Examination of Witnesses (Questions 719
- 739)
WEDNESDAY 24 OCTOBER 2007
Professor Richard Collins, Professor James Curran
and Professor Stewart Purvis
Q719 Chairman:
Good morning, gentlemen. I welcome you to our inquiry. As you
will note, I am not the usual Chairman; Lord Fowler is out of
the country at the moment. You may be wondering why Professor
Franklin is not with you; he has a serious bout of flu and cannot
make it. You know what the inquiry is about; you have submitted
evidence to us. The first questions are to all of you and then
we will switch to asking individuals. I would ask that you do
not come in on the questions asked of others, but I will obviously
let anybody who wishes to say something say it whenever they want
to say it. May we begin with the question of the impact of the
ownership, which is obviously part of the key to what we are doing,
on news provision and what the impact of that has been. Do you
consider that increasing the consolidation of the media ownership
to be a threat to the quality and diversity of news available
and, if so, why?
Professor Purvis: I think that it is a threat
but I do not think that it is necessarily a serious threat because
there is a major offset in this digital converged world and that
is that the barriers of entry to the news business are lower than
they have ever been in the sense that any of us today could walk
out of this room and set up a news website by the end of the day
and we could actually receive the content value at the end of
the day, and that is an extraordinary change whether it be compared
to broadcast or print. The access to the means of distribution
and the access to the content by the consumer have changed radically
and I think that that is a major offset to the concern about ownership.
I think that it creates a new concern which I, in a sense, would
put not quite as high as ownership though I would say that it
is coming up the scale, and that is media aggregation by which
I mean the power of media organisationsand sometimes not
from a traditional media background at all but from a technology
backgroundto direct the traffic, and the most obvious example
is the aggregator-in-chief, Google, who have the power
via the algorithms, in other words the numbers that control the
way they direct traffic in an online world, to either send them
to your site or not depending on how they choose to do that. As
somebody who has experience not just in university but in the
media in operating sites, it is quite extraordinary to see the
peaks of traffic on your own site and then understand that that
is entirely because an aggregator has chosen to point to your
site or not to point to your site.
Q720 Chairman:
Do you mean on their front page?
Professor Purvis: On that page but, in a sense,
the search is almost as important as the front page. If you type
the word "news" into Google, up come a series
of news organisations in an order and I have never understood
why they come up in that order but they do because somebody at
Google has made them come up in that order. Inevitably,
that means the people near the top of the list are going to get
more traffic than people at the bottom of the list.
Q721 Chairman:
I use Yahoo and they actually list news; they have news
items.
Professor Purvis: The other twist to this is
that Google and Yahoo, which were initially just
searches, have now, in a sense, also got into the news business
a little bit themselves because Google is saying to people
like yourself, "If you would like to comment on the news
yourself as the people who make news, write something for us",
so they have almost become media creators/content creators, which
they will then put in alongside the other content they are pointing
to. I think that these are suddenly interesting people and we
should be enthusiastic about the services they are offering but
a little cautious about the power they are acquiring.
Q722 Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall:
I would like to ask one question about that. The question the
Chairman put was about quality and diversity. You have talked
about diversity. Do you have anything to say about quality in
the sense that this range of diversity you are describing could
imply, potentially, a loss of quality because a lot of it is unmediated
or anyway, if it is mediated, it is not clear by whom or why?
Professor Purvis: Whether we have a problem
with unmediated content is a major issue in itself. If you take
the Prime Minister's famous speech, the views papers speech, in
that speech, there is effectively an attack on unmediated content,
but surely unmediated content is back to the printing press in
the first place. It is about people putting forward their views;
it is about citizens having a voice suddenly. If we do not like
what they say, that is a small price to pay for the freedom those
people are being given to air their views.
Professor Curran: I would like to respond to
Stewart's eloquence. The most visited news sites in Britain are
those controlled by existing media organisations. It is true that
there are a large number of bloggers but how important are bloggers
in terms of the general news feed? Pugh, for example, did research
in America and found that only 6% of the American electorate looked
at blogs as a source of news in the Presidential Election. It
needs to be put in context. There is an offsetting factor, it
is very exciting but it is not that important as an influence
save on journalism. Of course, there is a problem of concentration.
Three companies control 70% of the national daily newspaper market.
Is there a problem of quality? The British public thinks so. In
a Eurobarometer Survey, the British public were more distrustful
of the British press than any European population of their press.
The figure was 75% of people said they tended not to trust the
press. So, there is a problem of quality and there is a problem
of diversity and blogs is unfortunately not the solution.
Q723 Chairman:
Do you think that that 76 (sic) % which do not trust the press
is a new phenomenon? Do we have figures from further back?
Professor Curran: It is not a new phenomenon.
MORI have done surveys and Gallup have done surveys over a period
of some 30 years and it shows a low degree of credibility of the
British press. What was different about Eurobarometer is that
it compared the situation in Britain with the situation in other
European countries.
Professor Collins: I see the situation more
as Professor Purvis does than Professor Curran. I think that a
sense of proportion is important. I think that there are very
few countries that have a media with five quality newspapers of
diverse ownership and three nationally based distinct sources
of television news, all of which can claim some authority. It
is always possible to say that things could and should be better
but, in terms of diversity of ownership, I think that there are
few media markets that are more diverse than the UK nationally
although if you look at Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and
some English regional markets, you get a very different story
and more causes for concern. I hear Professor Purvis's view that
the growth of online media presents striking opportunities to
improve things. I think that the difficulties Professor Curran
has pointed to with established print and broadcast media are
likely to continue. I think that we are seeing a secular change
in those markets. Newspaper readership is declining and as more
and more TV channels come on stream, the audience for any individual
channel and therefore its revenue-raising capacity declines. Advertising
revenue is moving away from these legacy media to online. The
responses open to owners of legacy media are becoming more and
more restricted as circulation and advertising revenues diminish.
So, either they can reduce costs or they can merge. My sense is
that unless there is a striking increase in public intervention
in media markets, essentially we are going to see a tightening
of the ownership screw in legacy media and this is where I think
that the hare that Professor Purvis has started running, the potential
of online media and what can be done to improve established performance
there, is one worth pursuing.
Q724 Chairman:
Do you have any examples of where the proprietor and this consolidation
of proprietorship have actually influenced editorial decisions
in a particular newspaper?
Professor Purvis: Coming from a broadcast background,
I have one or two examples of where a customer as opposed to an
owner or proprietor has intervened and, on those occasions, I
rejected their intervention. I cannot speak for the newspaper
sector but I am aware that my colleague at City University, Professor
Roy Greenslade, did a survey that showed that, at the time of
the Iraq war, 175 editors in Rupert Murdoch's employment were
all in favour of the war which left some worry about how they
had come to that conclusion. That is the only background I can
offer on that.
Professor Curran: There was a survey done by
a German sociologist, Donsbach, which compared journalists in
Italy, Germany, Britain and America, and, in his survey, 22% of
British journalists said that they were constrained by editors
or senior managers in what they wrote, which was lower than in
Italy but much higher than in Germany and America. According to
that survey, one in five journalists felt that they were influenced
by "significant management pressure" was the phrase
that was used. On the other question about direct intervention,
I think that is too blunt a question to pick up on a subtle influence.
If you ask senior managers in The Sunday Times now, "Have
you been influenced by Murdoch?" I am sure that they would
all say "no" hand on heart and they would be right to
do so, but the change took place in the early 1980s when Murdoch
acquired The Sunday Times. He moved the paper from a liberal
conservative to a more right-wing conservative register and he
did that through senior managers who had a series of rows with
their journalists and 100 journalists out of 170 left in a period
of five years. Having cleared out autonomous liberal conservatives,
new sorts of team players came in and a new editorial culture
ethos was created, and it is no longer necessary to influence
the editorial agenda because there is a house tradition and there
is a culture already established. To give a satisfactory answer
to your question, history is required to be looked at, not simply
interventionicity.
Q725 Chairman:
I am sure that Rupert Murdoch does not believe in Scottish independence
and yet The Sunday Times, certainly in Scotland, supported
the SNP in the Scottish elections, which is just an example the
other way.
Professor Curran: That is true although the
fact that so many of the editors of his group's newspapers in
Australia, American and Britain all supported the Iraq war suggest
that they were double guessing to some extent.
Q726 Lord King of Bridgwater:
Professor Collins, you said that, compared to other countries,
there was an undue concentration of ownership, but really you
are not so much concerned how we compare with other countries,
it is the absolute standard of what is right. There is a greater
concentration than there used to be; does that matter?
Professor Collins: Let me put a similar point
more generally, Lord King. I think there is a finite amount of
diversity that any media economy can sustain and some markets
can sustain no diversity at all, local markets for example. I
think that we are in a period in which the established media,
and still the dominant media, of broadcasting and newspapers are
finding their financial screws being turned more tightly. That
process has not gone so far in the UK as a whole as it has in
many other countries. I guess that is the sum of my observation.
One can always say that there is room for more diversity and more
quality. These are criteria that almost by definition can never
be satisfied. My point is that one has to assess an imperfect
existing situation in terms of how far realistically things could
be different and I think that referring to examples in other countries
and to structural economic pressures are important factors in
doing so.
Q727 Lord King of Bridgwater:
Professor Purvis mentioned the question of customers putting pressure
but I am not sure whether that is pressure directly through on
the editorial side or whether it comes through the commercial
side through advertising, threats to withdraw advertising etc.
Professor Purvis: My experience was never on
the advertising side. In fact, it worked the opposite way where
if a broadcaster was aware that we had a piece of content which
in a sense might not be in perfect juxtaposition with the advert,
they would pull the advert rather than ask us to pull the content,
so that is a kind of fairly noble tradition. The examples of where
there was direct editorial intervention normally involved content
which was deemed to be embarrassing to the broadcaster directly
such as, for instance, when broadcast executives appeared before
Mr Kaufman's Committee as it was and did not do very well, one
might receive a call saying, "Do you really need to show
that part where Kaufman turned our guy over?" It was as crude
as that.
Q728 Chairman:
Or Maxton!
Professor Purvis: Or Maxton! The answer to that
was, "It was such an important issue and it was also quite
a dramatic piece of television, so the answer is `yes'".
Q729 Lord King of Bridgwater:
Part of the study that we are undertaking is on this issue of
news and the degree to which there is proper diversity, there
is a genuine quality of news provision in this country. I think
the evidence we have been given so far is that there is not very
much to worry about, there is new technology coming in with lots
of other opportunities and we are better than other countries.
Are we wasting our time?
Professor Purvis: I am not underestimating any
of the things that Professor Curran has pointed out. There is
a whole group of newspapers in this country which is effectively
owned and controlled by one man and you cannot get away from that
fact. I can only repeat that there are opportunities that did
not exist before and I am not just talking about bloggers. I responded
particularly to the question of unmediated content. I am talking
about specialist journalism for which there never really was a
daily outlet before. You might have a specialist journal that
has appeared now, there are specialist websites and quite often
they break stories. They put material into the public domain which
perhaps would not have appeared in a daily newspaper and quite
often daily newspapers follow it up. I think that has a positive
impact on quality, it has a positive impact on diversity and it
did not exist before.
Q730 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
Picking up on what Professor Curran said, I absolutely accept
that over time The Times and other members of the Murdoch
stable have had a cultural change, but what about the effects
of the whole news core entity? I think it is correct to say that,
for instance, the BSkyB/Virgin spat was rather undercovered in
The Times and I do not know what your response to that
is. That is something slightly more than a sort of cultural shift,
that is a specific story being ignored.
Professor Curran: I think that the media are
very bad at scrutinising themselves. There has been a very large
increase in regional press concentration. When you look at the
media sections of the daily papers, they do not talk about it.
I agree with the point that Stewart Purvis has made that advertising
does not have much influence. I think it is a hare that has been
run and its influence is enormously exaggerated. I would like
to pick up on the central question which is, does concentration
matter, which is the question you put. It matters enormously in
terms of restricting entry into the market. It is very, very difficult
to set up a daily paper or indeed launch a major television channel
because of the established power of incumbents. The Internet is
of course an opportunity to enormously extend the range of voices
heard and hopefully will do so, but one of the consequences of
the economic power of existing large corporations is that they
are colonising in cyberspace. There is a problem of online concentration
now, paradoxically. If you look at where people go to look for
the news online, they go to The Daily Mail, The Guardian
and the BBC. My answer is that you have a job of work to do.
Q731 Chairman:
Professor Collins, do you wish to respond to any of that?
Professor Collins: Yes, I think so. I think
that the basic presumption is that diversity of ownership equates
to diversity of content and there has not been much research undertaken
to test that proposition. If one looks at the news values of the
UK media, the 10 major newspapers and the three major sources
of television news, as Ofcom did in an interesting paper last
year New News, Future News, the finding was that essentially
there is a shared universe of news values, that the same things
are being reported across the newspapers and across broadcast
news. What is different is the spin or the perspective put on
it. I think that it is hard to get away from that mainstreaming
of what is important in society and indeed a shared mainstreaming
of assumptions about what is important is one of the things that
keeps society together. I think the question is, is there sufficient
information of an authoritative kind in the public domain for
people to make well-informed and sensible decisions about the
things that matter to them? If one looks at the newspapers that
have the highest circulations, the answer is "no" but,
if one looks at the ensemble of media that is readily available
at affordable prices, I would say "yes", and it is people's
choice whether they choose to buy The Sun, The Mirror
and The Daily Star or whether to buy The Financial Times,
The Times, The Guardian, The Independent
or The Telegraph. What I think we have seen over the last
15 years is a growth in diversity of sources of broadcast news.
Sky is the most striking example of that, but there is also the
relaying of other English language news programmes, CNN, Fox,
Bloomberg and so on, and the unprecedented accessibility of news
programmes in languages other than English coming from outside
the UK. My view is that again one can always ask for more diversity
and more quality but, if one looks at the situation over the last,
let us say, 21 years since The Independent started in 1986,
we have had one new UK-wide newspaper of authority, we have had
Sky News come on stream, we have had a plethora of more or less
reliable, more or less polemical, more or less authoritative sources
of online information and a great increase in the accessibility
of substantial news services originated overseas.
Q732 Baroness Thornton:
I want to ask you about regulation to protect diversity and quality
of news. There are several approaches, as I am sure you know,
and recently, when we were in America, one of the issues that
was under discussion was The Wall Street Journal takeover
and how that would be protected, or indeed when The Times
was taken over, which Professor Curran has already touched upon.
There are editorial safeguards that can be written into contracts
of journalists or to promote professional codes of conduct. Would
you support further regulation to control media ownership and
what general approach do you think such regulation might take?
Professor Collins: When we talk about media
ownership, I think we are talking about regulation of concentration
of ownership. I take it that we are not talking about national
ownership. The Communications Act 2003 liberalised ownership regulation
and I think that that is an international trend. One sees it in
Australia and Canada and I think the likely outcome of the current
FCC inquiry in the US is likely to be liberalisation. There has
not been a great deal of change to the ownership structures of
the UK media over the last four or five years. I think that we
have seen some unanticipated and perverse consequences of concentration
of ownership regulation and the so-called Emap case is well known
where Emap took over a radio company and, because of the ownership
regulations, it had too many channels. No-one wanted to buy or
take over the channel that Emap had too many of, so one went off
air, which is hardly beneficial to radio listeners. My view is
that the room for manoeuvre for regulators in terms of concentration
of ownership of traditional, established media is going to decline
because I think that newspaper readership is in a long-term slow
decline. We are going to continue to see a proliferation of broadcast
channels, so any individual channel is going to be less attractive
as an advertising medium and advertising is migrating online.
I think that it is almost inevitable that there will be further
concentration and I think that, if one tries to regulate that,
not only is the regulator in a nightmare-ish problem about how
do you define the markets and what do you do in an Emap caseand,
in my view, what you do in an Emap case is say that continuing
with these outlets is less bad than them going off airand
you then get into a proliferation of special cases and so on which
I think starts to become unmanageable. I would rather turn attention
to what positively public authorities can do. I think that there
is still room for continuing more or less with existing concentration
of ownership regulations; they still have some bite and they are
useful as an insurance or backstop. However, in the long term,
I think that we are in a game where they are going to slowly wither
away. For me, the question becomes, what is the appropriate and
proportionate level of public interventionwe have a massive
level of that in broadcasting and I think that is worth thinking
aboutand what can be done to promote desired behaviour
among journalists, owners and editors? I have to acknowledge that
the record there is a fairly gloomy one but I think that it is
to those two areas that attention can profitably be drawn and
I can say more about both should the Committee wish.
Professor Curran: Richard Collins is of course
right in saying that the world is moving in a deregulatory way.
I have just completed research funded by the SRC looking at the
consequences of that and I and colleagues in three other countries
compared reporting and public knowledge in America with Britain,
Finland and DenmarkAmerica has the most deregulated TV
system and Scandinavia is the most regulated and we are halfway
between the twoand what we found was a staggering degree
of ignorance amongst the American population. For example, 37%
of Americans knew what the Kyoto Treaty was and over 80% of Fins
and Danes did, and the difference arose from the fact that American
TV clears the news to the margins of primetime. So, between 7.00
and 11.00 you do not get the news on the main networks. Whereas,
in Scandinavia, you have a drip feed of public information, news
throughout the evening, on the major channels and Britain is in
between. I think that it is a disaster that the television news
was moved to 10.00 and 10.30 and one of the reasons why the British
population emerged as being less informed than Scandinavians is
because of deregulation. If I was on your Committee, I would exert
pressure on Ofcom to persuade ITV to return the news hour to 10.00.
Q733 Lord King of Bridgwater:
Which they are going to do.
Professor Curran: It has been leaked but leaks
are not the same as ... That is wonderful and there should be
pressure perhaps in the form of public statements to encourage
the BBC to move to earlier in the evening too. Deregulation is
not necessarily inexorable nor is it necessarily desirable.
Chairman: I think that is an opportunity
to move to some questions directed to Professor Purvis on ITV.
Q734 Baroness Howe of Idlicote:
I think that to some extent the question has been gone over fairly
well but, just looking again at your times idea, can you recall
times when there was pressure from a particular programme or whatever
to cover certain stories, or was that not an issue and was it
in fact battling away, as it probably should have been, in the
way that we were told by ITN, that editorial control is with the
editorial management at ITN and is, if you like, sacrosanct? Did
that work out in fact?
Professor Purvis: I think that the distance
between ITN as the supplier and ITV, Channel 4 and, for a time,
Channel 5 as the customer did help maintain editorial integrity
and editorial independence but, of course, being realistic, there
were timesand I have given you examples, and there were
very fewwhen I would be called by the customer. There were
other occasions when I would be nudged by the customer as to whether
we were going to report some success: they had achieved an award
of some kind. I have to say that, on that basis, I think that
pretty much all British broadcasters do have some puffery. I think
if you look at the BBC's coverage of the launch of Freeview, there
was quite a lot of it but actually it has turned out to be a pretty
important event, so that would be justified. I think that BSkyB
for a time covered quite a lot about BSkyB's own digital development.
So, I do not think that is a major issue. I think the examples
sometimes are of omission, as was said, and when we come on to
talk about impartiality ... Let us be honest, impartiality monitoring
is of what is transmitted. It is not of what is not transmitted.
So, actually, omission is the most powerful tool of all. By and
large, I think that the relationship between ITN and its customers
has been excellent and I have to say that, from the owners of
ITNand there have been some pretty interesting owners of
ITN over the years, some very powerful personalities with some
very strong viewsto their credit, there was never any intervention
at all.
Q735 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
I would like to pick up on the impartiality point. Professor Purvis,
what is your feeling about the suggestion that Ofcom has made
that perhaps this needs reviewing in order to encourage what they
call more diversity?
Professor Purvis: First of all, may I, like
Professor Collins, commend the Ofcom report. If you have not had
a chance to look at that, it is undoubtedly the best piece of
work done on broadcast news in recent times. The background is
that I lived and breathed impartiality for 30-odd years. I took
it so seriously that I did not vote, which actually I think is
my failing as a citizen really but I did not want to have to make
the judgment. As I have been a little more semidetached from it,
I have become a little more realistic about impartiality. I have
argued, for instance, that actually there is no such thing as
an impartial agenda. There is impartial coverage. In other words,
there are certain channels which are more interested in certain
things because of where they come from. When I was the editor
at Channel 4 News, it was sometimes described as a "left
of centre" news. Actually, it had a left of centre agenda
but I would say that the coverage of the stories was completely
impartial. When I challenged the BBC and said, "Actually,
you have an agenda of a kind but you are not really conscious
of it", they would constantly deny it until I see that they
had a report out which they themselves commissioned which came
to the conclusion that there was a BBC agenda, but that did not
mean that they did not report individual stories properly. The
realist in me says that actually everyone has an agenda of a kind
whether they realise it or not. Is this stifling diversity, which
is Ofcom's conclusion? I am not entirely convinced about that
but, as to their main conclusion that perhaps a regime in which
the mainstream terrestrial broadcasters were held with their feet
to the fire for impartiality but perhaps it could be relaxed for
particularly the foreign broadcasters ... I am not sure whether
the Committee is aware but there is a slightly bizarre situation
where broadcasters who are outside Europe and wish to be retransmitted
within Europe have to be regulated by some country within Europe.
Some of them choose London because quite often they have London
offices. So, Al Jazeera in English is actually regulated by Ofcom.
I am sure that it is regulated by the Dubai Communications Authority
but it is also regulated by Ofcom. Ofcom, to be honest, has had
problems telling Fox News what the British rules on impartiality
are because Fox News comes from somewhere, we all understand that,
and it has come up with this definition of "due impartiality".
I think that is part of the background. There is partly a real
politique here that says, "Actually, can we really tell Al
Jazeera and Fox News what to do? Would it not be better to reflect
that in perhaps a two-tier regulatory system?"
Q736 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
I am very interested in your analysis of the agenda that underpins
the impartiality in the way individual stories are presented.
I think you said that the BBC's agenda might have even been only
semiconscious. Upon what would those agendas be based? Would they
be crude, party-political positioning or would they be on some
dominant public concern, for instance like global warming, or
would they be so ephemeral that you could not really pin down
what they were meaning?
Professor Purvis: They would be both and you
have chosen a good example in global warming/climate change. The
BBC has given considerable prominence to that. There has been
quite a debate within the BBC. For instance, everyone is against
racism, therefore do you have to be impartial on racism? If it
is a given now that there is climate change going on, do you have
to be impartial between those who believe in climate change and
those who perhaps do not agree? These are the debates going on,
but undoubtedly the BBC has made climate change one of its news
priorities. That, I argue, is an agenda. I was involved in a review
of the BBC's coverage of the Middle East which I found to be a
fascinating process. The outsidersI was a sort of almost
insider from newscame to the conclusion that there was
not enough self-awareness by journalists about their own agenda
and how, to a certain extent, they allow their agenda to be dictated
by others. That is my cause, if you like: self-awareness and more
honesty and transparency about some of these issues and more debate
about them. To that extent, I absolutely welcome what the BBC
Trust is trying to do to try and heighten awareness within the
BBC of perhaps issues that they were not even aware of themselves.
Q737 Lord King of Bridgwater:
Gavyn Davies, the former Chairman of the BBC, gave evidence to
us. I am becoming a little muddled between agenda and culture
here. His view was that there was a sort of soft left culture
in the BBC which, with hindsight, he felt should have been dealt
with. Is that the same sort of point you are making about agenda
and culture?
Professor Purvis: No, I think there is a difference.
I understand why you ask the question but I think that there is
a difference between, shall we say, the views of individuals and
how those may commune at times and what they judge to be the stories
of the day. They may connect at times but their starting point
is different, I think.
Q738 Lord King of Bridgwater:
It is not just a question of the story of the day, it is the way
the story is handled. It is even down to the tone of voice of
an interviewer, that sort of angle that we put on it. Either the
question is asked straight or in a slightly questioning, disbelieving
manner.
Professor Purvis: We are getting into a slightly
different area. My belief is that there is truly no such thing
as an impartial agenda but that there can be impartial coverage
of a story. An example I gave is, when I was editor at Channel
4 News, we did quite a lot about Nicaragua. At the time, Nicaragua
was, shall we say, a story of more interest to people on the left
than the right, but that did not mean to say that the coverage
of Nicaragua was not completely balanced and completely straight.
Q739 Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury:
I have a question to Professor Purvis about ownership within television.
It is quite possible that ITV could buy ITN.
Professor Purvis: Yes.
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