My God Ofcom has sensible things to say about media plurality
Raymond Snoddy wonders if there is there no end to the wisdom of Ofcom. But then the organisation has a really tricky problem to deal with. We call it the Leveson dilemma…
The great thing about the media is there is a surprise at least every week and often every day of the year.
While still recovering from the shock of Michael Gove saying sensible things about press freedom it’s time for another jaw drop moment.
My God Ofcom, the communications regulator, has sensible things to say about media plurality.
The internet should be taken into account as a dynamic and rapidly expanding source. You can hardly argue against that one.
Google should be included even though at a YouGov seminar last week Noah Samuels, Google’s director of cross-poduct solutions, admitted that the company does not have a single journalist checking the accuracy of the information it disseminates. But let’s not be picky.
Ofcom also concluded that the BBC should be included in any review, a conclusion that would be difficult to escape given that 57% of the population who use the internet for news regularly go to BBC online services.
The media regulator also wisely came to the conclusion that setting precise percentages of market share for newspapers or any other news source would be inflexible and inadvisable.
Labour leader Ed Miliband please take note!
Is there no end to the wisdom of Ofcom? But then the organisation has a really tricky problem to deal with. We can call it the Leveson dilemma.
If none of the above then what do you actually propose as a solution? Despite obvious temptation, a body like Ofcom can’t just say everything on the whole is fine and insist that no action of any kind is required.
Here the true genius of Ofcom comes into play. The idea is so well formed and politically robust that chief executive Ed Richards must have been involved.
Only someone who has worked in the Downing Street strategy office could have come up with such an imaginative and yet deceptively simple manoeuvre.
You have a review every four or five years. This is very good. The tricky issue is pushed deep into the next Parliament or as politicians of a certain vintage used to describe it – kicked into the long grass.
But it gets better. Think of all the senior level jobs in Ofcom that will be preserved by the institutionalising of a regular review. They would no sooner be finished with their legal obligation to inquire into the state of public service broadcasting before, like a media version of the Forth Bridge, it would be time to start work on the media plurality review.
Pretty smart eh? The point is regularity. At the moment Ofcom only gets to play on plurality issues when a merger is under way and Rupert Murdoch might be a bit quiet on that front for the next few years.
And minsters always need something to take away from a review that they set up – a hare that they started running.
Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has mislaid his communications Green Paper and lost a great deal of his political credibility for reasons too obvious to mention. But it would be a cruel person who would deny him a regular review or two as a substitute for real action.
Ofcom may have stumbled instinctively onto a great truth – that in the internet age there is a cacophony of opinion and a diversity of views that would have amazed even our immediate ancestors.
If anything there is too much plurality of opinion for any person to get a handle on. There is even little sign of a shortage of professional, verifiable information either.
In such a world the importance of ownership might start to fade. It is inconceivable that one organisation could in any way control the BBC, Google, Facebook, News Corp and ITV.
It’s diversity of opinion that’s the thing, not necessarily artificially set levels of ownership.
Of course secretary Hunt might want to meddle some more. After all when he asked Ofcom to look into the issue he mused that perhaps the BBC had too great a share of voice.
Amusing then that Hunt himself was deeply involved in increasing the editorial “ownership” of the BBC by making sure that the Corporation takes over full control of the World Service.
What do you do if you think the BBC has too great a share of voice because the citizenry insist on trusting the quality of BBC News? Cancel the Six O’Clock News or close down the BBC News Channel thereby creating a monopoly for Sky? Hardly.
As for Ed Milibrand and his courageous plan to limit the extent of newspaper ownership, he obviously forgets that News International may have a 37% share but 37% of what? Alas a share of a declining market and at least in terms of print the bottom of the market has not yet been reached.
It cannot be stated often enough that the quickest way to endanger the future of the loss-making Times is to try to break up News International because of some spurious plurality issue.
Ofcom hasn’t been fooled by superficial arguments such as that touted by Miliband. But it still shouldn’t get carried away by its efforts this week.
It made a mess of reviewing the Murdoch attempt to take over the 61% of BSkyB he did not already own. There was no threat to competition or plurality as Brussels made clear. Sky News was never going to be turned into a British version of Fox News – the continuing impartiality rules would, on their own, have prevented that happening. No regulator is perfect.
The next big shock on the way – that Lord Patton and the BBC Trust appoint a sensible and experienced director-general for the BBC. That is perhaps too implausible for serious consideration.