ABSTRACT
To inform, to discuss, to mirror, to bind, to campaign, to challenge, to entertain and to judge – these are the important functions of the media in any free country. The purpose of public policy should be to enable the media to perform them more effectively. Yet historically, very different traditions of promoting these ideals, or indeed pursuing no ideals at all, have developed in relation to different media. Traditionally, press policy has taken the form of having no policy, and the functioning of newspapers has been left largely to market forces. By contrast, television and radio have been required to pursue objectives set by parliament, and have been subject to regulation. However, during the Conservative ascendancy of the 1980s and early
1990s, there appeared to be a revolution in official thinking about the media. It was argued that broadcasting should be shaped more by the market, and less by public bureaucracy. The state was portrayed as a threat to media freedom, and regulation was attacked as an obstacle to satisfying the consumer. These themes were invoked, for example, by supporters of the deregulatory Broadcasting Acts of 1990 and 1996. The clear implication was that the gap between press and broadcasting policy should diminish, and the market should be allowed to reign. A new version of policy consistency was pursued under New Labour, in
power for over a decade after 1997. The formerly separate worlds of broadcasting, telephones, computers and print were coming together, it was proclaimed, as a consequence of technological convergence, and this necessitated the development of a common approach for all communications. ‘Sectoral policies’ for separate media, of a kind pursued by previous administrations, needed to be replaced by a single, coherent vision for the communications industry as a whole. A new, unifying theme was also advanced by New Labour. ‘Communications
industries’, declared a 2001 government consultation document, ‘constitute a large and growing part of our national income’. Their continued growth will promote investment, employment, innovation, choice, diversity and lower
consumer prices. However, Britain’s communications industry is also faced with intensified competition in a more globally integrated market. Consequently, a key objective of communication policy must be, in the words of the government’s 1998 Green Paper, ‘not only to defend the domestic position, but also to attract a share of global revenues and jobs to the UK’. A new ministry was also created to brush away the cobwebs of the past,
and impose a new sense of direction and purpose. In 1992, the John Major government established the Department of National Heritage (the nearest synonym to ‘Culture’ that conservative sensibilities would then permit). It was renamed the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) by the incoming New Labour government in 1997, and was rededicated to the task of developing an ‘integrated’ communications policy. Yet, over ten years later, New Labour had still failed to fulfil its promise of
‘coherent regulation in a converging environment’. Like the New Right Conservative administrations that preceded it, New Labour merely added another layer of piecemeal reform. Indeed it added to, rather than detracted from, the confusion at the heart of British media policy.
