When government regulations are just compound nonsense
Published 06 December 1999
Media - Ian Hargreaves
Here, media-watchers, is your Christmas quiz. Which story, in the past week, attracted exactly the same scale of coverage in the Mirror and the New York Times?
Answer: the proposed £7.8 billion merger between Carlton Communications and United News and Media, a deal hailed elsewhere in the business pages of the British newspapers as the momentous event that will trigger the final consolidation of the ITV system into the grip of two companies or possibly even just one. In the prosaic language of the Financial Times's headline-writer: "Carlton-United deal may transform ITV." Or, to give it a bit of spin: "£8 billion TV groups to rival Murdoch" (Daily Telegraph), "Hollywood scale" (the Express) or "Titan TV" (Sunday Times).
For the Mirror and the New York Times, however, this mighty event was worth just 139 words - the Sun gave it a few lines more. So the reshaping of ITV is considered of minor significance both to the British red-top tabloid reader, who spends more time watching ITV programmes than anyone else, and to the upmarket American papers, which track the rivalries of the global media barons in relentless detail. In other words, this is a merger that won't make any different to what we see on British TV and which scarcely registers on the radar of the biggest global players in this American-dominated industry.
This is a sorry state of affairs, which underlines yet again what a disastrous hash successive British governments have made of broadcasting policy. They have not done a good job either for the viewer or for the long-term health of the British media industry.
It has been obvious for well over a decade that the regulatory framework governing the converging industries of telecommunications, newspapers, broadcasting and (now) the Internet needed to be aligned and simplified if Britain was to get the right balance between domestic diversity in its media and the opportunities to build companies of a sufficient scale to compete internationally.
The obvious way to do this is to measure market share on a multimedia basis. Instead, we have separate rules for newspapers, radio, terrestrial TV, cable TV and satellite TV. We need a single, vigorous economic regulator, working to clear rules. Media companies would then be encouraged to compete on quality at home, while diversifying from their regulated UK activities into foreign markets, films and books.
Although, in theory, this insight ought to have appealed to Margaret Thatcher, she was in practice too busy bullying the BBC and other programme-makers whose work she disliked. She preferred a fix here for Murdoch and a windfall tax scoop there from ITV, rather than a coherent regulatory approach to a crucial British industry.
Tony Blair's government, having dithered in opposition, has now delayed until the next parliament the long overdue bill that is needed to sort out the mess. Three successive prime ministers - Thatcher, John Major and Blair - all appear to have spent more time worrying about the fate of News at Ten than they have about these larger and more important matters.
It is into this textbook case of how not to set the policy framework for an industry that the impatient Lord Hollick of United and Michael Green of Carlton have written an incendiary chapter. Even though Blair and Hollick are close pals - the two had lunch shortly before the merger announcement - the deal should not be approved without safeguards to allow others to join the fray on equal terms.
Granada, the largest ITV company, is the obvious party-pooper, but current rules also allow European media companies to buy into ITV, and Vivendi of France and Kirch of Germany are among those that may want to get involved. American companies are barred from owning shares in UK terrestrial TV, but not in cable TV, newspapers, magazines, radio or satellite TV.
Although it is desperately late in the day to be sorting out this compound nonsense, the only sensible way forward is to hold the line on the current rules until parliament has approved a credible regulatory regime for the whole of the media sector. For commercial television, that entails rules that require properly resourced regional programming and an effective counterweight to the BBC in television news.
There is no case at all for hastening through the Carlton-United merger, or any revised version of it, merely to assuage the City's disaffection with the performance of the two companies' shares.
If we are to believe the City editors, the deal is a long way from being cooked. Sunday Business, which strongly hinted at the merger story a week ahead of the pack, reports that Rupert Murdoch is "seething" about the plan. Le Monde even suggested that the deal was an act of revenge fuelled by Carlton's Lord Ali, angry at the Sun's allegation that Blair is running Britain with the aid of a "gay mafia".
The Sunday Telegraph, distressed by the "nauseating love-in" between Green and Hollick, whose boardrooms "have a longer tradition of violence than Rwanda", thinks that in the light of the impending ITV free-for-all, the government should also privatise Channel 4.
Or as the Independent's lively Outlook column had it, what the Carlton-United merger offers is "a further semi-monopolistic carve-up of local TV franchises; an essentially defensive merger of two underperforming companies the better to make them indigestible to predators". No wonder Wall Street and British couch potatoes are yawning.
The writer is professor of journalism at Cardiff University
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by using the 'report this comment' facility or by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
