News Broadcasting: Regulation

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McNally, on bringing this debate forward. He has been an indefatigable campaigner on this subject for many years. I also declare my interests as a trustee of Full Fact and the Public Interest News Foundation. An awful lot of what I would have touched on has already been said, so rather than go over it again I will make a series of slightly generalised points which may seem slightly separated from each other but, I hope, hang together coherently.

The underlying reality is that the media world is an ongoing, permanent revolution. What is appropriate, correct and accurate today may not be tomorrow or next week. As the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, said, you cannot have a properly working free country with universal suffrage if those who live in it do not have a reasonably accurate understanding of what is going on in the public realm—subject to the obvious caveats. If that is the case, you must get the information to the public. This is something that we spend insufficient time thinking about, because it requires money; it cannot be done for nothing. How you get it and how it is deployed is very important. Within that framework, pluralism is very important, because to answer Pilate’s question “What is truth?” is much more difficult than saying what is not true. Hence there is a real need in the broadcasting landscape for as much truthful pluralism in the national debate as you can achieve.

As somebody who chaired a local newspaper company for over a decade, I say that we must not overlook the problems and issues covering news in the smaller local areas around the country. In some ways this is a much greater problem than the question of national and international news. While the development of local democracy reporting is something that I support, I am not sure that we have cracked the problem.

The world that we live in is defined by the Government of the day. As a basic proposition, I suggest that the Government of the day should be kept as far as possible from news gathering and the national Executives of this country and other government agencies should in general have as little as possible to do with setting the terms of reference or the modus operandi of news gatherers. As has been said already, it should be left to Parliament and the courts and independent regulators to do that within a framework of an independent judiciary.

I have considerable sympathy with the journalists’ basic proposition that you must keep government as far as possible from this aspect of public life. Furthermore, it is almost axiomatic that the very rich should not be able to provide “their news” as opposed to “the news”, and they should not be able to gag the news media or stop them from distributing material that is in the public interest. I am not quite sure whether we have got the balance right in this country.

In the age of digital communications, we cannot control everything outside our own jurisdiction. We must watch what techniques there may be for dealing with aspects related to that, but we must recognise this as a truth. Equally, along the same lines, it is not appropriate for foreign Governments to control and own media coming into our country, for the simple reason that, by definition, we cannot be their priority.

At Second Reading of the Media Bill, I made the point that the world is changing so fast, and we do not have an appropriate legislative framework for dealing with the changes as they come into effect. As I said, this is a permanent revolution, and a decennial Act of Parliament is not a relevant means of keeping on top of the matters that are so important. We in this Parliament spend a considerable amount of time debating and thinking about these things, which is right and proper and must continue because, as Thomas Jefferson said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. We must not cease to be vigilant. One of Parliament’s most important roles as part of the checks and balances in our system is to establish the framework within which our fourth estate works.