“Hunt is so nice most people want to believe in local TV just for him”
Raymond Snoddy says one thing is clear, the patently decent, sincere politician (Jeremy Hunt) is committed to retaining impartiality rules for news whether on national or local television. Nothing like a big, bold new Communications Act to take his mind off things when local television goes tits up in 2014…
Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt is one of life’s political optimists and earlier today he was as brimming with optimism as Tigger when he outlined his local television plans at the Oxford Media Convention.
Local was the one area – perhaps the only area – where “our outstandingly successful” media sector had been “outstandingly unsuccessful” in responding to consumer needs.
Sceptics think there might be a reason for that but for the culture secretary it was onwards and upwards. Expressions of interest would have to be in by 1 March. The formal process would get under way by the late summer with licences awarded by the end of next year.
After that local TV would be up and running and we would be on our way towards the vision of a connected big society in which the local is valued as much as the national or international.
Hunt is such a patently decent, sincere politician who absolutely believes in the case he is making – and you can’t say that of every politician – that it is difficult not to be swept up into his optimism.
You could just feel the goodwill oozing around the Said Business School this morning. Hunt is so nice most people wanted to believe in local TV just for him. The culture secretary was even told that most of the tweets had been favourable so far – even though they didn’t stay that way for long.
The Shott report into the prospects of local television had not been over-optimistic. In carefully worded language designed not to offend or be too negative the prospect of an initial 10-12 stations in large metropolitan areas was held out if conditions were right. The conditions included nice slots on the electronic programme guides once analogue switch-over has been completed and a national network spine created to carry, and in effect, subsidise local services.
Hunt broadly endorses the Shott position and has realistically accepted that perhaps two hours a day of local programming is about what you can reasonably expect, at least to begin with.
Former BBC director-general Greg Dyke, who has been known on one or two occasions to be wildly over-optimistic, believes Hunt should show more courage and be brave enough to go for as many as 80 services for cities such as York with 200,000 population and a hinterland of a further 200,000.
All of which leaves a neat slot for Richard Horwood, chief executive of Channel 6 to occupy, in something akin to middle ground. Horwood says he plans to spend more on his national programming than Richard Desmond does on Channel 5.
All programme genres would be covered, including news and then there would be guaranteed opt-out slots for around 40 local affiliates who would be part of the overall project. Horwood must be smiling today because the Hunt argument seems to be driving in the direction of a Channel 6-style model.
The culture secretary was told yesterday there were only two viable models for local TV in the UK. One was the old ITV model where regional stations grew up individually and then united and coalesced over time. The other was the American model with national networks feeding local affiliates.
Which was it to be, Hunt was asked. “The latter” he replied.
Horwood, who has not revealed so far where the large sums of money involved in Channel 6 would be coming from, will clearly face opposition, possibly from ITV and Sky if they whiff an interloper on their patches.
The button has been pressed and the race is under way and we will know soon enough whether any level of optimism about local television, however modest, is justified.
Some of the ruder responses suggested it was outrageous that the BBC had been forced to help pay for Hunt’s “vanity project” from the licence fee. Others reminded of failures of the past – one ironically in Oxford itself and the other in Manchester.
When pressed into a definitive answer for Newswatch, Professor Patrick Barwise of London Business School said he did not think local television would succeed in the UK. The odds were stacked against operators raising enough local advertising or even enough national advertising through a Channel 6-like model.
But Hunt had another rabbit to pull out of the hat yesterday – one that perhaps we should all have expected. Before the next general election in just over four years Hunt is going to produce radical communications legislation for the next decade.
And he has already got his skates on. There will be a Green Paper setting out the scope of the bill before the end of the year. It will range from the future of the BBC, the BBC Trust and the licence fee to what will be regulated in future and what will not.
It suddenly got a little draughty in the lecture hall when Hunt promised to be radical. “This is not about tweaking the current system, but redesigning it – from scratch if necessary – to make it fit for purpose,” the culture secretary promised.
In the meantime, he plans to go ahead with the relaxing of cross-media ownership rules in local markets to encourage growth.
One thing is clear, he is certainly not planning to give a Fox News-like channel a central position in the new world, however much he may admire the achievements of Rupert Murdoch.
Hunt is committed to retaining impartiality rules for news whether on national or local television. Nothing like a big, bold new Communications Act to take his mind off things when local television goes tits up in 2014.