What the Government Should Do About the Media

"Stay the hell out of it"

It seems that the British media is going through strife similar to that experienced by mainstream media in New Zealand.

As chance would have it I was referred to the evidence of Andrew Neil to the House of Lords Inquiry into the Future of News.

Andrew Ferguson Neil is a British journalist and broadcaster who is chairman of The Spectator. He was editor of The Sunday Times from 1983 to 1994. He has presented various political programmes on the BBC and on Channel 4.

His biography on Wikipedia states

“Neil was appointed editor of The Sunday Times by Rupert Murdoch in 1983, and held this position until 1994. After this, he became a contributor to the Daily Mail. He was chief executive and editor-in-chief of Press Holdings Media Group. In 1988, he became founding chairman of Sky TV, also part of Murdoch's News Corporation. He worked for the BBC for 25 years until 2020, fronting various programmes, including Sunday Politics and This Week on BBC One and Daily Politics, Politics Live and The Andrew Neil Show on BBC Two. Since 2008 he has been chairman of Press Holdings, whose titles include The Spectator, and ITP Media Group. Following his departure from the BBC, he became founding chairman of GB News and a presenter on the channel, but resigned in September 2021. He later joined Channel 4 in 2022 as presenter of The Andrew Neil Show, which shared the same name as his former BBC Two programme. In June 2024 he additionally began hosting a daily broadcast for Times Radio providing political analysis, commentary, interviews and debates.”

In 2018 the Guardian – not known for its right-wing sympathies – suggested that Mr. Neil symbolizes the rightwing domination of the media. The article was as much about media bias as it was about Neil and closed with the following observation

“Neil himself would be the most intimidating and effective rightwing polemicist in Britain if he was freed from the BBC. But the fact that somebody as stridently leftwing as he is rightwing would never be appointed to such a position is indicative of how our media operate. Many on the left fear that any critique of Auntie will play into the hands of a right wing that would privatise and gut the BBC if it could. This deference means that BBC political output remains framed by rightwing assumptions. The Media Reform Coalition has suggested a series of proposals, such as freeing the BBC from all government interference and a BBC board elected by licence-payers and BBC staff. At the very least, as the case of Neil underlines, the left – which, after all, represents millions of Britons – must stop accepting its continued media marginalisation as just one of those things. It isn’t – and it must change”

Interestingly enough freeing the media from Government interference is precisely what Mr. Neil advocated in his evidence before the House of Lords Inquiry on 23 April 2024.

I have been able to locate a transcript of the evidence of Mr. Neil. I reproduce a portion of it below. I have included links to the full transcript as well as video of Mr Neil’s evidence and a short clip from YouTube.

Mr. Neil’s evidence is pungent but conveys a useful message about the role of the Fourth Estate vis-à-vis the Government. It would be a message that Mr. Paul Goldsmith might do well to consider. Should the Government provide any sort of financial support for the media either directly of indirectly through a means such as the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill then the tension Mr Neil expresses will be loosened considerably. As he says of Government

“You are only trouble. We are not on your side; you are not on our side. We are different. Relations between journalist media and government should always be bad and never on any account should be allowed to get better.”

Mr. Neil also has some interesting observations on the problems posed by “Big Tech” towards the end of the transcript.

The portion of the transcript follows:

House of Lords

Communications and Digital Committee

Inquiry into the Future of News

Oral Evidence – Tuesday 23 April 2024

https://committees.parliament.uk/event/21290

Transcript - https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/14721/pdf/

Watch the Meeting - https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/dd4f4042-e071-4fdb-a64a-eb695d4448be

You Tube Clip – 1 min 56 secs

Baroness Harding of Winscombe: It is absolutely fascinating. I would like to take you to the role of government in the news sector. Looking forward over the next few years, how interventionist do you think government should be in supporting the news sector, if at all, and what do you think would constitute government overreach?

Andrew Neil: You should stay the hell out of it. You do not know anything about it. You are only trouble. We are not on your side; you are not on our side. We are different. Relations between journalist media and government should always be bad and never on any account should be allowed to get better. I do not want any of your help. I have rebuilt the Spectator without any help from anybody here or any Government or any tax incentives or any intervention. You cannot even keep the streets safe at night. The Scottish Government cannot build two bog-standard ferries. This Parliament cannot build a single high-speed line, so stay out of news. You are just trouble. We do not want any help. I just do not want you to interfere. I do not want your tax subsidies; I do not want your help. I want you just to concentrate. I am a Jeffersonian. The Government should concentrate on doing what only government can do and do it well. We have government that concentrates on doing far too much, all of which it does badly. Please. We have gone through a major industrial upheaval, a major technological revolution, and we have come through the other side. We have lost people by the wayside. At times it has seemed like the Bataan Death March, but we have come through and we now know what we are doing and we just want to be allowed to get on with it.

Baroness Harding of Winscombe: Should there be any support, public sector support, for local journalism, for local news?

Andrew Neil: You identify what has been a problem, which is the decline in local news. I would not overdo how great local news was. My older brother, sadly departed, was editor of that well-known journal of record, the Paisley Daily Express, and the fact that my first job was as its cricket correspondent of course had nothing to do with the fact that he was the editor. In fact, it had everything to do with the fact that he was the editor, plus they could not find another mug to give up their Saturdays and watch a 20-overs a side cricket match and file 1,200 words by Saturday night. All these local newspapers depended on local government for advertising. They were not fearless seekers of truth, uncovering local government corruption and wrongdoing. That was done by the national papers which were not beholden to them, so I would not romanticise that. I think there are alternative forms growing up. Quite a lot of concerned citizens now produce blogs that are excellent commentaries and insights into what is happening in local government and they have big followings. Almost a kind of citizen journalism is the way for local journalism to go. I am more worried about regional newspapers because, as I say, all these trends happen first in America. The papers that have suffered in the United States have been the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle, even the Los Angeles Times, because, unlike the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, they did not have nationwide brands, they were big city brands, and nor did they have global reach, which the three I have just named have. They are famous across the world. The same has happened in Britain with our regional and national press. The Scotsman, which I ran for 10 years and was a huge success, is now a shadow of its former self. Its circulation is down to, I think, under 20,000 now, which is remarkable. The Herald in Glasgow has suffered too. The Yorkshire Post seems pretty vibrant but I think the Liverpool Echo is in some trouble. I was the Northern Ireland correspondent for the Belfast Telegraph and I forget, the Independent or some other newspaper, they were really powerful. I think that is a bigger problem but how you resolve that I have no idea. Sometimes things just change and you cannot replicate what happened before. The idea that government should subsidise local journalism fills me with horror because he who pays the piper in the end always calls the tune.

Baroness Harding of Winscombe: Thinking about who pays the piper, do you have concerns about the level of influence big tech firms may have on news and, if so, what should be done about it?

Andrew Neil: I do, but I think that boat has sailed now. Part of the problem with all political systems is that they are probably about three or four years behind the technology. It is part of the problem with all regulation. I am not against regulation. For example, the one thing government should do in the media area of course is to ensure there is a level playing field and to make sure that the market stays open and that no one becomes dominant. That is proper competition regulation in a market economy. Also I am delighted that the British Parliament saw fit to ensure that foreign Governments cannot own media. I think that is only right. A market economy in media, how that could accommodate media owned by other governments, seemed to me to be bizarre. There is a role for government in that, but in picking winners or losers or trying to influence the news or to subsidise the news in some way, I do not see that. Can you go back to the point you were making?

Baroness Harding of Winscombe: How worried if at all are you on the influence that big tech can have on news and is there a role for Ofcom or some other regulator to mitigate that?

Andrew Neil: Part of the technology upheaval that we have faced is that in the early days—I am talking 2004, 2005, 2006—we thought the future was eyeballs, not subscription; get millions of people to your website and then what we came to know as programmatic advertising would come and that was a new stream of revenue. The problem is that the big tech companies, Google and Facebook, took the programmatic advertising between them and took a monopoly of it. The regulators did not know what was going on and by the time it dawned on them it was too late to do anything about it. Today there is a real problem with Facebook in that it sets algorithms that determine what people can read. I do not use Facebook but if I was a Facebook subscriber and I posted an article on to Facebook because I thought it was interesting, the algorithms could well determine that you see it but you will not. Increasingly these algorithms have become tighter and it is more likely that you will see it and none of the rest of you will see it. We found that became really tight when anybody questioned lockdown. At one stage the algorithms made a speech by David Davis in the House of Commons disappear and I think that is very dangerous, but there is a way around that: do not use Facebook. For the media, we do not depend on Facebook to get subs. For a long while legacy media used Facebook as a way of getting subscribers because you got them to read an article, you encouraged them to read another one. You had their email and before you know it you had a conversation with them and if you were lucky you sold a sub. That is how it works. You get the data first, you suck them in, they like what they see but they cannot read any more because they hit a hard paywall and they must pay to read any more. We do not use Facebook for that any more because of the algorithms. Just do not use Facebook. Again, I think we can sort that out ourselves. Here is the problem. This is not a criticism. I think this is something that is just built into the system. By the time you come up with rules that might deal with this there will be a new problem, something else that really matters, and this does not matter any more. I think at the end of the day we should be allowed to fend for ourselves.