Media: Ownership

Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve]

My Lords, I, too, express gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam. He has been immensely knowledgeable and tirelessly persistent in pursuing this nexus of issues raised by the plurality of media ownership, in and beyond your Lordships’ House.

At the heart of the debate lie the importance of press freedom and the role of the media in democratic societies. It is because we are committed to a free press that there are rather few ways of ensuring that the media, taken together, serve the public interest by offering diverse and thorough coverage of issues of public concern. Anti-monopoly provisions matter here, as nowhere else, because we need not only competition that protects the interests of consumers but diversity that protects the interests of citizens. That is one reason why most democracies conclude that anti-monopoly provisions are particularly important in the case of the media. Many have additionally been concerned to prevent overseas control of their media, or large sections of them.

Parliament recognised these issues in the basic sections of the Communications Act 2003. Section 3 reads:

“It shall be the principal duty of OFCOM, in carrying out their functions—

(a) to further the interests of citizens in relation to communications matters; and

(b) to further the interests of consumers in relevant markets, where appropriate by promoting competition”.

Noble Lords who remember the debates surrounding this part of the legislation will remember that the priority given to Ofcom’s duty to protect the interests of citizens was very hard fought. There will be those who think that Ofcom has not always accorded the interests of citizens that required priority. Now is the time for Ofcom to demonstrate that it takes both of its general duties and the priority which the Act assigns to its duty to citizens seriously, as it adjudicates the matter referred to it.

I take it that in a democracy we want not merely media that are free to publish but media that, taken together, cover a wide range of information, positions and arguments in depth for a range of audiences. This is particularly but not only important in the matter of covering news, where we hope that citizens will have opportunities to read, hear and view news and current affairs produced by a plurality of organisations, but also that they read, hear and view news and current affairs representing a diversity of voices, which will help them to judge matters of public interest.

Until a few years ago, we might have been reasonably confident that if we could secure plurality, diversity would be its natural consequence. I do not believe that is now so easy. We have plurality as never before, not only in the fact that new technologies enable us to access the media via multiple routes but in the fact that some of those whose voices were never heard by their fellow citizens can now make themselves heard via the internet. Yet these forms of plurality do not always support diversity of content and presentation for citizens. There are two fundamental reasons why the link between plurality and diversity has become weaker. One, which I think the lesser problem, is that some of the new voices that use blogs, Twitter, or specialist websites reach very small audiences. We indeed have more originators of content, but citizens may not thereby gain access to greater diversity. Bluntly, plurality is not now by itself enough to secure diversity but it is one of the weapons that we have, so we should prize it and use it.

We have to face the reality that media organisations are prone to repeat, recirculate and restate what is already public. No doubt some, on blogs and Twitter, surprise us by adding grace notes—or disgrace notes—to current debates but all too often they simply echo more powerful voices. What matters is not just concentration of ownership or its ramification through cross-promotion, cross-subsidy and bundling but concentration of editorial control. If we have no ways of ensuring a plurality of editorial views and approaches directly, we need to use these measures to prevent concentration of control, including editorial control.