Communications Bill May Create Cultural Dinosaur Park
The government is facing further criticism over its plans to liberalise the regulations governing media ownership, with a leading academic claiming that a ‘cultural Jurassic Park’ is in the making.
The key sticking points of the Bill are the clauses which will facilitate non-EU ownership of UK media assets and the lifting of cross media ownership restrictions. The latter will enable newspaper groups to run terrestrial TV stations.
The government has defended the proposals on the grounds of free market growth, a stance not supported by Tracey, who comments: “It’s a bit like the arguments offered by the Bush administration for not signing the Kyoto accords: let the market sort it out, and if there is pollution deal with it after the environment has been corrupted and God forbid that you should step in pre-hoc to prevent the disaster before it happens.”
Another figure to have joined the debate is US media magnate Barry Diller. The man who founded the Fox Network has warned the British government that allowing US media groups into the market is a mistake. Referring to both the UK and US media landscapes, Diller is quoted as telling a conference that more, not less, regulation is needed.
Tracey believes those defending the Bill have failed to understand the impact of market economics, commenting: “It is important to consider the whole landscape of American television. I noticed that people referred to The Sopranos or Friends, implying that because of these things [US-style deregulation] can’t be that bad, to which my response is that even deserts have the occasional tree.”
According to Tracey, deregulation is a beast: “Looming and lurking, threatening, ravenous, uncaring, dangerous, Britain as a cultural Jurassic park, governed by the canny intelligence of velociraptors.”
Home front opposition The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) believes the proposed Bill will decimate the UK media ecology, claiming: “The motivation for a US company to take an ownership stake in UK broadcasting would be to increase their own profitably by exploiting their own programme stocks in the UK market rather than investing significantly in UK production.”
This is a view echoed in the House of Lords where the Communications Bill has entered its third reading. A trio of high-profile peers (Melvyn Bragg, David Puttnam and Waheed Alli) have warned that US ownership of UK media groups would damage the quality of television programming, with competitors ‘obliterated by mega-corporations’.
Specifically, there is much concern that the rules effectively pave the way for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation to buy Channel 5. This would give Murdoch control of the dominant pay-TV platform (BSkyB), a division of four national newspapers, as well as a free-to-air terrestrial TV station.
Stuart Prebble, former chief executive of ITV, has reportedly described the Government’s intentions as “craven”, wryly remarking that the Bill seems to have been written by Murdoch himself.
The fresh criticism is a further blow to Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, who this week moved to defend the bill in the face of growing disquiet around Westminster (see Jowell Moves To Defend Foreign Ownership Deregulation).