenuousness.

Guardian: Is May’s press inquiry just a way of putting Leveson 2 on the back burner?

CHOMSKY ADVERTISER FILTER Stop Funding Hate D Mail campaign

FEB 2018 UPDATE: The campaign continues to have traction, an interesting reversal of the history of left-wing papers struggling to gain advertising. Not that we can say the Mail is struggling yet, other than with the general disruption of digitisation, with the online migration of advertising.
The campaign got multiple replies from advertisers pledging to cease placing ads in the Mail after tweeting about a Richard Littlejohn column condemning two gay dads, including celebrity swimmer Tom Daley.

Guardian: Center Parcs pulls Daily Mail ads after column against same-sex parents.

SFH aims to reduce what it sees as the baleful, malevolent influence over UK democracy (such as it is) and public opinion by pressuring advertisers with potential boycotts.

Peter Preston here recalls how left-wing reportage was discouraged through government encouraging advertisers to withdraw from newspapers that were critical of government 'defence' (ie, war!) policy, specifically the Suez crisis.

He develops a valid point - though once more here we can see the potential for social media and we media to have a greater impact on the poor practices of the press industry than the self-reliant IPSO.

Guardian: Bullying Paperchase and the Mail’s other advertisers just hurts everyone.

WEB 2.0 Crowdfunded StopFundingHate targets tabloid advertisers

Once again, we see alternatives to formal regulators springing up.

Chomsky recognised the power of advertisers, one of the five filters in his propaganda model; Curran and Seaton argue that the government encouraged press industry reliance on ad revenue to ensure that radical papers would struggle; the NoTW was closed by Murdoch when advertiser boycotts were organised online and major advertisers began to announce they'd cease paying for ads in the paper (he feared this would widen to the Sun/Times and Sky), while the Times in the 60s changed their editorial policy to be more right-wing, and alienate the new swathe of working class readers they picked up (advertisers refused to pay any extra for these new readers); Facebook and Google refused to consider any action on racist and other right-wing ads until a threatened advertiser boycott ...

Like Hacked Off, this is a citizen pressure group, making use of new media to push their agenda, including crowdfunding to launch the campaign:








Crowdfunder link.

ADVERTISER POWER YouTube censors demonetised videos

A notable outcry here, as it reinforces one of the fundamental lessons needed to grasp the complexities of media regulation: advertisers form a de facto, informal regulator. If they won't pay for space in your outlet, in most media industries that will lead to a revenue crisis.

Chomsky has advertiser power as one of the five filters in his propaganda model.

The row and resignation over the Daily Telegraph spiking critical stories about HSBC to protect its advertising account with the bank; the 1960s manoeuvres of The Times to get rid of its new working class readers when advertisers refused to pay any extra for these non-ABC1s; Murdoch closing NoTW only when multiple advertiser boycotts were announced, with more to follow after social media campaigns, which threatened to contaminate other News Corp outlets; the fate of the Daily Herald, a left-wing, union owned paper that was for a time the biggest selling in the world, but would ultimately collapse and reappear as Murdoch's right-wing S*n ...

Some of the trashy YouTube content undermined by YouTube withdrawing ads from 'unsuitable' videos may appear trivial, but the principles of freedom of speech and media diversity are always most easily undermined by picking soft targets to establish censorial practices that can then be arbitrarily widened.

YouTube and Facebook, together with their all-important advertisers, exist as largely unregulated behemoths, gaining an ever expanding role in the media landscape. Censorship, whether it comes down to algorithm 'tweaks' or demonetising videos matters as mainstream media's reliance on digital platforms, not least these two, grows.

With more and more low/micro-budget and back catalogue films going online, not least through YouTube, this can also be viewed as an alternative form of regulation to the formal BBFC system.

YouTube video makers protest as ads are stripped from 'inappropriate' content.

Mass media doomed, democracy too with churnalism?

Roy Greenslade recently opined that UK newspapers have reached the cliff edge, and could die out en masse very quickly now. The spark was a dreadful set of annual returns showing even the juggernaut of the Daily Mail struggling with print advertising.

Read article here.

Curran and Seaton looked back to the supposed liberalisation and birth of a free press with the 1853 scrapping of tax on newspapers, highlighting the role that advertisers played in deciding which papers survived the shake up. They found that it was mostly radical (left-wing) papers that closed, with advertisers effectively boycotting titles that spread news or views that undermined their parent businesses capitalist prospects (for instance by spreading knowledge of the trade union movement and fostering a working class consciousness).

Chomsky included advertisers as one of the five filters removing counter-hegemonic ideas and information from mainstream media in his propaganda model.

The role that advertisers can play in shaping editorial was shown when Telegraph columnist Peter Oborne revealed the paper had spiked pieces critical of major advertiser HSBC.

Today's very right-wing S*n newspaper grew out of a left-wing Daily Herald that faced secret services harassment but ultimately folded because they couldn't win sufficient advertising, despite offering the largest newspaper circulation in the country (at one stage the world!) at a time.

What do IPSO, the press regulator, have to say on this? Nothing.

Is this time of extreme pressure a good one to toughen up regulation of the press, with Impress if recognised and granted a royal charter threatening to bring huge fines to the table?

The BBFC arguably showed with their refusal to re-rate Postman Pat to PG that they wouldn't create such financial, business issues for film distributors once a film is in cinemas (all the marketing material, and even the trailer and actual film prints, would need replacing!). Perhaps then it is right if similar leniency is shown to a financially struggling industry ... or maybe the basic principles at stake are just too important to dilute?

Either way, without professional journalism, what hope has democracy got? The churnalists of the Daily Mail website are controversial as they largely rewrite other papers work and re-present it as their own. Google and Facebook are likewise feasting off the expensive product created by mass media papers.

Mass media is over, but where does journalism go from here? (Greenslade, 2016)

With advertising being so utterly dominated by just two online giants, how can a press pay for its content in future? The Times and S*n have both shown that newspaper online subscriptions are a very, very hard sell indeed.

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.

IPSO NUJ condemn it over Hopkins discrimination ruling

The National Union of Journalists has condemned the press regulator’s decision to reject complaints about Katie Hopkins’ Sun column which described migrants as “cockroaches”.Last week, the Independent Press Standards Organisation rejected all complaints that the column, which sparked widespread anger by suggesting that Europe should use gunboats to stop migrants crossing the Mediterranean, was discriminatory on the grounds that it did not refer to a specific individual.The NUJ said that by rejecting the complaints IPSO has “thrown further doubt on its own legitimacy” as the successor to the Press Complaints Commission.Only two complaints out of more than 400 have been referred to the Sun, both under clauses of the editors’ code dealing with accuracy rather than discrimination.

NUJ condemns regulator's decision on Katie Hopkins 'cockroaches' column (Mark Sweney, Guardian, 2015)

Whilst reluctant to further Hopkins' rather crude career plan - be loudly objectionable, become the subject of media debate, be a known talking head for hire - this is a useful case study from IPSO, one which can very usefully be compared to one of the PCC's most contentious decisions. Despite being the most complained about story in the PCC's history, they found no case to case to answer from Jan Moir's (another ... delightful columnist) piece on Stephen Gately, marking the Boyzone singer's funeral by linking homosexuality with drug-taking, promiscuity and the assumption that he had AIDS!

A reminder of the Gately ruling, one which did little to bolster the public view of the PCC:

The Press Complaints Commission has rejected a complaint from the partner of Stephen Gately, the Boyzone singer who died suddenly in October, over an article by the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir.The PCC received more than 25,000 complaints, a record number, after Moir wrote about Gately's death, describing events leading up to it as "sleazy" and "less than respectable".The article, published on 16 October, six days after Gately's death, provoked outrage, with many readers expressing their anger on Facebook and Twitter. Gately's record company, Polydor, also complained.In a ruling, the commission said it was "uncomfortable with the tenor of the columnist's remarks" but that censuring Moir, and the paper, would represent "a slide towards censorship". It added: "Argument and debate are working parts of an active society and should not be constrained unnecessarily."The PCC's director, Stephen Abell said the article contained flaws, but the commission had decided: "It would not be proportionate to rule against the columnist's right to offer freely expressed views about something that was the focus of public attention."Gately's civil partner, Andrew Cowles, said he was disgusted by the article and claimed the Daily Mail had broken the PCC's code of conduct on three grounds, arguing that it was inaccurate, intruded into private grief and contained homophobic remarks.The code says that the press must avoid making pejorative references to a person's sexual orientation, but the commission said that Moir did not use any abusive or discriminatory language."While many complainants considered that there was an underlying tone of negativity towards Mr Gately and the complainant on account of the fact that they were gay, it was not possible to identify any direct uses of pejorative or prejudicial language in the article," it said.

Taken from Robinson, 2012 Guardian article.

Clearly there is a VERY high barrier indeed to having any complaints on this clause upheld. As ever with the PCC and now IPSO, it is worth trying to step back and noting the point about freedom of speech; you may agree or disagree with its application here, but it is an important principle.

The NUJ are notable here ... their voice has been near-invisible in the ongoing 'debate' over press regulation.

The earlier Moir case also provides an example of commercial advertiser pressure not working to impact press content:

16 October 2009 The day before Gately's funeral, Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir writes an article that describes events leading up to his death as "sleazy" and "less than respectable". "Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one," she writes. The article provokes outrage on Twitter, with Derren Brown urging fans to complain to the Press Complaints Commission. More than 1,000 complaints are made by 7pm, causing the press watchdog's website to crash for most of the afternoon. In a highly unusual move, the Daily Mail issues a statement from Moir defending her views, while brands such as Marks & Spencer remove ads from the online version of the article.

The quote above is from a Guardian timeline of the controversy. The Mail would not be budged!