At a debate this week in Holyrood, MSPs voted 70 to 48 in favour of devolving broadcasting powers from Westminster to the Scottish Parliament.
This was largely ignored by the media – probably because nothing will happen as a result. The Scottish Parliament has no power to make its wish a reality.
The Scottish Daily Express was an exception. It did report the vote – with the headline “SNP Bid to gain control of BBC Scotland is ‘straight from the Goebbels playbook’ ”. The paper quoted Alistair Bonnington, who was head of legal at BBC Scotland for 16 years until 2008, comparing the SNP’s tactics to “those of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.”
It is an absurd comparison, but it begs the question: what do we mean by a free press?
Does freedom mean letting the market – ie rich media barons – decide what information we get – or don’t get? What level of involvement from a democratically elected government is acceptable?
In the run-up to the US midterms, psephologists talked about “low information voters”. I have a lot of sympathy with them – when we lived in the US, I found it shocking how difficult it was to access reliable news. Basically, all high-quality information in the US is behind a paywall. It doesn’t actually have much of a ‘free press’.
TV news in the US is absolutely abysmal. In the UK, you can still turn on a flagship news show – on Channel Four, the BBC, even Sky. – which is built around on-the-ground news reporting.
But in the States, every channel is just continuous talking heads, mostly featuring women wearing spider-sized fake eyelashes. I was told to try PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service. But it is a stale porridge service when it comes to news. I remember turning it on hopefully, when there had been a major development on the war in Syria. But their international segment that night was a feature that had been in the can for months about Americans buying flats for a dollar in an Italian hill village. I turned it off in disgust.
The coalface of truth
I started out as a reporter and I think that the kind of journalism which wears out your trainers is the best way of seeing all the sides of a story. We know nobody can truly be impartial – but good reporters get to experience at firsthand and, if they are given enough space, communicate the complex nature of reality.
Years ago, US TV channels had to provide mandatory public service broadcasting – quotas of news, current affairs etc. These were the days of foreign bureaus and respected international reporters like Walter Cronkite – “the most trusted man in America” who changed public opinion with his reports from the Vietnam War.
History shot on the wing
But in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan’s government removed the public service requirements. Foreign bureaus are very expensive and they don’t attract advertising so they were soon shut down. This process has been going on in the print media too. Citing cost pressures, the Washington Post fired its foreign correspondents earlier this year and some of them had to crowdfund to get home.
This removal of resources from the shoe-leather brigade is happening in the UK too. My colleague Jen Stout “Night Train to Odessa” – has written about how hard it is these days to get backing as an international correspondent.
International reporting is also getting harder and more dangerous. International journalists have not been allowed into Gaza so the work of reporting the conflict has fallen entirely on Palestinians, hundreds of whom have been killed. Jeremy Bowen has written about this. The BBC’s pleas for access have been ignored by the Israeli government. Lots of people express anger at the BBC over its reporting of Gaza. Part of the issue is that it has been reluctant to rely on the raw footage from citizen journalists and has been left uneasily balancing eyewitness footage with talking heads in London. But the requirement for impartiality has to come second to accuracy.
The keystone species in the UK’s media ecosystem
Public support for the BBC is diminshing – faster in Scotland than anywhere else in the UK. But if the BBC’s role as a provider of news and international news goes, the UK’s news ecosystem could collapse. Commercial broadcasters want to make money. If they can get away with spending less on news production, because the competition has been knobbled, they will. So while I may not be a wholehearted supporter of the BBC, I fear what might come after it.
The other main bulwark against the dark, screaming vacancy of US TV news is the UK’s regulator Ofcom, which can enforce requirements for public sector broadcasting. One of the beefs the Scottish Parliament has with Ofcom is that it has failed to protect Scottish news reporting. It waved through STV’s kill-off of the last remnant of Grampian TV, STV North. The resources STV saved went into yet another bland radio station with no public service role. Ofcom also greenlit the BBC’s halving of Scottish broadcast news output.
Ofcom’s corporate capture
Scots are not alone in believing Ofcom has abrogated its duty and undergone some kind of corporate capture. Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has led a campaign on GB News, producing evidence that the channel does not comply with UK rules about impartiality. Rusbridger argues that it should be counted as political spend because it promotes and employs members of Reform and acts as a mouthpiece for their political agenda. He wrote in Prospect magazine that he got a pretty cheeky response from the regulator telling him to start his own channel. He joked that he plans to call it ‘Woke TV’.
But some argue that TV news that attempts to tell both sides is simply old hat
Lewis Goodall presents The Newsagents, a conversational podcast that is also available to watch on YouTube. Because it is not on terrestrial TV, there is no requirement to be impartial. It is treated more like print journalism in that way.
In a lecture he gave recently, which he published on Substack, Goodall wrote:
Video journalism is changing, exploding, reinventing itself in front of our eyes. It’s an exciting time…I’m gutted that too much TV news in particular has simply decided, for reasons of expediency, for reasons of complacency, almost for reason of a quasi- religion, and partly for reasons outside of its own control, not to join sufficiently in that revolution. There is a Reformation going on out there. And TV news, increasingly feels, like a very old church, singing old hymns, with fewer and fewer choosing to join in.
Goodall argues that the future of news lies with shows like his, presented by opinionated journalist-celebrities:
We now live in a media world where individuals increasingly matter as much as institutions.
Sometimes- dare I say it- and I’m looking at my agent’s approving smile here- more.
People develop relationships with journalists and content creators online. They trust their judgement. They understand their sensibilities. They return to them again and again. Even if they know their judgment is not always perfect.
I’ll illustrate this with a change I’ve noticed even with my transition from tv news to podcasts.
People come up to you. They look thrilled. They treat you like your family. It’s actually quite weird. The best bit is whwere they say they go to bed with you.
Hmm. Not woke TV but sleep TV?. But Lewis is right when he argues that there is a changing media landscape. Many people spend at least some of their viewing hours on non-traditional channels on YouTube, from pro-Indy Broadcasting Scotland to the lefty Novara Media.
Facts are chiels that winna ding
But the danger is that there is an ellision between reporting and comment. It already seems that the media is dominated by characters who can construct an argument on any subject fuelled by a cuttings search and a double espresso. They know what their ideological leanings are and anything can be grist to that mill.
Yet “comment is free, but facts are sacred”, wrote the famous Guardian editor CP Snow. And Burns said “facts are chiels that winna ding” – truth matters.
What could Scotland actually do?
So what could Scotland actually do with control over broadcasting regulation in this changing landscape? Westminster could also hand over its powers over internet communications, including streamers like Netflix. A small market like Scotland is not going to have much impact on Netflix, but it could demand a modicum of locally made content at least.
Scotland has a much smaller media industry than similarly-sized independent countries like Denmark or Ireland. More power could help there.
It could ensure transparency, for example over what the BBC spends here and how they decide on their priorities. There is a perception that there is a London-centric dimension to this.
Glasgow Anniesland MSP Colm Merrick told the debate that Scotland is being hit disproportionately harder by the cuts: “While England “is set to lose “Blankety Blank”, Scotland is set to lose flagship news programmes and this is just – blank.”
At a committee hearing before the debate, the NUJ’s Scotland organiser Nick McGowan-Lowe told MSPs that trust is at rock bottom and if more BBC cuts come down the line, people in Scotland would question why they pay the licence fee.
The Holyrood debate heard that Scotland has low autonomy over broadcasting compared to regions of Spain. There, instead of a licence fee, public sector broadcasting is funded by taxation which goes directly to the governments in Catalonia and the Basque Country who fund and regulate local channels.
This kind of wholesale reform could probably only happen with independence. But for those who think that devolution has further to go, handing more powers over broadcasting to Holyrood would create room for experiment.
It would be interesting to see what ideas the Scottish Parliament can come up with to solve the challenging problems of today’s fragmented media landscape. Could it use those powers to ensure Scotland protects and restores a news media worthy of the name? There is only one way to find out.
