Our news environment has the potential to become very grim indeed

Opinion

The lords report on news was a balanced read that contained well-meaning recommendations but, until there’s robust legislation in place, can we truly protect the future of news in the UK?

Few will mourn the departure of the hereditary peers. They will have more time in future to defend their landed estates against the threat of having to pay inheritance tax.

But the lords themselves, as in the life peers, when they bring specialist knowledge to their role (as opposed to those rewarded with ermine robes for political favours), can be particularly valuable.

A case in point is this week’s report from the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, The Future of News, which warned that within the next five to 10 years there was a realistic possibility of the UK’s news environment “fracturing irreparably along social, regional and economic lines”, with particularly “grim” consequences for our democracy.

Yet the committee notes the UK is not the US — demise is not inevitable and some media outlets will continue to flourish, even in the current challenging environment.

But there are serious problems that have to be tackled urgently. They range from doing something about the worsening economics of local media and the impact of AI to mounting a more “muscular deterrence against foreign adversaries”.

Expert views

According to Baroness Stowell, who chairs the committee, the UK still had a healthy press sector, regulated broadcasters and an excellent range of online outlets offering more choice that ever before.

“But we need to be clear about the risks and realistic about the direction of travel,” said Stowell, who emphasised the importance of news and the fact that “accurate and well-informed news creates the shared understanding of facts, which is so important to our democratic system”.

The balanced report clearly benefited from the presence of peers who know what they are talking about when it comes to the media.

Apart from Stowell, who had a senior role at the BBC before entering Conservative politics, the committee includes former BBC director-general Lord Tony Hall and Baroness Patience Wheatcroft, former editor of The Sunday Telegraph and ex-editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal Europe.

Away from mainstream news

The UK may have its own sophisticated media ecosystem, as their lordships emphasise, but what is happening elsewhere is still scary.

More than 76m Americans voted for Donald Trump and now there is a real chance that he will install his own chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, with the threat that broadcasters could lose their licences if they do not dance to the Trump agenda.

ABC could face particular retribution because the network had the temerity to fact-check Trump’s many falsehoods in real time during his presidential debate.

Also, who knows what impact a newly emboldened Elon Musk will have on the media and whether he will in the end destroy the Twitter business he bought for $44bn but is now estimated to be worth closer to $9bn?

What is known is that Americans who regularly read newspapers voted three to one in favour of Kamala Harris. Obviously not enough Americans read newspapers and Trump concentrated on communicating through right-wing podcasts.

Next scary development of the week has highlighted the role of TikTok in influencing politics in Europe.

Out of nowhere in Romania came Calin Georgescu, a far-right, pro-Russian candidate, in the country’s presidential election. Despite not having a party and being virtually unknown to most Romanians, Georgescu topped first-round voting.

He campaigned almost entirely on TikTok.

Modest recommendations

Back in the mercifully less dramatic House of Lords, the committee has come up with a number of modest recommendations.

As they argue, more financial support is urgently needed for local media and that, the committee argues, should take the form of tax breaks for hiring and training local journalists and support for an expanded Local Democracy Reporting Service, currently funded by the BBC.

The committee had criticised “tepid and inadequate” attempts by the government to do anything meaningful about tech companies using news content from mainstream media to train their AI systems. It wants the Competition & Markets Authority to investigate, since they could be breaching copyright by lifting content to help fuel their news summaries.

Those summaries themselves could lead to a two-tier system of news being offered to consumers, with many receiving a news stream that has not been through conventional journalistic checks and balances. Ofcom rules on media plurality should also be updated to take account of AI-generated news summaries.

The report, perhaps because of a Conservative majority in its ranks, does stray into a thicket of arguments about the need to remain proportionate on “mis/disinformation”.

But there is absolutely no need to remain “proportionate” about the clearly false. It should be hunted down and denounced at every opportunity.

Meanwhile, it is far from clear that the recommendation encouraging “more effort on long-term societal resilience and more muscular deterrence against foreign adversaries” quite fits the enormity of the challenge faced by the news business.

The committee also worried about the low levels of trust in which some sections of the media are held.

It might have had more to say about the role of the right-wing press in such a lack of trust. Just to take one example, the Daily Express recently fulminated against the government for giving more than £500m to foreign farmers under aid plans when almost all such aid had been bestowed by the previous government.

We need more

With these reasonable and well-meaning suggestions from the select committee, the problem is that they hardly go far enough.

The growing imbalance between the multibillions of the high-tech companies and the disappearing advertising revenues of the existing media cannot be tackled by polite entreaties.

The tech giants must be persuaded to pay their fair share — not just for the content that is at the heart of their business, but also pay a fair contribution of taxes on their revenues and profits.

Alas, only robust legislation rather than committee recommendations will make that happen.

Raymond Snoddy is a media consultant, national newspaper columnist and former presenter of NewsWatch on BBC News. He writes for The Media Leader on Wednesdays — bookmark his column here.