The Future of News (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

Friday 25th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the committee and the chair on this important report, and my noble and very dear friend Lord Pack on his excellent maiden speech—I look forward to many more.

With the growth of social media, everyone is a pundit: individuals, Governments and terrorist groups. The challenges in news collection and delivery are manifold, and now bear an unbearable burden of a 24/7 news cycle, political and ideological bias, fast reporting with poor verification, and pundits or guests spreading unverified claims. For me, the most important issue is to ensure that there is a go-to, unimpeachable source, or sources, where we and the world can be sure that we are getting the dissemination of truth and facts rather than opinions and pundits. This is becoming an ever more challenging ambition, as budgets are cut and organisations bend towards popularity, “gotchas” and feelings.

Messages are now put out by so many bad-faith actors, or if not actually bad, just “My way is the right way”. As the report terrifyingly says in relation to young people, within the USA—and I am sure here too—some news outlets are

“increasingly preoccupied with younger audiences and their preference for ‘authentic’ content rather than ‘authoritative’ sources”.

I loved what the noble Lord, Lord Birt, said. I could weep for the reduction in funding for proper journalism. “Newsnight”, as brilliant as Victoria Derbyshire is—and she is brilliant—is a shadow of its former self. Discussion is not news, and it should be renamed “Discussionnight”.

We are seeing public discourse driven by heat, not light, and the media feeding a frenzy of the negative and the nasty, amplified by the Twittersphere. So much is fuelled by political posturing and shouting, echoed but often led by a disgraceful print media whose sole purpose appears to be to spread hate in order to sell newspapers—because, of course, hate sells.

Of course, I turn to the BBC. The world needs the BBC to be the truth sayer. Its strength is in the very fact that it is publicly funded. It has strong editorial standards and global reach, and it is often a beacon in the darkest corners of this earth. But even the BBC stands accused of bias, reporting errors and breaking news inaccuracies, and it needs to do better. We need to make sure it can and does continue to be that beacon and trusted source, because the importance of that cannot be exaggerated. The danger of the BBC becoming untrustworthy is that there will be a loss of baseline truth. It will be harder, if not impossible, to agree on facts. There will be a global fallout. The BBC is trusted worldwide and if it fails, others will fill the void, including hostile state media. Conspiracy culture would be fuelled, as would anti-media sentiment. Democracy itself becomes undermined as voters are less informed on reality and facts, and polarisation arises. We would lose one of the only powerful watchdogs we have, leaving powerful figures to be held to account less often.

On those powerful figures—and this is intended more for the Government or Governments and political parties than news outlets—I am worried about government and political control of the media, even in sending out whichever Minister to do the rounds according to the No.10 grid, let alone the “lines to take” methodology of saying nothing. It is a conformity and control that diminish our politics and access to real news, and it is this impoverished discipline that makes people turn away from real news to feelings—and that way lies madness.