2013-05-21T21:12:43-04:00 Des Freedman http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=des-freedman Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Des Freedman Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2903678 2013-03-18T19:23:28-04:00 2013-05-18T05:12:01-04:00

Des Freedman http://www.huffingtonpost.com/des-freedman/ Sun exhorting MPs to vote for a 'free press' and to reject proposals for independent press regulation is entirely appropriate: never has so much rubbish been written by so many columnists for so little reward. In these circumstances, it is not the freedom of the press that is under threat but the credibility of some of its leading commentators.

Just consider a recent column by the Sun's political editor, Trevor Kavanagh. Not only does he claim that proposals for a Leveson-compliant Royal Charter "risk an irreparable blow to foundations of true democracy" but he actually has the cheek to claim that the press would no longer be able to investigate things like Hillsborough - a scandal unleashed by his newspaper's outrageous lies about the behaviour of Liverpool fans back in 1989 and a cover-up that his newspaper did nothing to reveal.

Nick Cohen argued in the March 17 edition of the Observer that the plan for press regulation eventually agreed by all three parties in Parliament is the result of what happens when "'progressives' run riot and smash the liberties they are meant to defend". This is presumably in contrast to the far more progressive practices of hacking people's phones for no evident public interest, doing secret deals with the police, lobbying politicians behind closed doors and generally devoting far more resources to courting power than holding it to account.

Benedict Brogan in the Telegraph insisted that proposals to curb unethical journalism are all about the left taking its revenge on years of being marginalised and humiliated - nothing to do with any bad behaviour on the part of the press themselves. We will now apparently end up "with a system of press regulation that will be the most draconian of anywhere in the free world. The Americans will be gobsmacked by it; in Moscow, Harare and wherever else we like to lecture about freedom they will have a laugh". Yes, because up until now, no British newspaper has had anything to do with state control - except for already being subject to multiple forms of statute, from contempt of court to libel, and for happily taking some £600million of public money in the shape of exemption from VAT.

Hypocrisy and hysteria has marked the reactions of whole sections of the press when faced with a challenge to their own power. But remember that it was precisely the abuse of this power that led to the phone hacking scandal, that was uncovered during the Leveson Inquiry, that was mobilised in attacking Leveson's conclusions and that, most recently, has resulted in cross-party agreement for a Royal Charter.

Is the model of regulation contained in the Royal Charter strong enough to tackle this kind of press power? There are certainly elements of the deal that should help to iron out some of the worst examples of intrusion and inaccuracy and to provide the basis for a more ethical press. Ordinary journalists and members of the public will be part of the process of drawing up a new code while preventing editors from having a veto over membership of the new regulator is already a step forward from the utterly discredited, industry-dominated Press Complaints Commission. Allowing for third party complaints is another significant step forward so that, finally, there can be more challenges to those titles that take pleasure in scapegoating and stereotyping vulnerable groups like asylum seekers and refugees. Access for ordinary people to a free arbitration system as well as the regulator's power to insist on prominent corrections and apologies should also help to stop some of the most damaging aspects of sensationalist journalism. For their persistence in refusing to buckle under the pressure exerted both by the industry and David Cameron (who is now claiming credit for the deal when it was his political weakness that made it virtually inevitable), the victims' representatives, Hacked Off, deserve real credit.

Yes, there remain concerns about how the new regulator is going to deal with whistleblowing, data protection, journalists' sources and now whether all news-related websites are going to be subject to the model laid out in the Charter. Given the fact that the deal was struck in private - a rather ironic reflection of the criticism made by many during the Leveson Inquiry that too many deals between press and politicians are made in secret - it is no surprise that there is confusion over whether the rules would apply to a site like Counterfire or whether they are aimed specifically at the online versions of mass-circulation titles and, as the culture secretary put it, at 'news-related material in the course of a business'. The difference is crucial: it was the most powerful voices in the media who were found to have hacked phones, bribed police officers and bullied journalists and it should be they who should be subject to the new guidelines.

Of course, the effectiveness of the scheme depends both on the ability of the regulator to stand up to press power and the willingness of the press to be subject to the new rules. Some titles may even choose to stand outside the system and use their wealth as a shield against what they see as an affront to their freedom to bully, distort and, as Lord Justice Leveson put it, to "wreak havoc on the lives of innocent people".

More significantly, however, the Royal Charter does nothing to change the cause of the arrogance, complacency and neoliberal orthodoxy of newspapers like the Mail, Sun, Express and Telegraph: the fact that the British press is dominated by a handful of giant corporations whose responsibility is not to the public but to shareholders and proprietors hungry for profits and power. Changing the culture of the British press requires not just better codes and a more forceful means of persuading newspapers to play by the rules (though this would be very welcome both for ordinary journalists and the public) but will involve a challenge to an ownership structure that has placed the press in the hands of a tiny group of oligarchs and moguls. How can our media be said to be genuinely free when it is subject to the diktat of men like Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre, the Barclay Brothers and Richard Desmond? Tackling ownership concentration has to be next on the agenda.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2621557 2013-02-05T19:00:00-05:00 2013-04-07T05:12:01-04:00

Des Freedman http://www.huffingtonpost.com/des-freedman/
The first is a The Huffington Post debate at Goldsmiths, University of London featuring pro- and anti-war voices including the former shadow defence secretary Bernard Jenkin MP and the former cabinet minister Clare Short, journalists David Aaronovitch and Owen Jones and Iraqi activist Haifa Zangana and commentator Ali Latif. The overall question is whether the war was 'worth it.'

The second is a conference hosted by the Stop the War Coalition, who organized the original protest in 2003, and features a stellar cast of anti-war activists including Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Tony Benn, Jemima Khan, Seamus Milne, Salma Yaqoob and Lindsey German. Here the focus is very much on learning lessons from Iraq in order more effectively to oppose both present and future wars.

This is a crucial task. The 'war on terror' may have been rebranded as 'overseas contingency operations' and US and UK troops may have left Iraq and are preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan but the threat of military action from Syria to Sub-Saharan Africa remains very much alive.

In this context it is worth reminding ourselves of some of warnings posed by the marchers back in 2003. Chris Nineham's excellent new book, The People v. Tony Blair, captures the febrile atmosphere of the demonstrations that took place around the world on 15 February where anywhere between eight and 30 million people marched in 600 cities demanding that George Bush and Tony Blair call off their plans for an invasion and occupation of Iraq. In the UK, many marchers held placards simply saying 'NO' while many others insisted that any war would be 'NOT IN MY NAME'. Protestors made it clear that they did not believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that a US/UK onslaught would lead to the deaths of huge numbers of Iraqis and increased instability throughout the Middle East.

Ten years on, we meet to ask 'was it worth it?'

Presumably not for the many hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed in the conflict. The figures may vary (Iraq Body Count put the number at around 120,000 while the Lancet counted upwards of 600,000) but the story is one of devastation nonetheless.

Presumably not for the 4400 US soldiers killed in combat and presumably not also for anyone seeking peace, security and democracy in a region whose tensions and rivalries have been intensified by the occupation.

Presumably not for former prime minister Tony Blair whose reputation was utterly tarnished following the war and who continues to be met with cries of 'war criminal' whenever he appears in public in the UK.

Yet some did rather well out of the war. The US company Halliburton won contracts from government agencies worth $17.2 billion from 2003-6 to construct and maintain military bases, repair oil fields and other infrastructural projects in Iraq. The private equity firm, Veritas Capital, through its DynCorp subsidiary, earned $1.44 billion by training the new Iraqi police force before selling the company to another fund, Cerberus Capital Management in 2010.

None of this would have been a surprise to the millions marching to stop the assault on Iraq. One of the most popular slogans was 'No Blood for Oil' reflecting a widely-held view that the war was about securing Western strategic interests rather than about humanitarian motives.

What is so impressive is that despite news coverage that, with some honourable exceptions like the Daily Mirror, reproduced an official narrative that Iraq presented an imminent danger to the West, by and large ordinary citizens failed to buy into this. Polls showed that, while in 2003 the UK and US publics were each split in their attitude towards a war in Iraq, their opposition to the war hardened quite quickly. The last poll in the UK that showed a majority in favour of the war was in May 2004 and the picture has remained the same ever since.

There is a similar pattern in the US where, less than a month ago, a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 59% of Americans said Iraq war wasn't worth it. This followed a Pew survey from 2011 which showed that a similar number of Iraq veterans argued that the war was not worth fighting. Indeed, a majority of the US public still do not believe that the Iraq War was 'morally justified' and think that sending troops to Iraq was a 'dumb thing to do.' Most continue to believe that the US government deliberately misled the US public about the existence of WMDs.

Polls in Iraq also demonstrated a substantial majority of the public opposed to the US occupation with some 78% of those questioned in a 2006 poll stating that the presence of foreign troops was 'provoking more conflict than it was preventing'.

Of course, opinion polls are far from the most reliable expression of the 'truth' of any situation and are often the product of highly selective questions as well as providing a static and potentially misleading picture of individual beliefs on a particular issue. This is why the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu railed against what he saw as 'manufactured opinion... mobilised around a system of explicitly formulated interests.' Public opinion, as a tangible and meaningful phenomenon, 'does not exist.'

But 15 February 2003 shows that Bourdieu may have miscalculated. What the New York Times called the 'second superpower', world public opinion, took to the streets to demonstrate its firm opposition to the war in previously unheard of numbers and, in the UK at least, came within a whisper of making it impossible for Tony Blair to secure a parliamentary mandate for joining the US in attacking Iraq.

With British troops set to have some presence in Syria and a new 'Scramble for Africa', Tony Blair once again calling for a generation-long fight against al-Qaida and with President Hollande looking to restore the flawed philosophy of 'humanitarian intervention' by sending troops into Mali, these debates matter- not least to remind ourselves of the importance of calling our governments to account and of the need to re-awaken the 'second superpower.'

The Huffington Post UK with Goldsmiths, University of London event 'The Great Iraq War Debate: Was It Worth It? Iraq, Ten Years On' takes place on 7 February 18:30 - 21:00 (19:00 start).

Venue: Great Hall, Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths, University of London, SE14 6NW
Price: Free, but reserve your place at www.amiando.com/iraqdebate]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2217289 2012-11-30T08:15:11-05:00 2013-01-30T05:12:01-05:00

Des Freedman http://www.huffingtonpost.com/des-freedman/ report. It calls for a new form of independent self-regulation with statutory oversight in order to make sure that the press cannot wriggle out of their responsibilities. Cameron, after having promised that he would implement Leveson's recommendations unless they were 'bonkers', immediately declared in Parliament that he was not prepared to pass any legislation that would interfere with his commitment to press freedom. Perhaps the most concise response to this came in a Tweet from Stephen Fry: 'It would seem David Cameron's address is no longer Number 10 Downing Street: it's now Flat 2, Rupert Murdoch's arse.'

Battle lines have long been drawn.

Those commentators who have spent months attempting to undermine the Leveson Inquiry will see nothing in the report that will change their minds. The Sun reacted to the report by arguing that Leveson is advocating 'State control of newspapers' while the Daily Mail described it as 'a mortal threat to the British people's historic right to know'. Max Hastings in the same newspaper called it 'a Rotten Day for Freedom.'

This is hypocrisy of the highest order. What is being challenged here is the freedom to snoop, to tell lies and to evade any form of accountability, not the freedom to hold power to account which was never on trial and which is all too rarely practiced by the most shrill voices for 'press freedom'.

However, we have also seen the whole Leveson process dismissed by radical critics. The broadcaster John Pilger has called it a distraction and a 'club matter' while the academic Richard Keeble argues that it is 'best understood as largely spectacular theatre, too trapped within the system it is attempting to reform to have any lasting effect.' According to the monitoring group Media Lens: 'No-one should expect radical changes to the corporate media following the Leveson Inquiry, yet another instance of established power investigating itself.'

I think that both reactions, in very different ways, do not do justice to the situation.

First, because the recommendations, if implemented, would make a small but significant difference to prospects for a more accountable press. Leveson was absolutely clear in his comments introducing the report that 'there must be change' and he was decisive in rejecting the proprietors' proposed solution for a revamped regulator with no basis in law. That proposal, he argued, 'does not come close' to what is needed to secure effective regulation. An independent regulatory body on which not a single current editor or sitting MP can serve is clearly much better than a Press Complaints Commission dominated by vested interests. There are other potential benefits such as a conscience clause for journalists to prevent them from being sacked if they refuse to write a story that breaks journalistic codes as well as complaints and arbitration systems that are not dominated by the industry. These are all (rather gentle) ways of regulating press power and not of controlling press content.

However, more importantly, those who dismiss Leveson either as a threat to press freedom or as a waste of time, underplay the wider context of the report. Leveson's claim that sections of the press have 'wreaked havoc with the lives of innocent people' and have wielded too much power over politicians follows the discovery during the inquiry of systematic corruption, collusion and compliance at the highest levels of the press, police and politics. Public opinion--as demonstrated in several opinion polls showing overwhelming support for independent regulation that is not in the hands of the industry--is streets ahead of most commentators on this fact. Leveson, whether that was his intention or not, shone a bright light into the highest levels of power in this country and has provided a vast amount of evidence to assist the case for radical change to our media and political systems.

Of course there are many issues that are of concern in the report: the lack of any concrete proposals concerning ownership concentration, the absolving of Jeremy Hunt from blame in the BSkyB takeover bid, the continuing faith in the 'integrity of the police' despite evidence presented to the Inquiry and data protection issues that may make it harder for journalists to protect sources and investigate wrongdoing. But the question is: are prospects for press reform enhanced by Leveson's recommendations or not? I believe they are.

It is true that the Leveson Inquiry was about the establishment holding a mirror up to itself. That fact alone does not make it irrelevant or impotent. But it does mean that without broadening our perspective to look at the problem of press power systemically, we will never get the media we want or need. This is not a question of simply finding the perfect regulatory model but of dealing with the structural forces--of the desire for political influence, higher ratings and exclusives at all costs--which give rise to sensationalist, unethical and distorted reporting in the first place.

We need far more than the Leveson Report is ever likely to give us: ownership caps to break up giant concentrations of media power, a call for unionisation to protect the rights of journalists, and more democratic forms of governance to take control away from all-conquering proprietors. However, simply to dismiss the Leveson Report because it doesn't come up with all the answers (let alone ask the right questions) is to miss the huge opportunities that have been thrown up by its expose of how powerful interests operate in this country.

The sentence may not fit the crime but there is still a long way to go in seeking justice.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2115842 2012-11-12T05:17:11-05:00 2013-01-12T05:12:01-05:00

Des Freedman http://www.huffingtonpost.com/des-freedman/ survey carried out carried out after the Savile scandal emerged found that only 45% of the population now agree that the BBC journalism is trustworthy.

How should we respond to this?

First, we should point out this is still significantly above public trust in newspapers which, according to YouGov research in November 2011, found that only 38% of the Briitsh public trust the press (and remember that this figure includes all the press so confidence in some specific titles will clearly be much lower). This is the result of public disgust at the newsroom culture that brought us the phone hacking scandal and the evidence presented to the Leveson Inquiry of unethical, corrupt and criminal behaviour at the heart of some of the country's leading titles. Those newspapers that are now revelling in the BBC's discomfort are in no position to do so and are motivated less by a commitment to rigorous and independent journalism than by the opportunity to make life difficult for their publicly-funded rival.

Some of the hypocrisy is astounding. In its response to the resignation of director general George Entwistle, the Sun on Sunday (a News Corporation title) raged against his high wages and the fact that more than 100 senior BBC managers are paid more than the prime minister. There is no mention, however, of the $30 million paid to News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch in 2012 or the $16.8 million earned by the deputy chief operating officer James Murdoch - this after the disastrous performances by both men during the phone hacking scandal.

The Mail on Sunday wasted no time in using the BBC crisis to make a case for stronger regulation of broadcast news while ensuring that no such obligations are placed on the press. 'Surely', the paper commented in its editorial, 'there is a far stronger case for BBC regulation than for placing legal chains on the press?' Well, not really when you consider the amount of comment, investigation and general soul-searching that is now sweeping the BBC in contrast to the total lack of self-reflection or regret that marked, for example, the Sun's fabricated coverage of the Hillsborough disaster, the Daily Express' witchhunt against the parents of Madeleine McCann or the vilification of Chris Jefferies, accused of the murder of Joanna Yeates, who won substantial libel damages from eight newspapers in 2012. How many editors, reporters or even chief operating officers resigned after these escapades in contrast to the fairly swift decision taken by George Entwistle to accept full responsibility for the BBC's recent problems?

What is also absent from the vast majority of the coverage lambasting the DG's wages and the BBC's breakdown in editorial standards is any mention of the huge cuts that were imposed on the BBC as part of the government's austerity agenda. Remember that in 2010, a secret deal was reached by the then director general, chair of the BBC Trust and culture secretary Jeremy Hunt which froze the licence fee until 2017. This followed James Murdoch's high profile attack on the 'chilling' ambition of the BBC at the 2009 Edinburgh International Television Festival and Jeremy Hunt's article in the Sun shortly afterwards which called for a freeze in the licence fee. Given what we now know from evidence presented to the Leveson Inquiry about the number of meetings between Jeremy Hunt, the Murdochs, News Corp lobbyists and Culture Department special advisors, a harsh climate for the BBC was hardly unexpected.

The licence fee deal equated to a cut of some 16% in the BBC's budget and led to sweeping job losses in newsrooms up and down the country. Instead of focusing simply on the collapse in the BBC's 'moral fabric', the corporation's competitors would be better off reflecting on their own role in lobbying for a reduced licence fee settlement that has certainly contributed to recent editorial crises.

We should also make the point that the errors which the BBC has made are not on the same scale as those which led to the government's setting up of the Leveson Inquiry. The BBC appears to have made serious editorial misjudgements which have now led to a series of inquiries, at least three high-level resignations and the perception of a cover-up over Savile (though with no 'smoking gun'). Leading sections of the press, on the other hand, have been accused of systematically hacking into people's phones, blagging information, doing shady deals with the police and doggedly pursuing political influence and favours. With thousands of victims of phone hacking and dozens of arrests in relation to the three investigations that have been set up to examine illegal practices involving the media and the police, their crimes certainly appear to be of a different order.

However, none of this means that we should excuse the BBC for its failings and romanticise its record. It has long been used as a political football by different administrations and has reacted with coverage that is aimed to minimise harm rather than maximise impact. It has always been an extremely politically cautious institution that is far more at home with an agenda dominated by official sources and 'consensual' politics, since it believes that will best insulate it from the attacks of both antagonistic governments and embittered rivals. The impact of the Hutton Inquiry into the corporation's reporting of the Labour's government's campaign to secure public consent for the Iraq War has only intensified this caution. Its bureaucratic mindset (and accompanying structures) runs deep, in part simply to ensure that radical and innovative voices are kept in check.

There is no point in blaming the BBC's commercial rivals alone for the problems that the corporation has brought upon itself. It needs to change: it needs to democratise its governance structure and ensure a more active role for the public (for example through viewers' councils or democratic elections to key positions). It needs to re-connect with the interests of its listeners, viewers and users (even though the extent of this disconnection is most likely overstated) by adopting agendas that don't always sit comfortably with official frameworks and it needs urgently to boost its production staff and programming budget at the expense of a bureaucratised management structure.

In doing all this the BBC does not need to listen to lectures from its commercial competitors who have their own less than honourable and transparent agendas and who, when criminal investigations into phone hacking are concluded, need to put their own houses in order. The whole episode shows that we need to take democracy seriously not just in relation to economic and political questions but also to the media institutions that play such a major role in our daily lives.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1576737 2012-06-07T12:50:10-04:00 2012-08-07T05:12:03-04:00

Des Freedman http://www.huffingtonpost.com/des-freedman/ noted on Tuesday that Facebook stock had lost one-third of its value since the company's Initial Public Offering on 18 May. Using rather understated language, the article claimed that the IPO 'was highly anticipated and was supposed to offer proof that social media is a viable business and more than a passing fad.'

No. The IPO was supposed to prove much more than Facebook's viability - instead it was supposed to prove the triumph of the new digital economy. After all, this is a company with 900 million users, a company that has reinvented how we share information, has unparalleled access to personal data, has huge growth potential and is the epitome of social media dynamism. This amazing company was finally to be floated and, of course, not on the industrial-era New York Stock Exchange but on the cutting-edge NASDAQ.

And yet it was a disaster. Not just because of the technical problems, though these certainly contributed, somewhat ironically, to the turbulence of the day. What really messed up the IPO was that it was preceded by an information campaign far more redolent of the bad old media age than the high-tech transparency of the digital economy. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook's bank, Morgan Stanley, briefed only a minority of wealthy investors about concerns it had about the company's prospects and that the company and its underwriters effectively hid reduced growth forecasts from would-be buyers. It also appears that the bank set the share price too high with a price-to-earnings ratio of over 50 (in contrast, for example, to Google's 12) and that the bank was forced to intervene to protect the price, behaviour that is far from desirable in what it supposed to be a seamless and open free market. No wonder that the IPO, and the company itself, is facing official investigations and no wonder that, despite being faced with reimbursing clients who lost money, Morgan Stanley and other underwriters still stand to make approximately $100m from the deal.

In my opinion, this kind of greed, conniving, secrecy and hype sounds suspiciously like the 'old economy' deals in which transparency and good sense were abandoned in the rush for profits. But perhaps we should have known this was going to happen as soon as Zuckerberg et al insisted on a dual class structure in which operational control of the company by senior executives would be consolidated and protected. At this stage, warning bells should have gone off.

Of course, they're not the first to do this. After all, in Google's IPO, the executive triumvirate of Sergey Brin, Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt controlled 37.6 per cent of the company leaving new investors, in the words of Page himself, with 'little ability to influence its strategic decisions through their voting rights'. And the great irony was that they got this idea, unusual for technology companies, from old media dinosaurs like the New York Times Company, The Washington Post Company and Dow Jones, publishers of the Wall Street Journal.

Facebook is now in danger not simply of undermining its own brand reputation but of jeopardizing prospects for the wider new media environment by saturating the market for advertising and driving down costs. As media commentator Michael Wolff puts it, 'Facebook will continue to lower its per-user revenues, which, given its vast inventory, will force the rest of the ad-driven Web to lower its costs.' We're already seeing the impact of this on flagging demand for shares in other young internet companies like games developer Zynga (share price down 41 per cent since mid-December) and online reviews service Yelp (down 22 per cent since the Facebook IPO). As the Financial Times argued recently, 'there are fears that the turn of sentiment against Facebook has spooked the broader market, particularly retail investors who previously favoured the sector.'

The more significant question is, however, why on earth should we be surprised? Surely this is how capital - whether in the shape of the automobile industry, oil, pharmaceutical or even social media - operates.

True, this is the opposite of what the speechwriters for the new economy have long argued. Chris Anderson, Larry Downes, Jeff Jarvis, Charles Leadbeater, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams have all insisted in best-selling books that the internet is responsible for massively lowering transaction costs, stimulating innovation, collapsing barriers between producers and consumers and indeed ironing out all the glitches of the command economy.

The problem is that these writers articulate a deterministic vision of a frictionless capitalism in which questions of property have been sidelined, profitmaking naturalized and growth exaggerated. The dynamics of the free market have been abstracted from their daily operations and replaced with a technologically-induced vision of an economic system based on an innate tendency to equalize social relations and sustain high growth rates.

Yet even a digital capitalism is still subject to the same episodic crises of supply and demand and the same periods of speculation that affect other varieties of capitalism. Many of the factors that were symptomatic of the 'mass' media economy -- especially its propensity towards monopolization, commodification and accumulation -- are central to the dynamics of a new media economy shaped by the contradictory forces of the internet that promise dispersion but reward concentration and that fetishize openness but encourage proprietary behaviour.

The digital economy, just like the 'analogue' one, is highly unstable. 'The crash will come', argues Michael Wolff. 'And Facebook--that putative transformer of worlds, which is, in reality, only an ad-driven site--will fall with everybody else.' The digital world is not a parallel economy but one that accentuates the tensions between the creativity and collaboration of a generative system and the hierarchies and polarization prioritized by a system that rests, not simply on the drive to innovate, but on the relentless pursuit of profit.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1497189 2012-05-07T19:00:00-04:00 2012-07-07T05:12:01-04:00

Des Freedman http://www.huffingtonpost.com/des-freedman/ Sun editor and horse owner Rebekah Brooks take the stand. You may be starting to tire of the blanket coverage but please don't switch off just yet. There are big issues at stake.

Last week, the Culture Select Committee's report on phone hacking condemned senior staff at News Corp and concluded that Rupert Murdoch was 'not fit' to run an international media conglomerate. Some commentators and politicians in this country immediately tried to paint this as a partisan squabble between Murdoch-haters in the Labour Party and his defenders in the Tories and claimed that the controversy has undermined the credibility of the report itself.

This misses the point entirely. Everywhere else, the story is focused on one fact: that a parliamentary committee, having scrutinised the behaviour of Britain's biggest media company and criticised its corporate culture in the most vehement terms, has concluded that the man who is ultimately accountable for the company's successes and failures should no longer be allowed to run News Corp.

Campaigners in the US, for example, have now demanded that the regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, revoke News Corp's Fox Television licences while the chair of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees communications, has written to Leveson asking if he has come across any evidence implicating News Corp in illegal practices either taking place in the US or affecting US citizens elsewhere.

None of this will come as a surprise to those people who have long contested Murdoch's grip both on the UK media market as his well as his unhealthy influence on the political process. But there is a more important question that the constant focus on Murdoch threatens to hide: how did we get to a situation where one company was allowed to accrue so much power and influence? What does it say about our political system that it has bowed down so consistently to the compulsive allure of media moguls? What kind of democracy allows itself to be bossed around by figures who lack any kind of formal accountability?

Our obsession with the fate of Murdoch is understandable but it risks limiting the full implications of the phone hacking scandal. The fixation on one man means that we are likely to miss out on the broader, structural questions that ought to be at the centre of this debate. Instead of second-guessing the identity of the next CEO of News Corp or speculating about whether the company is going to withdraw from the British media market, surely it is necessary to ask some broader questions: what kind of ownership rules do we need to prevent these events from happening again? How big should media companies be allowed to grow in a democratic society? What does 'freedom of the press' mean in contemporary circumstances and is it really under attack by proponents of a tougher regulatory regime for British newspapers?

Media power cannot be understood simply in relation to single individuals. Instead it is the product of a system that systematically places the pursuit of profit and influence before the needs of its citizens. At the start of the phone hacking crisis, powerful voices in the press argued that this breakdown in ethical practice was confined to a few 'bad apples' in the News of the World.

Now that we have evidence of a cover-up at the highest levels in News Corp, of a 'culture of illegal payments' inside the Metropolitan Police, and of emails that point to collusion between media lobbyists and a government department, it would be a shame to amplify this mistake and to narrow down the problem simply to one company and one man.

Now, more than ever, power without responsibility - in the shape of proprietors who bully their staff, police who accept cash and favours from news organisations, and politicians who design policies with a view to securing a favourable reception by a powerful media - needs urgently to be checked. The vast majority of the mainstream news media failed to anticipate the economic crisis, failed to hold bankers to account, failed adequately to challenge the justifications for austerity and so have failed democracy. We need something radically different.

Rally for Media Reform, 6-8pm Thursday 17 May, Central Hall, Westminster. Speakers include Hugh Grant, Tom Watson MP, Owen Jones, Mary-Ellen Field, Jacqui Hames and many others. For more details, go to www.mediareform.org.uk.]]>