Chapter 3 – Inquiry findings 99
In the UK, public service broadcasting in the form of the BBC has remained free from such pressures thanks to the licence fee (see Box 3.1). The growth of new technology presents a different set of challenges. New technology is often presented in the ideal terms of everyone being connected to everyone else, a non-hierarchical network of voices with equal, open and global access. Social media give the public unprecedented opportunities to respond instantly and condemn sensationalism and socially-unacceptable or poor journalism, as illustrated during the uproar against Jan Moir’s piece in the Daily Mail following the death of singer Stephen Gately or, in the case of the BBC, refusing to broadcast the Gaza appeal. Conversely, however, the internet also contributes to the stifling of original news production. Far from being liberating, new technologies can enable the cutting of costs and increased efficiencies. For newspapers in particular, a decline in advertising revenues and reader figures since the 1970s has forced an increase in output, while at the same time cutting back on staff and diminishing conditions of employment.214 Job insecurity and commercial priorities place increasing limitations on journalists’ ability to function ethically.215 Needing to fill more space, including producing copy for both print and online versions, and to work at greater speed, on the one hand, while having improved access to stories and sources online, on the other, journalists are thrust into news production more akin to creative cannibalisation than original journalism.216
Civil society associations permeate life in the space between government and the market. As such, they are central to debates on increasing public deliberation and enhancing democratic participation in society. If the media are also central to such aims, then the relationship between the two becomes paramount. Civil society associations do, of course, produce their own media content. A UK survey by MTM London for Ofcom found that the third sector spent an estimated £60–80 million on public service content online in 2006/07.217 In addition to securing media coverage and producing media content themselves, civil society associations are also media owners. A long-standing example is the Morning Star,218 founded on 1 January, 1930 as the Daily Worker, and closely linked to the Communist Party. Today, it is a readers’ co-operative, the People’s Press Printing Society. Having survived three-quarters of a century, it still aims to ‘inform, to publicise and to advocate’, and considers itself to be a ‘forum for debate on the left’. While it is an example of civil-society-owned media with a very clear political agenda, it does provide an example of the type of media ownership role that is possible for civil society associations. Drawing primarily on the work by the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre 219 conducted for this Inquiry, this chapter focuses on the current and possible future roles of civil society associations in relation to media ownership and the creation of media content. The Commission recognises that, given the rapid speed and fluidity at which the media and society are changing, it is a challenging issue to write about. Although tremendous change is taking place across the media landscape, it would be wrong to present this as a doomsday scenario. Instead, it is important to look to a flourishing of new forms of quality news production and distribution through the internet, within communities and through new business models. Nevertheless, as illustrated below, the Commission recognises that traditional media are in crisis, and this has implications for the roles of civil society associations.
Civil society associations are central to debates on increasing public deliberation and enhancing democratic participation in society. If the media are also central to such aims, then the relationship between the two becomes paramount.
Democratising media ownership and content
competition and market principles have increased the diversity and range of voices, commercial news is primarily a commodity enterprise run by marketoriented managers, who place outflanking the competition above journalistic responsibility and integrity. Commercial journalism is criticised as being simply entertainment, attempting to pull audience for commercial not journalistic reasons, setting aside the values of professional journalism in order to indulge in gratuitous spectacle and sensational stories. In these ways, news can undermine the crucial arrangement which is meant to operate between a working democracy and its citizens, thus potentially contributing to people’s political disenchantment.