Examination of Witnesses (Questions 750
- 759)
WEDNESDAY 24 OCTOBER 2007
Mr Jeremy Dear, Professor Julian Petley, Mr Tim Gopsill
and Dr Martin Moore
Q750 Chairman:
May I welcome you. You obviously know the nature of our inquiry;
you have submitted evidence to us. We are delighted that you are
here to give us your views. May I begin with obviously what is,
certainly for the NUJ, the burning issue which is the recent reports
on the BBC. What do you think of last week's announcement from
the BBC on the content and quality of the BBC news operations?
Mr Dear: You would expect me to say that we
will be very concerned about the possibility of compulsory redundancies,
additional work and so on for our members at the BBC but I think
that above all what has come across is the real concern for the
quality of the content they are able to produce with a severely
diminished workforce. As you will have noticed, around 2,500 jobs
are to go. BBC News is to see around 500 posts closed, and the
money going to BBC journalism will fall by more than 10% in real
terms over the six-year period that the current proposals cover.
If you take a particular example, programmes like Radio 4's Today
programme will have their budgets cut and the programme where
once it had 17 reporters will now have less than half that number,
as if you can say that there is now only half the news there was
several years ago. Factual series such as Arena will be
scaled back. Storyville will produce less episodes. News 24 will
be asked to cut some of its original programmes and a number of
specialist reporter posts will also be axed. Importantly also,
BBC nations and regions will lose around 8% of its staff including
more than 400 in Scotland and Wales, among them the people who
produce the tailored news services for people in different nations
and regions of the UK, a vitally important part of what the BBC
does particularly in the light of ITV scaling back its commitment
to local and regional news. We were slightly surprised when the
BBC Trust Chairman, Sir Michael Lyons, said that the plans—and
I am quoting him—"safeguard investment in areas in
which the BBC's reputation as an outstanding public service broadcaster
rests". We do not think that that is what is happening and
that there is a very real potential impact on the quality of programming.
What the BBC has to decide to do, if it has to save £2.2
billion over six years, is not salami-slice everything but decide
what it does not do, what it should not do and stop doing it in
return for proper investment in the core areas of its public service
broadcasting.
Q751 Chairman:
Coming from Scotland, I accept some of that and obviously I accept
your concerns. However, it always worries me a little that, when
there is a Scottish story that manages to reach the UK news, there
is a correspondent sent up from London to cover that news rather
than it being somebody from Scotland covering that news where
they are already covering it. The Director General himself said
that he had 36 different requests for interviews from BBC News
outlets. Does that not mean that there is maybe a need to consolidate
and to use new services better?
Mr Dear: I am slightly puzzled by what you said
because he actually said that he had 37 calls about requests for
interviews. That may well show one tenacious journalist ringing
37 times! Certainly last week during the BBC cuts, I had an awful
lot of calls from, for example, The Daily Telegraph, but
all from one person. I do understand the point you are making.
If the BBC is to justify its privileged position in having the
licence fee—and it is a privileged position, one which we
very much support—it has to do so by being able to deliver
quality programming, but it also has to cut out waste and I think
it is right that we look at all areas and that it has to make
the 3% efficiency savings and it has to make the £2.2 billion
savings. What we are concerned about is that where the cuts fall
at the moment, they will impact across the board on the quality
of programming rather than simply addressing the areas of waste.
You can hardly argue that there is waste on programmes like the
Today programme and Newsnight which have significantly
fewer staff than they used to have. You may not like the programmes
but certainly the case that there is waste there that could be
got rid of just does not stand up when all of our members are
working 12, 13 or 14 hour days. What you will be asking them to
do is work 14, 15 or 16 hour days. In those circumstances, people
cut corners in order to get the job done and that is when quality
gets compromised.
Chairman: On the leaked salary of Jeremy
Paxman, it may be one way of saving quite a lot of money if they
find somebody else but that is another matter.
Q752 Baroness Thornton:
It is very reassuring to know that Jeremy Paxman has you looking
after his interests! I would like to move on to preserving public
service broadcasting beyond the BBC. In your evidence, you rightly
raise the issue that when the digital switchover happens, ITV,
Channel 4 and Channel 5, who fulfil public service broadcast requirements
in return for free analogue spectrum, will lose that and you said
that you thought you had a new system which would require effective
regulation and possibly primary legislation and that you would
be pleased to elaborate on this to us. So, in a way, what I think
I am doing is inviting you to do that, to tell us what you think
that system might look like and also I would like to ask for the
Media Standards Trust's comment on this too.
Mr Dear: Tim is going to answer the point in
substance but, in terms of an alternative model, we are meeting
with James Purnell at 3.00 this afternoon to put in front of him
what we believe is an alternative model. We have produced a document
on that and we are happy to make that available to members of
the Committee subsequent to today's hearing.
Q753 Baroness Thornton:
We are going to get a preview! Thank you.
Mr Gopsill: We have submitted it to Ofcom in
response to the future news consultation that they are doing.
We would say that the main concern is to preserve the idea and
system that it is possible to regulate television and put public
service requirements on television in the digital future because
there has been so much commentary to the effect that the digital
and online future means that the old rationale for regulation
disappears, the old rationale being the spectrum scarcity and
the reasonable nature of putting requirements on a licence from
the State and there have been so many commercial interests saying,
"This is all going to go and television is going to become
like newspapers, incapable of being regulated, partisan"
and all the rest of it. We simply do not accept that and what
we have been working out is a system of maintaining it using two
areas. The first one is high definition television and the demand
from broadcasters for access to the digital spectrum for that
purpose, and we cannot see why that should not be tied to an obligation
for public service commitments from the broadcaster concerned.
The second one is what are known as the listed events, the 10
listed events, that is the very high-profile sports events which
are covered by legislation restricting their broadcast to free-to-air
terrestrial broadcasters. Again, the possibility for bidding for
those events is a highly desirable property for broadcasters and
that too should be tied to companies that have a public service
commitment and put obligations on them. Of course, the listed
events are themselves public service broadcasting. I think the
NUJ is very keen to say that public service broadcasting is not
just news and current affairs, which is our own area of direct
concern, it is also high-quality programmes in all other areas,
drama, comedy and everything else.
Q754 Chairman:
May we move now to the effect of ownership on news which is the
basis of our inquiry. You both agree that the content of news
is changing. The NUJ seem to attribute many of these changes to
consolidation of ownership whereas the Media Standards Trust does
not. Is it possible to separate out the effect of consolidated
ownership from other forces for change?
Dr Moore: I think that it is very difficult
to separate them out with the exception of News International
where I think it is easier to separate them out and easier to
have discussion about News International because of slightly different
ownership arrangements and historically. I think that generally
the demands of the market, particularly in terms of technology
and competition, are leading many news organisations and many
news owners in a similar direction and that it is not practicable
to try and separate those apart and say what the influence of
one is as opposed to the influence of the other.
Professor Petley: I am speaking partly on behalf
of the NUJ but I am also Co-Chair of the Campaign for Press and
Broadcasting Freedom which the NUJ supports and I am also Professor
of Film and Television at Brunel University, so I come at this
from various angles. Certainly I think that the NUJ would be extremely
concerned about consolidation particularly in the newspaper area.
The whole point about the broadcasting area is that, as of course
you know, it is strongly regulated and therefore the possibilities
of owners, whoever they may be, influencing broadcasting content
is fairly slight and we have heard evidence from Stewart Purvis
to that effect. Of course, in newspapers, it is clear that owners
and the editors who they appoint influence content. I think that
has always been the case and you only have to read a book for
instance like Andrew Neil's Full Disclosure, which is a
fascinating book, to see exactly how that influence operates.
As my colleague James Curran said, of course it is not Mr Murdoch
or any other owner phoning up the journalists every day and saying,
"You must do that". Of course it is not. It is much
more like a felt presence and I think what happens in newspapers
is that when journalists arrive in the mornings, they take their
coats off and their jackets off and they hang their values up
with them and, for the most part, I think they internalise the
values of the newspapers they work for. It would be much more
preferable, in my view, if, when they hung up their coats and
jackets, they internalised good journalistic values to do with
impartiality, balance, disinterestedness et cetera, et cetera
rather than internalising the values of the newspapers for which
they work. I think that this really does go across the spectrum.
I am sure that we have the phenomenon of illiberal journalists,
if I may put it that way, working for liberal newspapers and vice
versa, but I think that a number of journalists do know that,
on certain issues there are limits If you work for The Mail,
I would think there is very little point in offering them an article
saying how wonderful the European Union is. I do not think there
would be much point in doing that.
Mr Dear: I think that there is another issue.
It is not just about the direct influence of an individual proprietor
which I think certainly in national newspapers has a big impact
but, in the regional press, which remember is huge and is probably
read by a greater density of people than read national newspapers,
it is the impact of the structures of ownership on the resources
available to people to cover news. You use the words "consolidation
of ownership". We would use the words "concentration
of media ownership" because actually that is what we are
seeing: what were original family newspapers or community owned
newspapers reflecting community values being increasingly owned
by large corporations, for example Gannett, the US corporation,
which owns Newsquest, one of the largest UK newspapers publishers,
and what we have seen as a result of that structure is a steady
erosion of the resources available in editorial areas of those
regional newspapers and there are dozens and dozens and dozens
of examples. Despite what the Newspaper Society may have said
to you as evidence, I would happily challenge those figures. We
have concrete examples from things like The Herald, The
Sunday Herald and The Evening Times as a result of
Newsquest's takeover there, three years worth of cuts. When Trinity
Mirror took over the Coventry papers ... I see that you are about
to stop me.
Q755 Chairman:
Do you have any figures to illustrate that point? If you do, could
we have them.
Mr Dear: Certainly we can send you further figures
on it and the ability for us to be able to say in every single
newspaper across the industry exactly what has happened is not
possible, but let me give you one statistic here from Newsquest
or Gannett, their American owners, which took over The Herald,
The Sunday Herald and The Evening Times in 2003
after a rival bid by the Barclay brothers. They announced £3
million pounds of cuts savings resulting in 100 job losses. One
hundred job losses may not sound like very much in the grand scale
of other industries, but I will say what those were: loss of specialist,
environment, Europe, business, and local government; a halving
of the Westminster coverage; a halving of the London newsroom;
a halving of the news desk; less photographers; the environment
correspondent removed; a halving of the business desk; and so
on and so forth. These are not insignificant little cuts, these
are cuts that affect the ability of that newspaper to cover particular
areas, and so there is less regional and parliamentary coverage
and more is reliant on Press Association or others delivering
copy to all Scottish newspapers that is exactly the same. So,
resource issues are very real in terms of the way in which news
is able to be covered. We estimate from the figures we have put
together 6,000 media job losses in the last three years, of which
we estimate that around 2,000 are editorial. Seven-hundred-and-fifty
job losses at Trinity Mirror, for example. So, how the Newspaper
Society can say that there are more journalists now than there
were 10 years ago is not understood by anyone. We have city analysts,
academics, journalists and everyone else saying the opposite.
Dr Moore: With regard to the point about the
consolidation of ownership and particularly with regard to the
changing nature of these organisations such that certain news
organisations are becoming less about news as we have historically
considered it and more about a normal commercial organisation,
if you take the examples of Trinity Mirror and the Daily Mail
Trust, over the last few years, they have been acquiring many
other commercial enterprises which previously might have been
considered estate agency, might have been considered second-hand
car buying, some of which they would have done before within their
papers but they have been buying up independent organisations
which do that as their primary purpose. Therefore, as they do
that, news gathering and news production becomes a smaller part
of the business and the commercial aspects of the business increase
in size.
Q756 Lord King of Bridgwater:
This is pure ignorance on my part. You say that there are 37,000
journalists in the UK and Ireland; are they all NUJ members?
Mr Gopsill: Yes we have 37,000 members. I am
the editor of the NUJ magazine; it is a closed circulation magazine
that goes just to our members.
Q757 Lord King of Bridgwater:
What percentage of journalists are members of the NUJ?
Mr Dear: It would depend which sector you talk
about. In core broadcasting newspapers, you would talk about three-quarters
of people being members of the union, but we also cover people
in public relations and books where that density would be much
lower. Overall, you may talk about half of all the journalists
but, in the main sectors of newspapers and broadcasting, it is
much higher.
Q758 Lord King of Bridgwater:
You have a very good eye on how many journalists there are in
work. If it was a closed shop, you would have the figures absolutely.
Mr Dear: Are you offering us a closed shop back?
Q759 Lord King of Bridgwater:
That is not quite my philosophy! What I am interested in is how
accurate your figures are. What percentage do you think are members?
Mr Dear: I would say about 50% overall, about
75% in core areas.
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