Cairncross Review

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking in response to The Cairncross Review: a sustainable future for journalism.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I gently remind the House of the three-minute time limit. This is a time-limited debate, and it would be helpful if Members could please stick to that limit.

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, it has been a year since Dame Frances Cairncross published her review, A Sustainable Future for Journalism. Cairncross’s remit was

“to consider the sustainability of the production and distribution of high-quality journalism, and especially the future of the press”.

The review’s six chapters outline: the importance of high-quality journalism to democracy; the rapidly changing market; the plummeting revenues of publishers; the huge power of the online platforms; and the need to protect public interest news. Sadly, the Government’s response does not comprehensively answer Dame Frances’s nine recommendations, nor does it fully address the two intrinsically linked systemic points that she highlights—notably, the impact of platforms as mediators on the quality of the news and the asymmetry of power between platform and publishers when it comes to revenue.

I declare my interests as set out in the register, particularly as a member of the House of Lords’ digital democracy inquiry committee and as chair of the 5Rights Foundation.

The most urgent issue raised repeatedly by Cairncross is how new distribution models for high-quality journalism have eroded revenue. This is a sector being hollowed out before our eyes, with reduced resources to hold institutions to account, as the platform model drives down quality in pursuit of profit. In her introduction, Cairncross points out:

“People read more sources of news online, but spend less time reading it than they did in print. They increasingly skim, scroll or passively absorb news, much of it ‘pushed’ news”,

which is

“based on data analytics and algorithms, the operation of which are often opaque.”

Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube measure views, likes and retweets, not the quality of the news they share. Under the guise of being “user first”, they are focused on building algorithms to increase engagement and, with it, their revenues—not on people’s understanding of what is happening in the world around them.

A user journey with a diet of financial, entertainment, political and international news as readers made their way from front page to sports page, has been replaced by unbundled news: bite-sized snacks driven by an opaque list of inputs that optimise user engagement; it is often difficult for readers to know or recall the source. Disaggregated news driven by commercial concerns necessarily interferes with a user journey based on editorial or public interest values. This business model enables disinformation to masquerade as news. It is not without consequences: the victims are children who get measles, pensioners who give up their savings and individuals who vote on false promises.

Cairncross recommended:

“New codes of conduct to rebalance the relationship between publishers and online platforms”,


underpinned by a news quality obligation under regulatory oversight. While the government response has warm words about these codes, it is unclear whether they are to be put on a statutory footing, silent on who will have oversight and offers no timetable. The news quality obligation becomes a vague sense that platforms must

“help users identify the reliability and trustworthiness of news sources”,

with allusions to the online harms White Paper. I do not understand why the Government commissioned a review on such an urgent matter, only for us to wait a year to hear that we will wait several more. Can the Minister outline the steps government will take to introduce new, effective codes of conduct and when we will begin to see them enforced? Also, what obstacles does she see to introducing a news quality obligation in response to the review, rather than waiting for an online harms Bill whose effect may not be felt for another couple of years?

As classified and display ads have moved wholesale from publishers to platforms, particularly Google, where targeted advertising is king, the duopoly of Google and Facebook have become eye-wateringly rich and the news sector increasingly poor. Meanwhile, news producers remain at the mercy of news feed algorithms that can, at the whim of a platform, be changed for no transparent reason, giving platforms the power to literally bury the news. Cairncross’s observation that the opaque advertising supply chain is weighted against content creators is not new. It was central to the Communications Committee’s report, UK Advertising in a Digital Age; it has been the subject of much complaint by advertisers themselves; and it is well laid out in the interim review from the CMA.

This dysfunctional business model hits the local press the hardest. The Yorkshire Evening Post showed its societal value by having local reporters when it broke the story of a child being treated on an NHS hospital floor. The subsequent false discrediting of the story on social media showed the financial value in misinformation. The editor’s plea to the digital democracy committee was that the Post needed a fairer share of the value of the content it produces. Without it, it simply cannot continue to put reporters on the front line.

Cairncross recommends an innovation fund, VAT exemption to match offline publishing and allowing local papers charitable status. The first of these is being done by NESTA, the second is being looked at by the Treasury, and the last the Government rejected outright, but at the heart of her recommendations was that the CMA should use its powers to investigate the advertising supply chain to ensure that the market be fair and transparent. Given the unanimity of this view, and the disproportionate control of the platforms, will the Minister tell the House whether she would like to see—as many of us would —the CMA move to a full market investigation to clean up the advertising supply chain?

Cairncross urged the extension of the Local Democracy Reporting Service but this has been interpreted by the Government as an extension of the BBC local news partnerships, with no additional funding, This is not an adequate response to the crisis in local journalism, nor does it fulfil the Government’s own promise to advocate for voters outside the metropole, whose local interests may be too small to be of financial value in the attention economy of the multinationals. Leaving whole parts of the country out of sight is not sustainable for our democracy.

The review also called for an Ofcom inquiry into the impact of BBC News on the commercial sector. However, I would argue that of greater concern are the recent announcements of large-scale cuts to BBC News. Amid the crisis in the local press, it is simply not the right time to undermine the BBC. In an era of catastrophically low trust, BBC News is uniquely trusted by 79% of the population—a statistic that any platform or politician would beg for.

Finally, the commitment from the Government to support media literacy is hugely welcome. The ability to identify the trustworthiness of a source and to understand the platform’s algorithms, how they impact on what you see and who benefits from your interactions is vital. But I urge the noble Baroness to make clear in her answer that media literacy is no substitute for cleaning up the hostile environment in which the news now sits.

I asked Frances Cairncross to comment on the government response to her review. She said it was

“of particular regret that the government rejected out of hand the idea of an Institute of public interest journalism.”

On another occasion, one might underline further the responsibility of the press to uphold their own editorial standards to a greater extent and better fulfil their own public interest role but, for today, I wish to congratulate Dame Frances on categorically making the case for high-quality journalism as a crucial safeguard to democracy.

I look forward to hearing from many knowledgeable colleagues and thank them in advance for their contributions. Since The Cairncross Review was published, the news sector has become more fragile, while the platforms’ power has become entrenched. I hope that the Minister—delightfully making her maiden speech in this debate—finds a way of reassuring the House that the Government intend to tackle the systemic issues that Cairncross has identified with the seriousness and urgency they require. I beg to move.