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Michael Tracey's report has been produced by the Campaign for Quality Television Ltd. 8 College Terrace, London E3 5AN
Prof. Michael Tracey, Director of the University of Colorado's
prestigious Centre for Mass Media Research has warned the British
Government that its intention of following a US approach to
broadcasting - set out in the current Communications Bill - will lead
to disaster. Tracey, director of the British Broadcasting Research Unit
until 1988 when he moved permanently to the US, says that seen from a
US perspective, present Government policy is 'as wrong headed as it is
possible to be without being totally insane'. He says the Government's
hope that it can promote high quality television through market forces
and 'light touch' regulation has 'all the logic of boiling ice'.He argues that the idea that US broadcasting demonstrates the power
of market forces to promote good television is a myth propagated by
those who stand to make fortunes out of the cheapened but - for them -
profitable television, further deregulation will spawn. He says the few
good US television programmes they love to quote - such as 'The
Sopranos', 'Six Feet Under', 'Sex and the City' - are irrelevant to any
understanding of what market forces have done to US television and what
the future bodes for British television in light of the Communications
Bill. These few programmes come mostly from the subscription channel,
Home Box Office, a premium pay channel that operates as close to the
licence fee system as the US will ever come. The rest of US
broadcasting, driven by ratings and advertisers, is in such crisis that
it is causing intense concern across America. In 1981, Mark Fowler,
Reagan's chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said that
in future the public interest would be viewed 'as that which the public
is interested in'. New technologies, he argued, made broadcasting so
cheap and plentiful, old style regulation was no longer required. In
reality, says Tracey, what was driving policy was a distaste for the
communal values that that regulation had promoted and an almost
theological belief in the virtues of the market. Both are core
ingredients of the new British Communications Bill. It refuses to talk
about citizens, only consumers and will open up ownership of British
commercial channels to American takeovers.
Culture minister Tessa Jowell has said Britain can have the most
dynamic television market in the world - while still protecting public
service broadcasting. Tracey says the claim is based on a lie. The
American experience demonstrates that the two are utterly incompatible.
The whole story of US media since 1981 has been not just the
elimination of costly, high quality programming - an essential part of
public service broadcasting - but the progressive elimination of
anything which does not maximize profits, with disastrous consequences.
He quotes three examples in detail: the damage to children's
television; the undermining of broadcast journalism; and the growing
threat to US television posed by the rise of reality television, to
support his analysis. Tracey concludes his study with a 1958 quote from
US broadcaster and journalist, Edward R. Murrow, addressing a
conference of broadcasters. He told them that television: 'can teach,
it can illuminate; yes, it can even inspire. But it can do so only to
the extent that humans are determined to use to those ends. Otherwise
it is merely wires and lights in a box.'Murrow
rightly understood, says Tracey, that how we communicate has to have
its origins in some sense of a principled condition. If it is not, then
the result will be a debased and trivialized culture. In saying this he
was echoing Abraham Lincoln who talked about the conflict between what
he described as 'the better angels of our nature' and a coarser side
which 'revels in degrading and dominating others'. Tracey ends his
essay with a plea that what has happened in America must not be
replicated in Britain: 'The US, despite all its wondrous possibilities,
in its obsession with the market and abandonment of those "better
angels" of which Lincoln spoke, has created a wasteland and called it
paradise. Why on earth, would Blair and his Government, want to do the
same thing, to a place that I still regard as home�'
Last modified: Monday, November 13, 2006
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Notices
Events & Announcements
World Press Freedom Day
More reporters are currently imprisoned in Turkey than in any other country in the world. Only a matter of weeks ago lawyers failed to persuade a Turkish court to release a 76-year-old journalist from a Turkish internet news station.
World Press Freedom Day on Friday May 3, 2013 is being marked in Britain by a rally to highlight the dangers facing journalists in Turkey and in this podcast, Nicholas Jones speaks to Barry White, Organiser at the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, and Sam Bamford, the TUC's policy officer for Eastern Europe and Africa about the importance of a campaign to highlight international press freedom.
The World Press Freedom Day rally is being staged by the National Union of Journalists at the NUJ head office, Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1 on Thursday May 2, 6pm-8pm.
DATELINE: 27/4/13
UK launch of EU media campaign
DATELINE: 13/3/13
The UK launch of a 'European Citizens' Initiative' calling for EU rules against concentration of media power will take place on Thursday March 21 from 11:00am – 12:30pm in Committee Room 4A at the House of Lords, London. Guest speakers will include actor and activist Hugh Grant (pictured), media consultant Claire Enders, Professor Steven Barnett, Barry McCall (President of the NUJ) and Marc Gruber (Director of the European Federation of Journalists).
A European Citizens' Initiative is an official petition, like a Downing Street petition. If it succeeds in gathering a million signatures across the EU, the Commission is obliged to respond.
This petition calls for the EU to act to protect media pluralism and press freedom.
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Previous stories
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