Media Regulation

Debate between Peter Bottomley and Susan Elan Jones

Tuesday 28th February 2012 Westminster Hall

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

People in Westminster Hall have listened with interest to the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). I come with a slightly different perspective. I should declare that I have taken successful defamation actions against a number of newspapers, but they are not relevant to what I will say. I put on the record that the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe has a media self-regulation guide that I commend to all. It takes a perspective beyond this country.

Media regulation can be seen as what the media themselves should be doing, or as what people do to the media. On the whole, I am more interested in what the media choose to do themselves. I regret that the ways of holding print journalism to account basically disappeared when the Hard News programme with Ray Snoddy was dropped. We ought to be able to justify a weekly serious news television programme looking at what the media do. I recognise that the media pages of the broadsheet newspapers include serious coverage by people who have had a great deal of experience in the media, but the ability to use the power of broadcasting to hold people to account and to make available to all what is known to a few would be useful.

I do not stand here as a supporter of News Corp, or News International, or the papers to which the hon. Member for Rhondda referred, but I am not antagonistic to them in general. However, I recollect that when John Biffen was Secretary of State for Trade he did not refer to the Monopolies Commission the takeover of The Sunday Times and The Times, when The Sunday Times was profitable but The Times certainly was not. Two Government Back Benchers voted against the Government. One was Jonathan Aitken, and I was the other. I am not suggesting that the takeover would not have been cleared, but it should have been referred. Before that debate and vote, I asked Harold Evans whether he would let me have some information. He said he would, but he did not. When he later fell out with his proprietor, he asked me to join his campaign to expose the wrong that had been done, and I said, “You’re a bit late, mate.”

A programme this morning—I forget whether it was on BBC 1 or Sky News—had an excerpt on elements of the independent media in Russia, where some proprietors of independent television and radio channels are having great pressure put on them by powerful people. We should know more about what is going on around the world when people suffer such pressure, and there should be a way of providing international interest and pressure so that the sort of media dominance that former President Berlusconi developed in Italy can be challenged. If what is happening in the media in one country cannot be challenged, persistent and reasonably consistent international pressure and interest is necessary.

The only profitable paper that Rupert Murdoch and his media took over in Britain was The Sunday Times. The Times was not profitable, and what became The Sun was not profitable. He started his satellite television service from scratch, and it is arguable that by choosing analogue he stopped us having a world lead. Robert Maxwell’s competitor satellite service, which was digital, could have taken us further ahead, but one was commercially successful and one was not. That is the way the market goes.

I realise that the hon. Member for Rhondda and our current media have a great interest in what the News of the World and perhaps some of its fellow papers did, but we should not believe that they are the only ones to have caused casualties in some of their ways of operation. Mostly, they gather news and entertainment, putting it all together, and sell it commercially. There are times when it is possible to apply pressure. I remember being asked to go on Radio 4’s “Today” programme when The Sun had published a photograph of one of the Queen’s children, taken 16 years ago when he and various friends in Canada were jumping into a lake without clothes on. Crowns were drawn across their middles in the photograph. The deputy editor of The Sun was asked about that before I was interviewed, and he explained why he thought that was legitimate. I was then asked what I thought, and I said that if anyone was looking for naked bodies in the papers, there were more in The Guardian, but in the arts pages rather than the so-called news pages. I said that anyone who is frightfully worried about naked bodies should never have a bath, because all of us have one. I also said that if anyone thought that The Sun had made a mistake in publishing the photograph, there was no point telling it because it had explained why it thought it was all right. I suggested going to a branch of one of the 10 named advertisers who had full-page advertisements in The Sun and saying, “I’m not going to boycott you; I’m not even going to boycott The Sun, but if you talk to The Sun could you please say that I think it made a mistake.” Within 36 hours, The Sun had apologised. There was similar pressure when The Sun published the Queen’s Christmas message in advance, and it apologised for that.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) made a powerful case on retraction? At the moment, when there is misrepresentation or a deliberate lie, it does not matter much to the people who perpetrate it because if they are eventually told that they must publish a retraction, they can do so, comfortable in the knowledge that it will be on page 36, somewhere between the crossword and the horoscope. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, as my hon. Friend said, we should have like with like, and that we need teeth to do so?

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

I am not sure that we should be doing that; I think they should be doing that. As I understand it, the proposals for a revised system for the Press Complaints Commission, or whoever its successor might be, will require that any retractions and apologies that are negotiated or ordered will have to have agreed prominence, and not be tucked away in the middle or on the back pages. That problem is in hand.

I am not suggesting that we can have a perfect system. When my wife was a Minister, a senior person in another news group, not News International, said that if it was not allowed to have a significant share in a television company, it would get us. Fourteen days after she made the decision that it would not get what it wanted, it put a 14-year-old member of our family on the front page of its paper. I am not saying that the two were necessarily connected, but it seemed suspicious at the time. There will be casualties in an open society, and we must accept that people make mistakes and that people suffer.

There is value in the press undertaking investigations that others choose not to, and publishing information that the powerful do not want published, and on balance we gain far more by reducing the amount of externally imposed regulation. Most of us get most of our news from the BBC. Its news coverage and transmissions, from Radio 1 to Radio 4 and the amount of news and current affairs on BBC 1 particularly—copied well by commercial television and Sky News—are important. I do not envy editors who are responsible for judgments on how to obtain and check information, and then decide what to broadcast and how to broadcast it. The question then arises of how to regulate, how to control, and how to obtain redress, and those are the matters that we should keep in mind. If anyone asked me to vote for externally imposed regulation, which would reduce the opportunity for people knowing what journalists and other media workers believe should be made available, I would do so with great reluctance, if at all.

The regulation system for the BBC is wrong, but it is not enormously wrong. The BBC should have a chairman. Having a chairman of the trust who is not officially the chairman to whom the director-general is responsible as an individual is wrong, but that is what Parliament decided, and it may take another cycle of change at the BBC for that to change. Ofcom has done pretty well, but we should provide a forum where people who work in the media and feel that they cannot get important stories broadcast or published could put such information so that we know what is cut out. Too often, the inhibitions on editors and journalists are greater than we know from outside.

I understand what the hon. Gentleman said in his introduction to the debate. I do not believe that the Government necessarily have the answers to all the questions, and I do not believe that they should have. It is often for the public will or the public mood in which there are many activists. I commend to those who are interested Article 19: Global Campaign for Free Expression, which has a rather more balanced approach than we have necessarily heard this morning.