Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, Daily Mail Group and Reach (publisher of the Mirror titles) dominate 83 percent of the national newspaper market (up from 71 percent in 2015). When online readers are included, just five companies – News UK, Daily Mail Group, Reach, Guardian and Telegraph – dominate nearly 80 percent of the market. The report’s authors warned, “We believe that concentration in news and information markets in particular has reached endemic levels in the UK and that we urgently need effective remedies. Concentrated ownership creates conditions in which wealthy individuals and organisations can amass vast political and economic power and distort the media landscape to suit their interests”.
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he warning is further backed up in a forthcoming book, The Media Manifesto (Polity Books, August 2020), by Fenton and coauthors Des Freedman, Justin Schlosberg and Lina Dencik. They emphasise a crucial point that is a longstanding characteristic of rational media analysis: we must stop using the misleading framework of media failures. As Noam Chomsky observed many years ago in his book Deterring Democracy in describing media performance, “The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist”. It is therefore not a “failure” when newspapers and broadcasters neglect to scrutinise state-corporate power. Granting a free pass to power is virtually their raison d’être. Or, as The Media Manifesto
“The BBC has been a key institutional mechanism for reinforcing establishment ‘common sense’ ’’ observes, “[The] inability to hold power to account shouldn’t be seen as an unprecedented ‘failure’ of the media to perform its democratic role when, in fact, this has long been the media’s normal role under capitalism: to naturalise and legitimise existing and unequal social relations”. The authors continue with examples, “It’s not about failing to hold banks to account but about the complicity of financial journalists and commentators in celebrating neoliberal economics ahead of the 2008 financial crash; it’s not about failing to be tough on racism but about the media’s historic perpetuation of racist stereotypes and promotion of anti-immigrant frames; it’s not about failing to recognise the challenges of apocalyptic climate change but about repeating tropes about ‘natural’ disasters such as hurricanes, heatwaves and forest fires, together with routine “balanced” debates between climate change scientists and deniers. These are not examples of the media’s malfunctioning but of its default behaviour”. But, goes up the cry from the back row, what about “our” blessed BBC? It is, after all, obliged by its Royal Charter to report objectively and impartially, untrammelled by billionaire ownership or tawdry
commercialisation. Right? Not so. As Des Freedman observes of the BBC in The Media Manifesto, “[It] is a compromised version of a potentially noble ideal: far too implicated in and attached to existing elite networks of power to be able to offer an effective challenge to them’”. As can be seen every day of the week, the BBC typically follows a similar agenda to UK newspapers in its own news coverage. Freedman adds: “Far from retaining its autonomy from all vested interests, and delivering a critical and robust public interest journalism, the BBC has been a key institutional mechanism for reinforcing establishment ‘common sense’ and has represented the strategic interests of the powerful more than the disparate views of ordinary audiences”. He continues, “It has reached the point where even the accomplished former World Service journalist, Owen Bennett-Jones, has condemned the BBC’s dependence on official sources and argues that ‘there is plenty of evidence that the BBC, in both its international and domestic manifestations, deserves the epithet ‘state broadcaster’. Without significant reform, public service media are, in reality, just as likely to be embroiled in the reproduction of media power as their commercial counterparts and therefore just as likely to be part of the problem rather than the solution.” Fenton emphasises the point later in the book, “despite its claims to be impartial and independent, the BBC has always sided with the elite and been in thrall to those in power”. Regular readers will be aware ColdType | July 2020 | www.coldtype.net
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