Secretary of State speech to the Convergence Think Tank

11 June 2008

I’ve been doing something dangerous for a politician in recent weeks – I’ve been thinking. And rather than keep these thoughts to myself, I thought the right thing to do in these unusual circumstances I find myself in was to come and share this thinking with our think tank and, hopefully, add something to your important deliberations.

What has surprised me since I started this job some four months ago is rawness and the fierceness of this clash between the old and the new worlds, and the sense of fear about it. When I look at the issues across my department – not just in broadcasting and media but in music and indeed all of the creative industries – I don’t see a path of smooth transition to the future but something of a cliff edge. And faced with this, I worry that people are beginning to take decisions that, as a society, we may regret in the long term.

So that is why I now felt this was the right time to lay out some of my thinking, to challenge some of the assumptions on which these decisions are being made and are taking root at the moment.

We all know this country has been very lucky to benefit from creative content produced to high standards. The question before you, this think tank, is how we carry forward the best of what we have currently got, what we have traditionally enjoyed, in a changing world?

So today I want to make an argument. It felt right to lay some of this thinking out now as there are big questions looming that will require important decisions –I want you to know the context in which I am making these decisions and the instincts I bring to these deliberations.

My theme today is standards – and in some ways I want to rehabilitate the word. Call me old-fashioned, but for me standards are absolutely vital to everything we are considering – not just looking backwards but looking forwards as well.
I will begin with broadcasting but will then apply some of the same thinking, same tests to the online world.

What do I mean by standards? I’m thinking of guiding principles like impartiality and accuracy in TV and radio news, the integrity of programme making and the 9pm watershed, protecting against harm and offence, that have stood us in good stead for years. These are principles that have stood us in good stead over the years.

Why are these important? Standards are what have kept British broadcasting valued, celebrated and trusted in the UK and around the world. And I think they are becoming more, not less, important to traditional print and broadcast media as we look to the future.

Being trusted has never been more important. People are still relying heavily on TV news – despite the explosion in information sources. And trust is what people value most, particularly in news, as the Ofcom phase 1 PSB review recently found.

People, both at home and abroad, look to British programming because they understand that it is produced to high standards, meaning they know they can trust what they are seeing and hearing.

There is a reason why bbc.co.uk is the third most visited website in the UK. There is a reason why hotels around the world buy in Sky News and the BBC. Why Morse is sold to 200 countries around the world, Prime Suspect winning a clutch of Golden Globe awards.

Taken together, this creates a powerful economic argument in support of standards. Standards are part of Britain’s brand when it comes to world markets. If we chip away at these standards in response to short-term pressures, we risk changing forever how people at home and abroad think and feel about original British programming.

The growth of the internet has been so fast and furious that I appreciate it has generated a real pressure on people working in traditional media, and I accept that some may say in response to the arguments I’m putting forward today that it’s easy for someone like me to talk about standards when I’m not faced with the reality on balance sheets and feeling real pressure that brings. I can see how some people feel there is no alternative but to chip away at existing standards on the assumption that they are in fact old world baggage – ballast that’s hampering progress in the new world.

I worry that the online world will simply wash away all of the standards that have built up over time so we may as well surrender, do it now, and have a chance of surviving.

This feeling has spread to policy-makers too. Not to make an overly political point but it did surprise me recently when the Conservative Party proposed the removal of the impartiality requirements for non-PSB TV news. There is an argument that the distinction between online newspaper sites and TV news is blurring and that we should embrace the future and indeed allow it to proceed with more pace.

I accept that attitudes and perspectives are changing very fast and that if I were to look again at this issue in five years time I may feel differently about it but for now I take directly the opposite view in response to this point put forward by the Shadow Minister. With so much of the online world untrusted, I feel we should preserve standards of accuracy, impartiality and trustworthiness, rather than dismantle them. People still use the internet and TV for different reasons and with different expectations and we mustn’t forget that.

Lower standards and you lose the trust and the public support that goes with it. Lose trust and you lower the quality, you lose innovation, you lose the ability of programme makers to take risks, you lose new possibilities, new talent goes undiscovered, and high quality programming is compromised.

This is the context in which we must consider the recent phone voting scandals and it is why it is a very significant issue. In my view, this has holed broadcasters just above the waterline in terms of public trust – damaging but not fatal. It has made it easier for critics of public service broadcasting. Look, they can say, the vaunted high standards of PSB are a myth. They are no more likely to uphold standards of integrity than anyone else.

Another test of standards that is coming round the corner is product placement. As you know the Government is obliged to consider this as part of the implementation of the new Audio Visual Media Services Directive.

I can see the arguments and benefits of product placement and understand why people feel it is an inevitability given the pressures they are under. But applying the same test, I can also see the cost and the very high costs that might be paid in the long term. I feel there is a risk that product placement exacerbates this decline in trust and contaminates our programmes. There is a risk that, at the very moment when television needs to do all it can to show it can be trusted, that we elide the distinction between programmes and adverts.

As a viewer, I don’t want to feel the script has been written by the commercial marketing director. If Jim Royle gets out of his chair for a Kit Kat, I want to think, ‘he fancies a Kit Kat’ – not, ‘Kit Kat my arse!’ If I thought it was because someone has paid for him to eat one it would change the way I felt about the programme.

We will be consulting shortly, and I am ready to listen to the arguments on both sides. But I come today to give my instinctive view on how I’m feeling about how we respond. And, again, like impartiality in TV news, I accept that this issue may look different if I were to look at it in five years time. But here and now I do want to signal that I think there are some lines that we should not cross – one of which is that you can buy the space between the programmes on commercial channels, but not the space within them.

British programming has an integrity that is revered around the world and I don’t think we should put that hard-won reputation up for sale.

These standards that essential to the success of broadcasting, in this converging world – there is a view that standards have no place online, but I don’t believe that’s right.

In its infancy, the internet was out on the fringes and some of the pioneers saw it as the “wild west”, a lawless frontier country. For some of the early internet pioneers, it was a means of subverting and bypassing the regulatory systems of the old world.

Can I just quote to you from Barlow from something called, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (by John Perry Barlow, February 8, 1996)

“You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions."

“Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.”

That was then. Twelve years on the internet is mainstream and affecting the professional lives of everyone in this room. It is in everyone’s office, most people’s homes, it’s essential to the global economy. It has brought huge benefits, let me stress that – access to information, communication, democracy – and the World is a much more interesting place for it.

But the penetration of the internet to all of our lives, means that I think that people don’t want it to feel like the wild west. Things some people accept as inevitable in terms of governance, I believe we should question.

Why? Because as, for example, Tanya Byron finds in her report there is a climate of anxiety, as well as opportunity that surrounds new technology.

You do have to stop and think when you read a quote from a nine-year old boy in Tanya’s report about whether we are sufficiently controlling this online world in which our children are roaming. It’s funny but it does make a very important point. He said: “I’m worried I’ll get lost on the internet and find I’ve suddenly got a job in the army or something.”
It made me laugh and I’m glad it made you laugh too but I think it makes an important point.

To that though, do we need to be helping and educating people more, finding the online standards equivalent of the 9pm watershed for television? So that, for example, parents can make informed choices about what their children see? These are big issues that will require Government to work with industry to find the right balance.

Why? Because what is unacceptable offline should not be acceptable online – for example, child pornography and other crimes like fraud or theft. This equally applies to the music industry.

The music industry has been the canary in the internet coalmine in terms of the consequences of piracy and illegal file-sharing. There is a lot of thinking yet to be done on this question. But we have signalled in our creative economy programme that if the policy and creative industry insiders don't solve this problem, we will bring the same values of the real world – the values that say shoplifting of a CD is unacceptable - to the internet.

But there is also a challenge to industry to develop new business models so they benefit from changing consumer behaviour.
Of course, some of the way the new world is currently operating is defended by saying it is really all about the consumer. It is tremendously empowering for the consumer and in many ways a good thing, but there does come a point when you have to question and ask where what is good for the consumer can be bad for the citizen.

Of course, I am not saying there are not already some rules.

Most of cyberspace isn’t free of rules. Innovative systems of governance have sprung up spontaneously – rules of etiquette and usage that help people navigate, negotiate and do business with confidence online. And as you will have seen from the Prime Minister’s speech to the Google conference, it is not this Government’s policy to react to the challenge of the change the internet presents by retreating to a position of protectionism or heavy regulation.

But, it is the time to ask ourselves some fundamental questions and challenge some of the assumptions of the consensus on which it is operating before it takes root.

The questions in my mind are these:

Have we said content should be free?
How do we use the power of the internet to democratise creativity and maximise economic benefits for the UK?
How do we maintain standards in media and give citizens information sources they can trust?
How do we modernise and adapt systems of law - copyright and intellectual property – that have protected British creative talent over the decades so that we can maintain high creative standards in the future?
How do we maximise the empowering and democratic benefits of the digital age without criminalising an entire generation?
Questions, which I hope that we can begin to explore through the convergence think tank and questions which I wanted to bring to you and add to the debate.

Four months into this job and I am not ready with the answers yet. We have yet to see the second Ofcom report and the programme of the outcome of the Convergence Think Tank.

There is still a lot of work to be done. But I want to end where I began – the question of trust and standards.

I want to see us carrying forward the best of the past in a way that is realistic about the future. The internet shouldn’t and mustn’t sweep away all the values and standards that have served us well in the past. What we have through the fast but gradual process of convergence is the chance to re-evaluate standards and values and update them for the future, and I would welcome your advice on how we might best achieve that.

[Ends]

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