To the Westminster Media Forum to talk about The Future of News Media. Hopefully, for the students, there is one.
With charter review complete and the licence fee about to be set, no-one from the BBC is in attendance. But with a huge percentage of the jobs in broadcast and online news being in said corporation, its shadow looms large. Who would want to piss it off? Who would not want to be its friend?
Sky News exec ed Chris Birkett is there, as is Channel 4 News deputy editor, Martin Fewell.
The subjects are interesting:
• The future of news outlets in informing the public
• What do UK citizens in the 21C expect from news media?
• Impartiality and broadcast news
• Depth, quality & relevance: an increasing challenge for news media?
But no one sticks to them. Instead we hear a score of opinions from the score of panellists. Familiar themes include the disparagement of the US broadcast media, and lauding of the beneficent role played in UK public life by the BBC.
Only Don Foster from the Lib Dems (who actually expended a couple of words on the demise of the ITV News Channel) bothers to say how dreadful the new BBC governance regime is, making the trustees guardians not of the public interest, but of the BBC itself. Conservative DCMS shadow, Hugo Swire, looks like a man minding a brief for a friend. A Scottish questioner from the floor fails to understand how Mark Thompson is not interested in giving a country with its own legal system and parliament its own national TV news.
The debate on impartiality features a voluble Welsh guy from The Sun, Marc Webber (on the right), who makes a lively presentation at which he takes credit for inventing debate and the Internet too. Guess he never heard of Question Time or 606. He gets a round of applause for showing enthusiasm, if not actually saying anything sensible or worthwhile.
No-one asks about standards, as if the biggest libel trial in British legal history hadn’t occurred (see previous posts on Libel news). The debates are old and sterile. Money for ‘impartial’ or regulated news in the UK has traditionally come directly from the licence fee, or indirectly – as the unquantified, regulatory price of analogue spectrum.
Now the news part of the licence fee is likely going to one organization for another ten years, with no indies – like ITN or Sky – allowed to compete for it. And the indirect subsidy is disappearing along with analogue television.
So the future for regulated, trusted news is either with the BBC or with whatever regulatory procedures are put in place to preserve or enforce news funding for other providers.
Myself, I like Channel 4 News and ITV News, and the BBC and Sky. I like the mixture, the possibility for a little diversity, a little alternative. But politicians don’t seem that bothered. Nor, judging by attendance, do too many other people. Are you?