UK Journalism (Communications and Digital Committee Report)

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, as other noble Lords have said, this is a good report from the Communications and Digital Committee under the distinguished leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert. Hence, this is an important debate. It is also an important debate because we are talking about an important topic, which is the framework in which our democracy works. This has been on the agenda of the Communications Committee since its early days, when I played a part in it, and regularly, rightly and forcefully, the committee comes back to it from time to time. I declare an interest as a trustee both of Full Fact and the Public Interest News Foundation, which are referred to in the report.

I am going to make my remarks from the perspective of local news. I was chairman of the CM Group, a Cumbria-based regional media company, for more than 10 years. It is now part of Newsquest. There is not only an important democratic aspect to news and local news, but an important community one because of the cohesion it can help bring to communities around the length and breadth of the country. We all know of some of the problems relating to that in the current world. I think it was CP Scott in his editorial to mark the centenary of the Guardian—some of your Lordships may have been sent a copy of it—who commented that newspapers are both institutions and businesses, but that it is important that a newspaper’s role as an institution ultimately trumps its characteristic as a business.

In discussions such as this, we tend to look to the future perhaps more than we might. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, who commented that 200-odd years ago, when modern newspapers as we know them came into being, there was—in my words—rather a long-established ménage à trois between advertisers, journalists and publishers. Interestingly, in the original edition of the Guardian, the first item on the first page was an advertisement for an anonymous black dog, which has thereby gained some degree of immortality.

For about 200 years that was sustainable, but now, thanks principally to technology, it has all broken down. The crucial question is, what happened? In very simple terms, the money ran out. I believe that in this country—and across the world more widely, for that matter—we somehow need to establish a sustainable system that will work to deliver these things over the years and into the future, so that the money will not run out.

In the report, a number of very useful points are made about specific things. But while they are valuable by themselves, they do not actually give a full lead towards a bigger picture. The report comments on charities, and the Public Interest News Foundation has registered investigative journalism as a proper subject for charitable registration. But it is not appropriate for the rough and tumble of real politics. It has a role to play, but it is not the answer. Criticism is made of the system of apprenticeships that we now have in this country. I currently chair the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership, and for a time chaired a training company, and I believe that the criticisms, not merely in the context of journalism but more widely, are justified.

The noble Lord, Lord Faulks, talked about algorithms, and I am sure he is absolutely right. If consumer protection means anything, the confidence the public have and the need to know exactly how algorithms work is obviously crucial in this sector. Finally, as far as the relationship between platforms and publishers is concerned, it is clearly the case that the platforms have a dominant position, as the noble Lord, Lord Grade, said. This needs to be addressed.

It used not to be the case, but recently it seems that when there is a problem, the Government throw money at it. Journalists and media companies must not take the 39 pieces of silver, because it betrays their constitutional role. It seems to be one of the heresies of the modern world that the private sector is motivated principally—indeed often only—by greed. Clearly there are some extremely greedy people in the private sector, but we have to find a way whereby the private sector can deliver what we want to see, because we do not want the state to be directly involved. One of the interesting things about our country is that we seem to have a genius for devising ways of doing this. In public sector broadcasting, it is not only the BBC—there is Channel 4, ITV and Channel 5, all of which are working in a slightly constrained legal framework to enable media to be delivered to our fellow citizens. I suggest to the Minister—and I congratulate him on his new job, as a predecessor of his predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey—that, if he could help lead on establishing a new settlement for media in this country which enables the fourth estate to play its constitutional role and at the same time remain solvent, he will have done a very great service.

As I said at the start, this is an important debate which goes way beyond the economic value of the sector. I am sure we shall come back to it, and it is right that we should.