UK Journalism (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood. I fully support his closing remarks and would like to do anything I can to help him in that quest.

I must declare my interests, first as a career journalist and somebody who still pens the occasional article and, secondly, as the current—and, indeed, so far only—chairman of the Financial Times appointments and oversight committee. I was interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Birt, refer to the FT and Martin Wolf in particular. As somebody who had never worked for that paper until recently, I assure noble Lords that I have been so impressed by the care that the journalists take in what they write.

But, like the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, I am not sorry that I am not now embarking on a career in journalism, because it is a very different career. Too many of the people who set off with grand ideas find themselves chained to a screen and never really allowed out, even to meet real people.

How different it is from those days when Lord Rees-Mogg—as he was then—never had anything to do with a keyboard and would phone in his copy to people who would take it down verbatim. Occasionally, of course, the odd typo slipped in. One went all the way through and, on the page in which the column appeared, Rees-Mogg informed the world that the Queen had just carried out her task with all the aplomb with which she “shot peasants”. I looked it up online and found the photograph that proved that she did indeed do this—the caption said, “The Queen and Prince Philip celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary with a peasant shoot”. If anyone is interested, it is in the Waterford Whisperer. I tell the story merely because it is evidence of fake news in the extreme, which is what we have to cope with.

Much has been said in this debate about the power of the platforms, and this excellent report, for which we owe our thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, and his committee, puts a lot of stress on that. I support the proposals to try to curb that power, but I do not underestimate the difficulties there will be.

However, today I will concentrate on two issues. The first is the importance of media holding power to account, particularly politicians. We have seen the media doing that very well during the last year or so, over PPE contracts, for instance, and most recently the Pandora Papers. What was most interesting about that was that 160 news outlets—normally the most competitive of organisations—combined their efforts to make a point and release some really valuable information that they had worked on so hard for so long.

It is really important that those organisations have the power to continue to do that, and to do so at a national and local level. The Government’s research has found that turnout in local elections is higher when there is good local media coverage. Luckily, the BBC is there to support local media. Since 2018, it has built up a team of 165 local democracy reporters, who make their work available over local news media. It is really important that that should continue.

It is also essential that the media functions not merely to convey the content of press releases but to question what is already being said. The process of education will help, and the report is very sound on that, but the process of educating people to be quite sceptical about what they read will take time. In the meantime, work such as that done by Full Fact, the charity of the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, is very valuable, but so is the work of the BBC with its Reality Check website, which is essential reading for anybody who wants to know the truth. Certainly, its dissection of the Prime Minister’s conference speech should be made widely available.

That takes me to my second point: the regulation of the BBC and beyond. Ofcom is a hugely powerful organisation with a wide reach. It does not regulate newspapers but does regulate just about every aspect of TV and radio, including the BBC. Since January this year, Ofcom has been awaiting a new chair. An acting chair was put in place at the beginning of the year, until 30 June, while the appointment process for a permanent chair was completed. This powerful media regulator is still without a permanent chair. It appears that the process to interview and appoint one has stalled. So, while I genuinely welcome the noble Lord to his new position as Minister, I also apologise for asking him whether he can he bring the House up to date on the process for appointing a chairman of Ofcom.