Abstract
The BBC’s deference to government is a warning that public funding of news media puts too much power in the hands of politicians
Official rhetoric on the press is unambiguous and time-honoured. The former Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Baroness Morgan of Cotes, reaffirmed this in January: “This government is clear that newspapers play an invaluable role in the fabric of our society, and underlines its support.” As the popular demand for printed news, which has sustained the press for half a millennium, falters, this is – were practice to match words – nice to know. But there is a can of worms here.
A “free and independent press” that is financially supported by government is an oxymoron. When politicians start worrying about journalism, however well-intentioned their rhetoric, in the corner of the room an 18th century ghost wags a warning finger: “The functionaries of every government,” asserted Thomas Jefferson, arguing for democracy’s critical need of a free press, “have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents” – and that includes news sources.
Nicky Morgan was responding to a review the DCMS had commissioned, chaired by Dame Frances Cairncross, looking into “A Sustainable Future for Journalism”. Morgan’s statement came a year after Cairncross had presented proposals designed to protect the press against “threats to the financial sustainability of publishers; the impact of search engines and social media platforms; and the role of digital advertising”.
In a representative democracy with a free press, the state does have a legitimate role, but must exercise it blindfolded. Help cannot involve responding to content. Zero-rating VAT on all newspapers is “blind” in this way, as is insisting every relevant paper run statutory notices about government action of direct concern to their readerships and paying them for so doing. But it is hard to go further.
All the Cairncross Review’s recommendations on the issues of technological challenges and competition have been accepted by the DCMS and some – a £2million pilot innovation fund to encourage the use of new technologies and help start-ups, for instance – are already in place. But Cairncross’s most eye-catching proposal, for an “Institute for Public Interest News” funded by the Lottery, has been roundly rejected by the DCMS.
The government will not be taking this recommendation forward as, while it acknowledges the value the proposed institute is intended to achieve, it is not for the government to lead on this issue. Indeed, it is not. But before consigning the idea to the dustbin of history (where it truly belongs), we should not forget how vividly it spotlights the Jeffersonian danger.
The Cairncross Review’s idea for the Lottery to be used to sustain the press was not intended to support hacks in general (surely unthinkable at a time of collapsing infrastructure and social services). It was specific: the “high quality” press was to be the object of this largesse. Not taking on board the absolutely crucial need to proceed blind, Cairncross strode boldly forward. Simply: to be supported was “high quality journalism” – ie, the “truthful and comprehensible” … “You know it when you see it”.
However, as Cairncross admitted, this (self-evidently) “is not a definition that justifies direct public support”, and “quality journalism” was therefore glossed as “public interest news”:“investigative and campaigning journalism, and especially investigations into abuses of power in both the public and the private sphere”… “the humdrum task of reporting on the daily activities of public institutions”…
It would be difficult to dispute that “both are essential in a healthy democracy”, as Cairncross claims. But, we would argue, very real vexations would be likely to attend putting these good intentions into operation if public funds were involved.
Cairncross was very clear-sighted as to the difference between such public interest “high quality” news, which it wanted to sustain, and its opposite – “soft content” – which it felt “does not qualify as news in the public interest”. But it blew its class-prejudice cover with the example it provided. The distinction turns out to be the old, ideologically fraught one between discrimination and popular culture, but as applied to the news. Popular “soft content” was, the Review said, to be found in news stories about Love Island, which has to be discriminated from news that is good for you (or that you are well enough educated to absorb). Leavis and Williams, thou should’st be living at this hour.
In 2019, even The Guardian (where Dame Frances once worked, and which we surely know to be of “high quality” when we see it) carried 30-plus stories on Love Island – eg, about a domestic altercation involving a presenter, or the swimwear on display being declared a fashion disaster. But are all these stories not worth sustaining? What about reports of an ex-contestant’s death, possibly by suicide? Discussing ethical issues around reality television could well be judged, by any reasonable standard, as news “in the public interest”.
But, anyway, who could monitor the “Institute” and distribute the money? What if public interest in investigative and campaigning news is, too “embarrassing” in the opinion of the authorities enabling its funding? Isn’t such socially valuable journalism, after all, essentially in the business of speaking truth to power – and might not power not like to hear it? Public money, demands public oversight, and public oversight means, however much you try to disguise it, politicians, and they (like the rest of us) are not much good at self-denying ordinances. In the face of a flow of embarrassing, damaging outcomes (ie, the journalistic “man-bites-dog” norms of investigative/campaigning reporting), the temptation of removing (or manipulating) the funding sustaining such “unhelpfulness” is, in the long term, irresistible.
When MI5 vetted BBC news reporters
The problems that would have faced the “Institute for Public Interest News” are not merely speculative. We have nearly a century of evidence of what happens when the state funds an organ of opinion. Just go to the BBC Archive at Caversham. In 1923, the government minister in charge of radio (the postmaster general) assured the Commons that “it was undesirable that the service should be used for the dissemination of speeches on controversial matters” – by which he meant, eg, not mentioning the Treaty of Versailles without prior clearance from the Foreign Office. The BBC has moved on since then in many ways, but not much in distancing itself from the politicians. The Corporation, as it became in 1927, put itself financially in thrall to them by accepting the licence fee system. And there is still a minister in ultimate charge – Oliver Dowden.
The current iteration of the BBC’s contract with the government, its “Agreement”, still has 30 specific references to “Minister” and as many to “content”. It is public funding that legitimates this, and editorial independence is always threatened. The central principles of a free press – especially speaking truth to power – are not readily evidenced in the BBC’s DNA.
It is frequently suggested, not least by the BBC itself, that, as it is always being attacked both by the left and the right, this must be because it is impartial. Not so, as bias can be schizophrenic, one story this way, another the other. (And, of course, even if equivalent examples of different, opposing biases could be considered as offsetting each other and adding up to impartiality, everybody feeling that the Beeb is biased against them is itself no guarantee that the grievances of one “side” are of equal legitimacy and/ or weight to those of another). Such rhetoric, however, serves a useful purpose as it distracts from the reality. So how does the BBC do as a high-quality prototype “Institute for Public Interest News”?
Take, as a most salient instance of this, its relations with the secret state. The media are often infiltrated by spooks, but few news organisations have actually invited the secret service to vet candidates for “sensitive” jobs (eg, news reporting). The BBC, though, did this for decades. MI5 lived in room BH103. And investigative journalists do not usually get shopped to their subjects, as one director general shopped a Panorama team investigating MI5 in 1980, in order to ensure there would be no embarrassments.
However, this being a free country, it is only rarely that the political paymasters who overtly control content are themselves revealed as interfering. Rather, it is the Corporation that usually does the policing. Which is why it finds itself counting the angels on the head of a pin. “Due impartiality,” in BBC-speak, apparently allows a journalist to opine on air that an asinine tweet from the US president is racist, but not to say that he, the person, is – OK to call out the tweet, but not to call out the tweeter. The management’s endless double-guessing of the authorities has instilled an institutional aversion to controversy seriously out of step with the traditions of the press. (There’s a reason why whistle-blowers usually take their stories elsewhere.) These avoidances and convolutions are the consequences of the hand that it has been dealt. It’s not the BBC’s fault.
Against this, the underlying rhetoric of society expresses a commitment to free speech, and this certainly has much substance for all media, including the BBC. On a day-to-day basis, it can and does conduct itself correctly, assuming its right of free expression is in place. Its journalists on the ground keep the faith but, as Georgina Born wrote in her study of the Corporation under director generals Birt and Dyke: although “most of the time [the BBC] has real autonomy”, it is a “contradictory organisation” kept “on a short lead”. The lead is longer when it comes, say, to adaptations of Pride and Prejudice (no questions will be asked in the House), but it is shorter with news and current affairs. And a short lead is no basis for “public interest news”, whatever its “quality”.
It is seven years since a senior Conservative, Grant Shapps, first blurted out in public the previously unmentionable: he threatened the licence fee. Today the prime minister does the same (no doubt in Latin: BBC delenda est). Of course, there would be a battle royal. This is the country, after all, where John Milton once cried (albeit quite some time ago): “Give me the liberty to know…”. But the outcome of current hostilities is not the point.
The point is that the BBC can be threatened because it is publicly funded. The Cairncross Review was wishing to deal the “Public Interest News Institute” the same hand the BBC has been trying to play for the last nine decades. Insouciantly, the Review assumed the governance of the “Institute” “should ensure complete freedom from any political or commercial obligations” – as if Lottery money made it inviolate, as if the BBC’s experience was irrelevant.
If we are worried about the sustainability of the press, a state can, directly – and blindly – intervene. In Norway, with the world’s freest press, public monies are used automatically (ie, blindly) to support every newspaper with a circulation under 6,000, making sure communities have a choice and minority-language titles are sustained. It costs millions of kroner a year. How would that work in the UK? Come on, Oliver, we’re waiting.
