Hugh Grant became the darling of the Birmingham ICC when he swept into Lib Dem conference to talk about phone hacking. And now Unite have called on Labour to set up a commission to investigate the power of media owners. Conference season is in full swing, and there has never been a better chance to slay the dragon of poor media plurality in the UK.
But worryingly, most of the participants in the debate are quite happy to operate with outmoded conceptions of what media plurality actually is, and how best to promote it.
Traditionally, we talk about plurality as if it's purely about who owns what. Crudely, it is assumed that the more you own, the more control and influence you have over people's opinions. The problem is this: what we actually care about is, according to an incisive 2009 EU report on the matter, ensuring that there is not 'one dominant opinion-forming power.' This 'plurality of influence' is what we really want to achieve, as part of a wider culture in which citizens form their opinions autonomously in a vibrant and diverse media environment. Market-based understandings of plurality are very crude at measuring this.
First, the emergence of online news allows corporations to reach people in cheaper ways which evade traditional analyses. For instance, in the US, the Huffington Post doesn't show up on circulation figures. Do we therefore deny that it has any influence whatsoever on people's opinion-forming? HuffPo US receives 35 million plus unique monthly users. The New York Times Group receives approximately 30.1 million readers and 33.6million website hits, approximately 1.79 times more. However, NYTG's 2010 revenues were over 50 times bigger than HuffPo's. It is worth noting that the crudity of this measure (the web figures count unique users, while the circulation figures will count repeat customers more than once) probably exaggerates the NYT's figures at the expense of the Huffington Post's. This means that the discrepancy between revenue and number of users is even greater.
Secondly, influence over opinion is a subtle and complex beast. It's simply not the case that by buying the Sun, readers will vote as Murdoch sees fit by some kind of literary osmosis. There are a number of factors. How much you trust the news source matters (and any call for regulatory reform needs to take heed of Ofcom statistics out this year which suggest that online news is as trusted as the broadcast media but regulated as loosely as the press). So does the level of your engagement with it - spending two hours with a broadsheet is a very different level of involvement than listening to a 30-second radio bulletin.
The Sun's claim to have 'won' John Major his 1992 election victory, but the evidence is that the paper's direct effect on voting was small but specific. While it probably didn't convince a wave of new Tory voters to take to the polls, it did affect those whom academics call 'cross-pressured voters.' These voters read a newspaper which is opposed to their own political convictions, and are statistically less likely to vote for their usual party when cross-pressured.
All of which implies that the current way of promoting media plurality is insufficient. Competition law takes a measurable variable like 'percentage of the market owned' and blocks anyone from having above a certain level of it. But we just can't do that with something as complicated as influence over opinion-forming. How do we control for cross-pressuring? How do we set an objective, measurable value on 'trust' or 'level of engagement?'
Instead, what is needed is an all-encompassing approach from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Instead of reacting when anyone's influence spills over a certain level, the department should proactively neutralise risks to plurality. One area to focus on is media literacy. A massive risk to media diversity is a passive populace which absorbs the news without ever challenging it. The risk can be neutralised by encouraging citizens to take the news media for what it is, spot inherent bias, and use it as a tool for their own opinion-forming. The success of the relatively cheap and hugely successful MediaSmart campaign to provide materials to primary schools to improve education about advertising should be emulated, and Lord Putnam, among others, has long been calling for media literacy schemes.
So yes, the PCC does need to be reformed, and yes, we need competition laws. But for goodness' sake, let's not lose sight of the wider picture. Media plurality must be promoted as well as safeguarded. Let's hope the DCMS is up to the challenge.