News Broadcasting: Regulation

Lord Vaizey of Didcot Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McNally, on securing this important debate on the regulation of news broadcasting companies. The role of due impartiality in broadcasting is an important issue to discuss.

I should say that I have skin in the game, as I have a regular Friday night show—7 pm to 10 pm—on Times Radio, where I normally cover culture. I always have an MP on the show: sometimes I am interviewing a Labour MP, sometimes a Conservative MP. I also cover shows. I covered Mariella Frostrup’s show recently, where we changed the section “Meet the Member” to “Meet the Peer”. I was lucky enough to have the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, on that section, but I did not feel that at any point we strayed beyond the rules of due impartiality in discussing his distinguished career. The noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, has been on as “my frenemy” on a Sunday show hosted by Alexis Conran. And of course, I should say that the Minister has been a guest on my show as well.

But enough about me; let us talk about due impartiality, because it is important that we discuss it. Obviously, we need to think back: as the noble Lord, Lord McNally, pointed out, this has been around for 100 years. There is a reason why we have due impartiality rules, and there is a reason why we need to debate them now. We had them then because the BBC was by far the most dominant broadcaster, along with ITV and, to a certain extent, Sky News when it came into being. Most people got their news from linear television news, and it was important that they got it in as unbiased a fashion as possible. We have never worried about due impartiality from the rich newspaper ecology that we have in this country.

Now we face a very interesting landscape, where we have a plethora of new media companies able to launch because of technology—not just Times Radio but GB News, LBC and TalkTV. And we have streaming. If you decide that flat earth is your thing, you can spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week, looking at flat earth conspiracy videos on YouTube. Amazon and Netflix are coming within Ofcom’s remit, but there is now a plethora of media.

We all know why we are talking about due impartiality. We want to avoid what we think we saw in the US, which was the rise of Fox News on the right—with its heavily biased programming and positions dictated to a certain extent by the management team—and CNN on the left. It is perhaps ironic that, if you examine the rise of President Trump, you might actually see that CNN played a bigger role, because, frankly, Trump was box office and got wall-to-wall coverage on CNN anyway.

When we discuss due impartiality, we need to be cautious. We need to have this debate not because we dislike GB News—although it does often air questionable content—or another right-wing broadcaster, because there are plenty of other stations that you could accuse of potentially breaching impartiality. LBC has David Lammy and James O’Brien—he is a broadcaster I admire, but nobody can pretend they do not know where his politics lie. The BBC has in fact today reappointed Robbie Gibb, a Conservative activist, to its board for another four years. Interestingly, in this Conservative Government, the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, himself is investigating the BBC for due impartiality.

Nevertheless, I do support the thrust of what the noble Lord, Lord McNally, said in his remarks, which is that it is important, as much for Ofcom’s sake as for ours, that it is not left to develop policy on its own without some oversight from Parliament, some indication from Parliament, about which direction it should travel in—and I absolutely agree with him that Ofcom is an excellent regulator that has proved itself time and time again able to navigate distinctly choppy waters where people have very strong opinions. I thought the remarks from Melanie Dawes, the chief executive, about holding broadcasters with a higher audience to a higher standard, was an interesting adaptation of doctrine, a bit like a papal bull, which deserves to be discussed in Parliament.

I sat on the fence when I raised the issue at Second Reading of the Media Bill—and guess what? I am going sit on the fence again and simply come to the position that we need to debate what we mean by “due impartiality” in a fragmented media world. Having said that, I will get off this fence and say emphatically that we need to continue to regulate broadcasters and we need the essence of due impartiality to continue.