More coverage this weekend of broadcasting regulation, with stories in the papers that restrictions on product placement will be relaxed.
While no final decision has yet been taken, the announcement that the government is in principle in favour of deregulation have brought mixed reactions, with commercial broadcasters understandably pleased, and some groups claiming viewer trust will be undermined. Or maybe they are worried viewers will be as traumatised as I was at seeing Superman drink Budweiser.
The annual performance by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport at the Royal Television Society Convention is always closely watched, and Ben Bradshaw’s speech this year will be no exception. It comes not long since James Murdoch’s Mactaggart Lecture in which he complained of (among other things) the effects of the BBC on the market, and the BBC’s response to this, including its own review.
All good stuff for debate, but it is worth remembering that much of what Digital Britain said about broadcasting was not so much about what the BBC was doing to the fortunes of the popular broadcasters, but what the market would not provide without an intervention. And at the top of that list, we concluded, was provide alternative sources of impartial news, particularly at a regional or local level.
The question of whether a part of the licence fee should in future be used to provide this choice remains at the top of Mr Bradshaw’s inbox, although his speech will undoubtedly address the wider issues surrounding TV today. I suspect as we go into party conference season, there will be more soul searching about the future of what is likely to remain the digital communications device found in most homes – the telly.
Working in the Department for Business puts me right on the divide between the public and private sectors. Our ability to achieve our policy objectives often means flexing tht boundary, either through spending, regulation, direct involvement in a market or some other intervention. The current political climate sees a lot of discussion about how much of all of this the state should have been doing, or should do in future. Some people are claiming that decades of belief that we should have a small state letting the market prosper might be coming to an end, with the pendulum swinging towards a highly interventionist state.
While communications policy hasn’t endured such a dramatic twelve months as the financial sector, the same issues are at play. Virtually nobody really hankers after renationalisation of our telecoms networks, for instance, but lots of people want to see a very active state providing investment in next generation broadband. In broadcasting, the consensus around the BBC’s role in the country’s culture might be cracking a little bit at the edges, but I would argue there is a general acceptance that it will play a massive role in our future, tempered by a concern that commercial alternatives are starting to look under severe strain.
So how should the government react? People will always look to the government to ‘do something’. It sometimes takes a brave minister to say there is nothing for us to do. As always in politics, the trick is to get the balance right and make the intervention the right one that leaves the market able to function properly. Maybe that’s what Digital Britain will ultimately be judged on.
We’re going through the paper responses to the report, of which there are nearly 300, and the stack stands a good foot off the table. They range from one page emails to thirty or forty page submissions.
It’s too early to summarise them in any detail, but a few themes have emerged. Most obviously, there is a lot of discussion about our ambitions for broadband – plenty of people saying 2MB/s isn’t enough, but also plenty of nervousness over who is going to pay for it. Likewise, there has been a fair bit of comment over the supposed ‘old media’ focus of the report, although the established broadcasters quite rightly point out that people still watch a lot of television…
But plenty of people have raised slightly different angles, and questioned why, for example, there isn’t a greater emphasis on carbon reduction or technoloygy development. We’ll have to consider all of this as we go into the final report.
Finally, we’ve got the challenge of how to capture all the online comment about the report. Like it or not, the civil service still works mostly on paper (or at least on pages) and it’s actually much easier to precis, file and refer back to a twenty page submission from the BBC than it is to capture the back-and-forth of an online discussion between four or five people. But it’s more important in this project than ever that we demonstrate we’re listening to the online chatter.
