By Susan Yu
In the furore that surrounded the Leveson Inquiry, the past
few months have shone the spotlight on the relationship between politics, the
media and its regulators to the publics’ attention.
To
get an insight into this complicated web, Lord Carter of Barnes, former
minister for Communications,
Technology & Broadcasting and Founding Chief Executive of Ofcom, came
to speak at the Oxford Media Society and gave us a shrewd overview on the
profit, policy and politics: balancing the public and private interest in the
media and communications industries.
‘There
was a great joke doing the rounds in Downing Street’, Lord Carter enthused.
‘The Pope was on a visit to the UK and was keen to go on a trip up the River
Thames. A gust of wind blew the mitre off the Pope and into the river it fell’.
Tony Blair being ‘muscular and athletic, without hesitation, took off his
jacket and shirt and leapt off the boat, swam to get the mitre back to the Pope’.
The next day the news headline says ‘Tony Blair walks on water’. Five years
later, Gordon Brown is in power and the ‘Pope makes another visit up the Thames’.
Same thing happens again, the wind blows the Pope’s hat into the river. Brown, remembering
what had happened before, takes off his jacket, leaps off the boat, he doesn’t
dive in, ‘he walks across the water, doesn’t get wet at all, picks up the hat
and walks back to the Pope’. And the next day, the newspaper headline reads ‘Gordon
Brown can’t swim’.
So
what does that tell you? ‘Apart from the fact that it is completely a
fictitious story’ with which Lord Carter amused us, the underlying message is
that sometimes the media conditions the environment within which reality is
seen. And that is ‘the reason why we have a different relationship with the
media unlike any other industry’. The press have the ability to play back what
actually happened with a perspective. ‘People have higher expectations of the
media industry,’ Lord Carter explained, because ‘they inform us, reflect our
opinions back to us; shape our opinions’. Indeed, the media is a powerful tour
de force that can profoundly shape our thoughts, and without tight regulations,
things can get out of hand and people can and have stepped over line, as
exemplified by the phone hacking employees of the Murdoch empire.
This
leads us to the question, who is then responsible for refereeing the media? A
fair game of football simply would not work without a referee. ‘Regulation is a
critical part of any industry’. The media industry is ‘not black and white’.
Indeed, ‘there are shades of grey’.
The
genesis of Ofcom, the regulator and competition
authority for the UK communications industries, started in 1997 just as
the Labour party came into power. Importantly, Ofcom ‘brought broadband to the
UK and thrashed its wholesale prices’. As a consequence of this, all the
newspapers have been making less profit over the last ten years. Most newspaper
companies are ‘not funded by the state,’ and are therefore out there to make a
profit, and not just any profit, but ‘an unreasonable profit because everyone
in business wants to make an unreasonable profit’. With ‘less money to invest,
less profit to reap’ what do you do in order to stay alive? You take a risk.
And the more risks you take, you push the rules, and that is what we are
uncovering in the Leveson Inquiry. Journalists in that environment found themselves
to take more risks, because the competitive environment that they were in, was
such that it made it more difficult to operate. Ultimately, what they did was
not right, but to get to the crux of the problem, it is imperative to
understand the context in which it all happened.
Lord
Carter suspects what will happen next after the Leveson Inquiry is a tougher
regime for the regulation of the newspaper market will ensue, albeit it will
‘happen about five years after that market is really that relevant’.
In
truth, both the press and its regulators all have a hefty lesson to learn from
the Leveson Inquiry. Rules are not to be broken.
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