The Future of News (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Friday 25th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, not only for the excellent way in which she introduced this debate but for the tremendous job she did in chairing the Communications and Digital Committee. She led with energy and purpose, which was much appreciated by us all.

This is a critically important debate that goes to the heart of the future of democracy. A healthy democracy needs voters to be informed and engaged; instead, we are seeing a significant rise in news avoidance, significant disengagement with news among some demographics, and lowering levels of voter turnout.

During the work on this report I was most struck by the decline in local news, which others have mentioned, and the committee makes a series of important recommendations to tackle this. The growth of local news deserts is alarming. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, said, in too many areas voters next week will be going to the ballots almost blindfold. The absence of local professional journalism means local politicians not being held to account, a lack of transparency and an absence of channels for candidates to promote their policies. Instead, voters are reliant on social media. We know that these are the platforms for echo chambers and pile-ons, not reasoned debate. Voters are vulnerable there to simplistic populist policies that do not bear scrutiny. I therefore welcome the DCMS local news strategy and urge it to act robustly and with urgency.

I strongly encourage your Lordships to watch the latest TED talk by Carole Cadwalladr. Her previous talk blew the lid on Cambridge Analytica and the massive, widespread harvesting of Facebook data that then allowed social media to be used to influence voters in the Brexit referendum and other elections. As a result of that talk, she suffered a SLAPP at the hands of Arron Banks. I strongly support what our report said on SLAPPs and urge the Government to reconsider their position on a legislative solution during this Parliament.

Cadwalladr’s latest TED talk is brave and names the “coup” by the “broligarchy” in Silicon Valley. The tech bros have been given the freedom to make untold riches out of harvesting our data in exchange for loyalty to a President who has said that the press are the enemy of the people.

When the committee visited Silicon Valley, Meta was clear: news is too much trouble for it, so it is not servicing it to avoid paying for it. Now Meta in the US has abandoned fact-checking. X would not see us. Google is doing deals with news providers, as is OpenAI. I support what the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said about news aggregators.

Cadwalladr reminds us in her talk that all these businesses are based on data harvesting. Their surveillance is extreme and they undermine our privacy. They have the infrastructure of totalitarianism, and the White House is freeing them up to do as they see fit. These are also the platforms that, yet again, are destroying the business models of news—this time through scraping their content, training their AIs and then generating news algorithmically.

The committee is right to push the Government to do better on the vexed issue of copyright and AI. I wish Ministers well in negotiating a crucial trade deal with the US, but this must not be at the expense of children’s online safety, our vibrant creative sector or the viability of news organisations, both large and small.

We are at a moment in history when I genuinely believe that democracy is at threat through the erosion of professional journalism. We are not powerless. We must prioritise protecting the viability of news and ensure that informed, diverse debate is unmediated by unaccountable algorithms.