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Democracy: POWER Inquiry

My Lords, the report of the Power inquiry chastises the media for having,"““significant unelected influence on government policy and decisions””," and, in particular, the concentration of ownership of the media. The combination of a media lacking diversity and an apathetic electorate is not, the report concludes, good for democracy. Some of those canvassed felt that in recent years the media have acted more like a political party with a clear right or left bias and that that turn of events is largely due to the concentration of ownership in the hands of a very few who have their own agendas. The thesis is that with such heavy and broad influence, the citizen’s influence is correspondingly reduced and the incentives for engagement weakened. Those who think about these matters at all feel that the media should return to their traditional role of factual reporting rather than publishing views too often disguised as news. These concerns are by no means new. What is new, however, is the seriousness with which even very liberal journalists are treating them. One of them, John Lloyd, who has long been associated with the Financial Times, worries about how the media wield their undoubted power. He argues that the growth of the promotion of opinions, of taking a position whether it be leftist, liberal or conservative, comes with a price when those opinions drift into the news columns, implicitly or explicitly. The news then ceases to be an attempt to present a version of the truth, and more an effort to fit events to a view. One ends up adopting a position—as has, for example, the Independent—of being not so much a newspaper but a ““viewspaper”” and this dispenses with any claim to objectivity in favour of the polemical role. One of the best examples of this mismatch between reporting and assuming a shared political stance arose when the European constitution was rejected by the French and the Dutch last year. The elite of the European media had apparently become blind to an underground popular mood and movement that was against the long-held acceptance of and belief in the European project, a belief that the press assumed was shared by readers and viewers in those countries. The lesson here perhaps is that adherence to a view can distance journalism from popular movements and from disaffection. Another example, of course, was the failure of the serious media in America, liberal or not, to report critically and persistently on the evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Lloyd suggests that proper news reporting, defined as relating facts in a way credible to people of differing views, must hold to two criteria: any political interest or bias must be declared, and there has to be transparency about the quality of the information provided; for example, are sources first- or third-hand, and has the information been checked and cross-checked? The citizen is entitled to information upon which he or she can make decisions and attempt to influence policies that affect his or her life and livelihood. Part of one of the important roles of the media is to convey that information by one means or another, but they must do so as objectively as possible. That, it is argued, does not happen in part due to the single ownership of a number of diverse media outlets, all of which, it must be assumed, project a single political stance. The discontent that that provokes and the rapid growth of new technology has prompted direct communication— so-called ““public conversation”” or ““citizen journalism””—in the form of blogging and discussion forums. Private channels provide opportunities for debate, new ideas and refining arguments, but they cannot replace, at least in the foreseeable future, the more traditional media for at least two reasons. First, while private channels can respond in real time and with passion, inevitably, fact-checking is absent, and, secondly, they do not have any direct influence on political decision-making. It is suggested in the report that the media act today as an obstacle to the power of the citizen, and yet genuinely free and independent media are a crucial institution of democracy. The restraint on introducing any kind of statutory curb on the media has held and, indeed, must be held. However, that does not preclude, as the Power inquiry suggests, a review of the laws that govern media monopolies and the concentration of media ownership. Diverse media which adequately distinguish between factual reporting, comment and entertainment are a democratic strength. This is an excellent report, and if only some of the innovative, practical and doable recommendations are adopted by the Government, the improvements will be felt by every citizen in this country.