UK Journalism (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, this report is packed full of useful insights into the challenges facing contemporary journalism. I am especially pleased to see that at last—if rather belatedly—the problem of lack of diversity has been expanded beyond representation to include the urgent need for diversity of opinion. The problem of groupthink for journalistic impartiality is well described in the report. I agree with Sir Robbie Gibb that too often journalists are stuck in echo chambers and therefore misread the mood of the country, as they did with Brexit, too often mistaking Twitter for public opinion.

I am glad that the report notes the problem of confirmation bias. However, identifying a problem does not solve it. I am not so convinced by the proposed solution of getting Ofcom to collect data on a larger number of demographic characteristics of staff, such as socioeconomic background, because it seems to me that that is just another version of representational identity head counting that misses the point.

I am more persuaded by the report’s focus on the problem of an over-academicised journalistic profession. The tried and tested tradition of school leavers joining local newspapers as apprentices in the heart of communities, learning their trade by covering, for example, court cases and council meetings, would do more than valuably restore journalism’s key role of holding all public bodies to account. It might also drag journalism out of its rarefied ivory tower—and it might save us from the cack-handed reportage of the London media venturing into red wall areas like anthropologists discovering new exotic tribes.

One key area I do have qualms about is the treatment of the public’s mistrust of media institutions. I am squeamish about the seeming assumption that the problem here is one of the public’s ignorance. The disproportionate emphasis in the report on media literacy as a vehicle for restoring trust implies that it is the public who need educating—as though the media were blameless.

This becomes clearer in the discussion on how to train citizens to detect misinformation. Surely it is more complicated than that—especially as the term “misinformation” has increasingly little to do with factual accuracy and is regularly weaponised to delegitimise opinions that journalists and politicians deem dangerous or offensive, or which simply do not fit into a narrow official narrative.

Although the report, and the Government’s response, reassuringly stress the importance of a free press, I would say that media freedom has rarely confronted so many censorious trends. Those often come in the guise of fighting misinformation and fake news, and that is where we see the real threat to free media.

Ofcom’s coronavirus guidance heavy-handedly instructed broadcasters not to feature stories that, first, undermined people’s trust in the advice of mainstream sources, or, secondly, would deter audiences from following official rules. Surely, this veers close to state-endorsed suppression of dissent—as though the science were settled, and that was it. It turns the media into a behaviour-modification scheme.

As MP Steve Baker noted, Ofcom effectively labelled any kind of rational criticism as unscientific misinformation. This may explain a conformity of narrative, throughout the pandemic, from media outlets that differed from one another only in the levels of fear and anxiety they whipped up.

Meanwhile, the Government have encouraged big tech to become a “Truthfinder General” in recent months, in relation to alleged misinformation—at great cost to free speech and transparency. Ultimately, that denied access to a wide range of opinions and evidence, which were not made available to the public—or, indeed, to journalists.

Look at how those who tried to raise the possibility of a Wuhan lab leak had their social media accounts suspended, and how respected experts were lumped together with cranky 5G obsessives as agents of misinformation. Interviews and evidence were removed by Facebook. This in turn stopped journalists investigating what is now considered a crucial line of inquiry—but rather too late; the evidence has gone. Then there was the infamous removal of Talk Radio’s channel by YouTube. When digital giants feel emboldened by government to shut down and censor MSM, there is surely no room for complacency about freedom of the press.

In this context, I am less than reassured by the constant references to the online safety Bill as a protector of media freedom—hardly, when the Bill would mandate, and therefore empower, big tech to remove so-called misinformation, all enforced by Ofcom. This is a recipe for censorship.

Finally, there are new threats to a free press on the horizon. The media itself can be a victim of cancel culture. For example, the strategy of the online Twitter mobs unleashed by the NGO Stop Funding Hunt—sorry, I mean Stop Funding Hate—is to bully a variety of businesses to cancel advertising in certain media outlets, usually tabloids, but more recently GB News. The idea is to punish financially editorial “wrongthink”, and that is chilling. So I hope the committee will look into new threats to media freedom. I regret that, when it does that, one of the greatest threats it will have to consider is the forthcoming online safety Bill—unless some of us can stop it.