Plurality Of The Media

Vince Cable, that well known beacon of intellectual capability and economic reason, has shoved his oar into the debate in the wake of the phone hacking scandal, telling the BBC that ‘having media moguls dominating the British media is deeply unhelpful’.

Presumably, in the case of News Corporation, we can read Vince’s ‘deeply unhelpful’ as ‘not fully part of my favoured liberal-left media consensus’. How dare individuals own large numbers of newspapers and influence the British political scene. Disgraceful. Anyway, our dear Business Secretary went on to add:

We have learned from the past that having media moguls dominating the British media is deeply unhelpful, not simply in terms of plurality but because of the wider impact on the political world.

What I want to see is a very clear set of unambiguous rules… about market shares, that we don’t have dominant players and a presumption against cross-ownership between press and television.

It isn’t simply an issue of Rupert Murdoch, there are other big media companies who could have the same influence in future and we’ve got to stop that happening.

This, you may remember, is the same man who ‘declared war’ on Rupert Murdoch and News International before the phone hacking scandal re-broke (remember it was old news until the Guardian and BBC dug it out again for their own ends), and was consequently stripped of his status over media policy on the BSkyB bid. This is not about phone hacking and never was – it is about ensuring the stranglehold grip of the liberal-left over the media establishment.

Of course, a fantastic way of ensuring greater plurality of media in Britain, which Saint Vince says he so desires, is the abolition or significant downsizing of our beloved national broadcaster. The BBC is a huge, sprawling organisation, owned by the state and funded by the television licence fee. What better way of opening up the media playing field than taking apart the BBC monopoly? But will Vince be seeking to break up their dominance over the broadcast and online media? Not likely.

Inflation Causes Inflation

In a brief discussion today on the BBC News 24, the presenter attributed a rise in inflation to an increase in the prices of alcohol, transport and energy costs.

That is like saying, the inflation has been caused by the inflation – or indeed, that old classic, the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. It tells us absolutely nothing about why the prices of alcohol, transport or energy actually rose!

I’m so glad that licence fee payers fork out £3.5bn a year to fund such quality reporting by our beloved national broadcaster.

Media In Focus

Following on from my previous post about how, in a time of great financial crisis, many in the media have got their focus and priorities entirely wrong, another fantastic example of such wings its way to us via the ever-relevant BBC website.

The BBC are reporting that porn protesters have hit Westminster to complain about new laws that will ban the possession of extreme images showing ‘a threat to life or serious injury to a person’s genitals’. Wonderful stuff as you can imagine.

Now, the protest consisted of a mere twenty people and it would seem that as a consequence the BBC felt the issue of violent pornography and yesterday’s march warranted an entire news article on their website with an accompanying video.

However, compare this with the level of coverage two other past protests held outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster gained that concerned calls for the Government to honour its manifesto commitment to give a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

The first was back in October of 2007 and the second in February of this year, both of which I was in attendance. Now, the Referendum rallies were not mass protests on the scale of the million strong Countryside Alliance or Stop The Iraq War coalition marches – but they were still pretty sizeable with a couple of thousand people in total, and very many more than the twenty individuals at yesterday’s ‘porn protest’. Yet did the BBC (or any other news agency for that matter) cover the Referendum protests? The answer is of course, no – they did not. Not once.

Calling for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty did not just concern a few sick and depraved individuals wanting to photograph one another performing bizarre sexual acts, but the freedom, liberties and democratic rights of an entire nation of millions of people.

Yet, it is apparent that the BBC and most other news corporations hold the discussion of the laws on violent pornography more important than whether we wish to be a sovereign nation. Even the professional photographer and ringleader of the porn protesters, Ben Westwood (son of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood) acknowledged that:

There are more important issues to be debated than this.

In that Mr Westwood is entirely correct, but it would seem that large swathes of the media would disagree. Sadly, some things it would seem never change.

Media Priorities

Sam Tarran makes the point (first noted here) that while our banking system undergoes massive regulatory failure, the media busy themselves with the massively important issue of whether George Osborne has been receiving donations.

To put things into perspective, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King recently admitted that:

Not since the beginning of the first world war has our banking system been so close to collapse.

Compare such an alarming statement on the state of our banking system and economy with the BBC’s Political Editor, Nick Robinson and his account of George Osborne’s trip to Corfu. Someone’s journalistic priorities in the wrong place, wouldn’t you say?