The silence over job cuts at ITN is a reminder of:
- the lack of political will to take public service commitments seriously and
- the failure of the the regulator.
My personal experience (disclosure: I left the company in 2004) is that ITN is an incredibly tightly run ship. It doesn’t generate profits to pay for corporate jollies or “fat cat” bonuses. It’s a journalist- run business that still gets its core revenues from meeting the public service obligations of its principal clients, ITV and Channel 4.
In the case of ITV, the extent of those obligations have been halved over a decade. The decline in advertising revenue has been slower and gentler than the halving of the news contract.
The regulator, Ofcom, has a budget this year of £127m of which 19% is attributed to regulating broadcast TV – that’s about £24m. Besides the bitter irony that the cost of regulating TV could virtually fund the public service provision of television news on ITV and entirely fund it on Channel 4, the reality is that the regulator has watched the contract go down without:
- acting to do anything to protect it,
- bringing it into line with overall programme spending,
- or even with declining advertising revenue.
ITV may be losing share and and ad money but it has cut public service news provision much harder and much faster.
Will Ofcom awake from its slumber? Not with the current political and public silence.
Its failure highlights yet again the problems of having two regulators for public service broadcasting, a BBC Trust and an Ofcom. With one regulator, public service commitments might at least be possible to benchmark properly.
It’s hard not to think that Ofwat does a rather better job for £12m a year – half of what Ofcom says it spends on telly – regulating an entire industry.