06 September 2018

Nutty Or Nuanced?

Corbyn’s media proposals.

By John Watson

It has been a difficult end to August.  Politicians returned from holidays with their batteries recharged ready to fight for their ideals.  Lances were couched.  Tans had been burnished.  They were ready to do or die on the great issue of the day, but, alas, there was little to say.  Until the Government reveals what is really going on behind the closed doors of the Brexit negotiations, there isn’t much point commenting.  The great issue of the day is in a “closed period”.

That doesn’t mean that there is nothing to talk about.  The anti-semitism debate rages on.  Crossrail is to be a year late.  But by comparison with Britain’s future, this is thin gruel.  Rather than dancing about like hyperactive gadflies, wiser politicians have used the lull to do some thinking and that is why it was a good moment for Mr Corbyn to use the 2018 Alternative MacTaggart Lecture to set out some of his ideas on the media.  At this stage these are only ideas and Mr Corbyn put them forward with a view to stimulating a debate which would lead to party policy in due course.  Since that amounts to an invitation to comment on what he said, however, I propose to take it up and trust that he will not mind if I sometimes disagree with him.

The media, of course, has two distinct functions, to entertain and to inform; it is the second of these which concerns Mr Corbyn.  His worry is that “the British media isn’t ready for the challenges of the 21st century and so cannot properly serve the interests of a truly democratic society.”

I think everyone would agree that the servicing of democracy by the provision of information is the most important role of the media, but things float a little off course when Mr Corbyn is more specific.  Try this, for example:

“At their best, journalists challenge unaccountable power and expose things the rich and powerful would rather keep hidden.”

That is a little out of date.  It is certainly an important function of journalists to reveal the secrets of the rich and powerful, but in these days of rising populism there is a more important function still: that of challenging popular bigotry.  It takes more courage to stand up to the racism we are seeing in Eastern Germany or to the politically correct notions which dominate British politics than to write a diatribe against banking profits.

That doesn’t invalidate what Mr Corbyn says, but it demonstrates a slant.  As the leader of the Labour party it is natural for Mr Corbyn to make the rich the villains and to call for their influence to be reduced, but it is more important still that the press should not be dominated by politicians.  After all, we rely on it to help redress the balance when the demagogues get out of control.

This slant also emerges in Mr Corbyn’s identification of existing shortcomings.  He regards it as bad that the media is not trusted.  He is right about that.  He thinks that the concentration of ownership is unhelpful.  He is right about that too.  But then he slips from Corbyn, the analyst, to Corbyn, the panderer to the left, with:

“The owners and editors of most of our country’s newspapers have dragged down standards so far that their hard-working journalists are simply not trusted by the public.  It’s a travesty.”

It isn’t just a travesty.  It is simplistic nonsense.  “Owners and editors bad; journalists good” may have a place in Animal Farm but it really cannot be the case that when a journalist gets promoted to editor he goes through a Jekyll & Hyde metamorphosis.  There are good owners and bad owners, good editors and bad editors, good journalists and bad journalists, just as there always were.  How could it be otherwise?

So why is it that the press has become less trusted?  Why is the quality seen to have fallen?  The truth is, of course, that it is all about money and the most revealing comment in Mr Corbyn’s lecture is that 24% of journalists earn less than £20,000 a year.  Money is the lifeblood of the press and a shortage of it causes a vicious circle.  Falling income means less to spend on journalism.  Less spend on journalism means shallower research and more superficial coverage.  Falls in quality reduce circulation which takes us full circle to a decrease in income.  There is no doubt that we need to get more money into news reporting.

The lack of money gives rise to a second problem, a lack of diversity.  It cannot be a good thing that three companies control 71% of national newspaper circulation, but that is an inevitable result of the lack of profitability.  If newspapers are not inherently profitable they become a rich man’s game because that is the only way in which they can survive.  The answer to that is not to destroy the proprietorial model by insisting that editors be elected by journalists but to encourage other models to grow up alongside it.  You don’t need to be Darwin to realise that progress comes from new and varied growth rather than imposing rules on what you have.

It is by reference to these two objectives that Mr Corbyn’s lecture should be judged.  He can hardly be blamed for not finding the answer to funding in these days of austerity but his ideas don’t really cut it.  Charitable status does not provide funds for itself but rather gears individual’s contributions with state subsidy.  The type of people willing to fund “public interest journalism” normally have an axe to grind and one can see the main political parties rushing to get an effective subsidy for their research and propaganda.  Do the public really want to subsidise them in this way?  A second proposal that money be found by taxing the internet companies is merely sleight of hand.  Probably we will tax them more heavily in future but if so the taxes fall into the general pot available for health, pensions, infrastructure and the rest of it.  A decision to use it to fund the reform of media and broadcasting is just spending public money.  A better answer might be to face up to that and provide a government fund to pump-prime new initiatives.

A more interesting idea is that of a British Digital Corporation, a sort of multi-media equivalent of the BBC.  It isn’t really spelt out in much detail but the idea of a state-run media platform to compete with those already existing is an interesting one and has the advantage that it introduces a green shoot rather than imposing restrictions on what we have.  No doubt we will hear more of it in due course but we already know a little about the vision and it is not promising:

“The BDC could work with other institutions that the next Labour government will set up like our National Investment Bank, National Transformation Fund, Strategic Investment Board, Regional Development Banks and our public utilities to create new ways for public engagement, oversight and control of key levers of our economy.”

Please, please, Mr Corbyn and Mr Watson.  Could this be an attempt to produce something that serves the public and not an adjunct to a particular political agenda?