The Return of the Public PDF Print E-mail
24 June 2009, Dan Hind

In the recently published White Paper Digital Britain the government signaled its intention to provide more state funding for journalism. The decline in advertising revenues in both print and broadcast media has made it impossible for commercial providers to deliver high-end drama, documentaries and investigative journalism. The government therefore proposed that 3.5% of the license fee, around £126 million annually, be given, among other things, to ‘news consortia’. The White Paper also says that the government is ‘open to other proposals for funding in the consultation process’. However it is raised, state funding, the White Paper assures us, ‘needs to be contestable, allocated against clear range, reach and quality criteria by an arm’s length body’.

The funding crisis in the traditional media businesses presents us with an opportunity to push for changes in the ways in which the news is produced. The existing news media – both private and state-owned - have demonstrably failed to provide the public with the information it needs to assert its democratic rights. The national failings need not be rehearsed in detail here. It is sufficient to note the astonishing credulity of the major media in the face of government claims in the period directly before the Iraq War and the almost complete silence about the buildup of debt in the years before 2007. In the words of Richard Lambert, the head of the CBI and a former editor of the Financial Times, ‘precious few journalists gave any hint at all of what was to come’. At the local and regional level the collapse of effective scrutiny has hardly been less complete. Town after town has been eviscerated by narrow corporate interests while the media stood by in silence.

It is time therefore to consider how we can reform the media in line with democratic principles. The government wants a debate on how ‘contestable’ funding for news might be provided.  Our aim must be to ensure that news no longer simply reproduces the balance of views in society at any given moment (and therefore privileges the interests of those who already enjoy political and economic power and prestige). We need to create media institutions that are capable of producing and disseminating information that is disruptive and unwelcome to precisely those established interests.

At the heart of serious reform of the media in Britain must be a mechanism for direct public commissioning. As the journalist Jonathan Cook has pointed out, investigative journalism has always been subject to very tight controls by the management of news organizations, precisely because its disruptive potential needs to be kept in check:

[…] investigative teams were numerically tiny in comparison with the main editorial staff; the investigative reporters were restricted to their own discrete teams with almost no contact with other editorial departments; and their choice of subjects was closely “supervised” by senior editorial staff.

In other words, the investigative reporter is the exception in journalism rather than the model. He or she is the loose cannon whose reports can bring the paper great acclaim but only if the reporter is kept on a tight leash. The honour they bring the paper can equally turn disastrous if the wrong subjects are pursued or the story leads in unpredictable directions that threaten powerful interests. This is why investigative reporters have always been a small and threatened breed and have always been closely scrutinised.

This, as Cook makes clear, was the case during the heyday of investigative reporting. Now that the media groups are cutting back on journalism in general and expensive investigations in particular, this kind of work is even more closely monitored by management and even less likely to explore areas that are of concern to powerful interests.

The solution to this problem is to place commissioning decisions in the hands of the public. Instead of leaving the topics chosen for investigation in the hands of professional editors (in the hands of those who have demonstrated their ideological trustworthiness, to put it less politely), journalists should post proposals for investigations at local, regional and national level. The public can then vote for the subjects that they want to see funded. The £126 million up for grabs would pay 5,250 journalists £24,000 a year to look into matters of public interest – about 15% of the NUJ’s current membership.

It is the commissioning power that is most jealously guarded by news organizations, whether they are private corporations or they are controlled by the state. Give that power to an engaged and motivated public and you will profoundly alter the balance of power in this country. Those who are curious to establish how their communities, municipalities and nations are run will have the means ensure that they are adequately informed, without the intervening filter of ‘responsible’ media ‘professionals’, whose first loyalty must be to the institutions for which they work, not the general public interest.

The government plans to consult with the BBC Trust on pilot schemes between now and 2012. This presents us with a glittering opportunity. At the moment the media are reporting that the money will go to established regional media players:

Each consortium is likely to be made up of existing TV news providers, regional newspaper groups and other media organisations, several of which – including Guardian Media Group, STV and the Press Association – have already expressed an interest in the scheme.

But clearly the money should not be given to ‘news consortia’ by civil servants, no matter how impeccable and ‘contestable’ the criteria. The public should give the money to journalists to conduct the kinds of investigation that it supports, through a simple and transparent system of ‘public commissioning’.  We can achieve this if journalists, academics and the general public unite and put together a clear case for public commissioning, and address the many objections that are likely to be raised – the public will want celebrity stories, this move will weaken the BBC, and so on.  The government intends to end the consultation process by early September. We don’t have long to make an unanswerable case for democratic control of the commissioning process.

This is not a matter of narrow interest to media professionals and their employers. This is a matter for us all. It is about our hopes to achieve an adult understanding of the times we live in. It is about our becoming, for the first time in more than three hundred years, a light unto the nations. For too long the state and private capital have been given extraordinary leeway to describe the world in ways that suit them.

Public commissioning would give us an opportunity to break their domination of the investigative process. It would give civil society powerful new means to hold power to account. After all, whoever controls our view of the world pretty much controls our world.

Isn’t it time we took control? £126 million isn’t enough, but it is a start.

Let’s make a start.

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