BROADCASTING

THE BBC BECOMES STATE TV

A senior BBC journalist, writing anonymously, warns that the BBC’s submission to the demands of government could mean the end of its historically independent role and a relapse into state broadcasting

THE FICTION of the BBC’s independence from political control is now firmly laid to rest. As BBC News is rocked by director James Harding’s plans for another £80 million of cuts, it is clear the corporation now exists as a Whitehall department, with its budget and priorities decided in Downing Street.

Unlike other ministers, culture secretary John Whittingdale does not answer to Parliament for the consequences of government policies. He has a spineless BBC Trust to hide behind. And with an unamendable Royal Charter to be imposed this year, there is little parliamentary procedure to stop further damage.

The White Paper published in May is a step towards the neutering of the corporation for political reasons. When the draft charter is published in the autumn, it will become clear whether a public broadcaster faces transformation into a state broadcaster, with editorial content subject to the views of a unitary board made up of a bloc of political appointees.

Independence was given away in 2010, when the new coalition dumped £300 million-plus of annual government spending onto the backs of the BBC. The BBC Trust agreed to take on the burden of the World Service, the Welsh-language S4C and the roll-out of broadband internet – plus a freeze in the licence fee!

The government’s argument was that the BBC must carry its share of austerity cutbacks; but the BBC is nothing to do with government spending, and by accepting the move the BBC subjected itself to direction by the state.

This time round another “deal” was reached with the Treasury for £1.3 billion of cost to be borne over five years by the BBC to pay the licence fee for the over-75s. Once again independence was traded for a harsh cash settlement “which could have been worse”.

Audiences might wonder why a fifth of the money they pay for BBC programmes should go on a welfare policy for pensioners.

One cost-saving option being pressed as a result is to merge the News Channel and the BBC’s commercial 24-hour television news service, BBC World News. Between 10-12 million Britons watch the News Channel every week . They now face losing the service as their licence-fees go to sustain BBC foreign language television news broadcasts in Urdu, Persian, Arabic and Tamil. For the first time a BBC news service paid for by advertising and distribution deals would be broadcast into the UK. If rolling news can be sustained this way, why not other services?

In response to the politically-driven attack on the BBC’s place in national life, journalists are using industrial means to resist the impact of the cuts. Even before it is merged, the BBC is demanding staff in World News work an additional 12 days a year, to help balance stretched budgets. And if this is imposed, NUJ members will strike. Industrial action has already been taken in Newsgathering and the World Service, even before the latest cuts programme is rolled out.

To set up a Parliamentary safeguard, the NUJ is backing a cross-party group of peers led by the Liberal peer Lord Lester of Herne Hill to make any licence fee settlement subject to the approval of Parliament, and require BBC staff representatives to be appointed to the new unitary board.

LEVESON 2

You can’t stop now. Keep phone-hack probe going

THE GOVERNMENT is blocking the promised resumption of the Leveson Inquiry into relations between the police and the press.

Stage Two of the inquiry into the tabloid phone-hacking scandal was planned to take place once the trials of the journalists and their informants were over. It was due to investigate phone-hacking at the News of the World and what went wrong with the original police investigation.

In November 2012 Prime Minister David Cameron told campaigners: “We remain committed to Leveson part two … It is right that it should go ahead, and that is fully our intention.”

The criminal trials are now over – though some civil settlements are still outstanding – but government seems reluctant to pursue enquiries that could revive the embarrassment felt by senior police, media bosses and politicians four years ago as evidence came out on how they colluded to prevent evidence of the criminality coming to light.

In June Labour frontbencher Andy Burnham tabled a new clause to the Policing and Crime Bill going through Parliament to “compel the Prime Minister to instigate an independent inquiry such as Leveson two into the relationships between the press and police and the extent to which that has operated in the public interest”.

Lancashire MP Andy Burnham, who has campaigned for justice for the Hillsborough families against the lies published about their loved ones in the Sun, said in the Commons debate:

“It seems to Labour members as though the Government have subtly shifted their position in the intervening years … it is no longer a question of when the inquiry will go ahead; it is a question of whether. We have had anonymous briefings from people close to the Culture Secretary and others in Government to suggest that it has already been canned. We are not prepared to accept that.

“If the minister were to say clearly to the House that there will be a second-stage inquiry into the culture of relations between the police and the press, we would not press our new clause to a vote.”

Home Office minister Mike Penning said: “The Government have made it clear on many occasions that we will wait for the criminal proceedings that are still ongoing to come to a conclusion, and then the Home Secretary will move forward.”

Labour persisted with the clause which was rejected by 268 votes to 158.

Criminal proceedings ended when crown prosecution chief Alison Saunders announced there would be no further charges against journalists at the Mirror group, because there was “insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of a conviction” – despite the company paying out millions to settle civil phone-hacking claims.

Lord Justice Leveson has said that he would not be available to conduct the inquiry himself so a different judge would have to be appointed.

Campaigners are calling in particular for further inquiry into the media ramifications of the case of murdered private detective Daniel Morgan. His partner Jonathan Rees was charged with the killing, but the trial collapsed.

Rees earned £150,000 a year selling illegally obtained phone-hacked data to the News of the World, and among his targets was senior Met police detective Dave Cook and his then wife, former BBC Crimewatch presenter Jacqui Hames.

Dave Cook was head of the murder investigation and Jacqui Hames has accused the NoW of targeting the family to intimidate them. News UK chief Rebekah Brooks has admitted the hacking but claims it was to investigate a supposed “affair” between the couple – who had then been married for 11 years.

The case has become a cause celebre among campaigners against corporate media crime. For powerful media and police bosses associated with Jonathan Rees it may also be a case they don’t want reopened.

Guardian media blogger Roy Greenslade explained the decision: “We surely know that David Cameron’s government is not going to want to get on the wrong side of Rupert Murdoch all over again.”

ALTERNATIVES REGULATION

There are better ways

All around the media there are people who want to do things better. As large corporations tighten their grip on Big Media – on the internet, in print and broadcasting –there are those who campaign against them, organise to have them regulated and start up independent media of their own. The CPBF supports much of this activity and in this four-page feature focuses on positive moves on regulation, covering the ownership of Big Media, the regulation of the press and public service broadcasting, including the future of the BBC.

Change the law, change the media

Plans for a new law to protect and increase media plurality are being developed by the Media Reform Coalition, as JUSTIN SCHLOSBERG explains

THE MEDIA Reform Coalition has prepared a media plurality bill to present to Parliament and provide the basis of a legal framework for remedying concentrated media power in the digital age. The bill seeks to redress the present gaps and stalemate in media plurality policy, paving the way for a comprehensive, fair and future-proof approach.

Media plurality is a resurgent issue in policy-making debates in most liberal democracies. The power vacuum left by evaporating profits and retreating corporate investors has put many newsrooms back in the hands of wealthy individuals, from local oligarchs in Eastern Europe hoping to capitalise on opportunities for political influence, to dot com billionaires in the US seeking to redefine the business of news.

Added to this is the new “gatekeeping” power attributed to digital intermediaries which some consider the pivot of contemporary media plurality concerns. But rather than diminishing the gatekeeping role of traditional news brands, the evidence points to the contrary – that the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter are progressively amplifying the voice of incumbent and legacy media whilst doing little to support those vehicles of public interest journalism most under threat; especially local and long-form reporting.

Last November Ofcom produced a framework for measuring media plurality, after five years of deliberation and consultation, and persistent calls to set benchmarks for determining how much plurality we have and need. The Ofcom framework contains useful metrics but does not address the crucial questions of what to do about it. Parliament must act to fill this gap.

The dual principles set out in the bill are intended to safeguard media plurality among large media owners, and promote it for community, independent and not-for-profit media at all levels – from hyperlocal to national news.

In respect of the safeguards, the proposed bill would apply “public interest” obligations to dominant publishers, with structural remedies where there is too much concentration of ownership. These obligations should not amount to content regulation. They must not affect content but be limited to measures to preserve an arm’s length between owners and editorial. Or they could spread the range of shareholdings in a company to preserve its long-term sustainability.

The bill would determine the circumstances in which intervention is triggered, along with the range of applicable remedies. Given the intimacy between media and political elites, the existing plurality regime places far too much discretionary power in the hands of ministers. This renders policy acutely vulnerable to commercial capture or, potentially, leaves media groups vulnerable to political pressure.

On promoting plurality, the bill proposes that funds should be raised from a small levy on the profits of the digital intermediaries to support the most vulnerable and least profitable forms of public interest news. Companies like Google may not profit directly from their use of journalistic content, but the attraction of news does play a role in the “user experience” and add immeasurable value to their businesses.

There is a legitimate case that the huge companies should make a meaningful contribution to supporting independent media, in the public interest. A “media plurality trust” should be set up to allocate the revenue to initiatives that make a measurable contribution to news plurality, particularly in local and long form journalism.

Progressive legislation in support of media plurality is both necessary and possible – to ensure that citizens can hear a diverse range of voices and perspectives; and that journalism’s unique contribution to democratic life is enhanced.

The draft Media Plurality Bill can be accessed at www.mediareform.org.uk/blog/media-plurality-draft-bill.

ALTERNATIVES PUBLIC BROADCASTING

What public TV could really be like …

DES FREEDMAN profiles a parallel inquiry to the BBC charter review process that has a more positive approach

PUBLIC broadcasting is under attack and media reformers are preoccupied with the threats to the future of the BBC and Channel 4 posed by the Tory government. This is the background to the independent inquiry, chaired by the leading film producer David Puttnam, set up to sketch a vision for a viable future for public service television.

This is an environment buffeted by a storm of political, technological and cultural forces.

We have the government’s ideological hostility towards publicly owned companies – whether BBC or Channel 4; we have the rapidly changing consumption habits of younger audiences in particular shifting their attention from the TV set to a range of more mobile devices; we have the increasing alienation of minority audiences from the core TV channels ; and we have the prospect of a diminished BBC, a privatised Channel 4, a US-owned ITV and a Murdoch-owned Sky.

We also have vociferous demands from minority communities for better representation and improved employment possibilities, together with demands from the devolved nations for more autonomy. We have major television news broadcasters clinging to a political “centre ground” when that ground is shifting and increasingly distrusted by millions of citizens.

All in all, a pretty challenging climate – and that’s not even mentioning Netflix and YouTube.

To get to grips with these issues, researchers at Goldsmiths University of London set up the inquiry, which Labour peer Lord Puttnam, one of Britain’s most successful film producers, agreed to chair.

The inquiry team has travelled up and down the UK listening to audiences and taking evidence. Meetings in Cardiff, Coleraine and Edinburgh highlighted the demand for increased control of budgets and commissioning and bemoaned the lack of high quality content specifically aimed at audiences in the devolved nations.

An event with Lenny Henry called “Are You Being Heard?” heard arguments for action to address the structural barriers facing minority ethnic talent and the need to produce content that speaks more effectively to working class issues and audiences.

A meeting in Liverpool asked “Does Television Represent Us?”. Film director Ken Loach gave a straight answer: “No, absolutely not. Does it do justice to the nuances and the subtleties and the intricacies of people’s lives and their concerns and their worries? No, absolutely not. It never has.”

Other speakers were more positive, arguing that the main public service channels are a counterweight to the hypercommercialism of the multichannel operators and that they still play a vital role in nurturing a democratic public sphere.

We have hosted debates with the BBC Director-General, the chief executive of Channel 4, broadcasters, bloggers and producers.

For some people, the most contentious issues are about agenda-setting and control; others are more concerned with how best to stimulate creativity and to provide a space that is not reducible to ratings, demographics and market imperatives.

The inquiry reports at the end of June and will make recommendations about the future of the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. But there are broader issues that we will want to consider.

We can no longer take public service TV for granted. The political settlements and technological landscapes that sustained it are less conducive than they were: neo-liberal governments and digital platforms have undermined the basis of the regulated “compact” between broadcasters and the public.

We need to rewrite its role for a digital future and to design new content and services that are available to all. We need to treat our television system less as a self-contained set of services than as a complex ecology in which individual components have a material impact on each other.

Changes to one channel will affect the others, and determine the possibilities for the diverse programming at the heart of the public service remit.

We will ask: to what extent does it adequately serve all audiences? Does it need to be fixed?

No single inquiry or report can answer all the questions about the future of an institution that for all the upheavals does remain uniquely powerful and popular in British life.

But, given the manoeuvres of those who would wish further to commercialise and privatise it, a vision of television that engages, represents and inspires the public is worth fighting for.

Read the submissions and see details of forthcoming events at www.futureoftv.org.uk.

ALTERNATIVES PUBLIC BROADCASTING

… What it used to be like when it had the chance

Public broadcasting is about entertainment and drama as much as news and current affairs and GRANVILLE WILLIAMS affirms how brilliant it can be when writers and directors are given free rein

A SERIES of television plays had a tremendous impact in the mid-1960s. Central to the plays was the portrayal of ordinary lives, capturing the speech and physical character of people in work, home and leisure. The protagonists were miners, housewives, dockers, building workers, political activists. The power of these plays lay in the way they exposed social injustice by tackling the big themes of unemployment, strikes, homelessness and racism.

Tony Garnett’s memoir, The Day The Music Died, and a new documentary, Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach, are out in June. The creative work the two men did together started in the 1960s, when they worked on the BBC Wednesday Play. The film and the book will draw people back to what was an amazing moment for BBC Drama, and also, I hope, introduce their work to new audiences.

They worked as producer and director on Up The Junction, Cathy Come Home, The Big Flame, The Rank and File and Days of Hope.

One reason for this miraculous record was the space created by the 1960 Royal Commission on Broadcasting proposal for a third channel, which led to BBC 2 going on air in April 1964. The Director-General, Hugh Greene, encouraged risk-taking and experimentalism, and Stuart Hood, a Marxist, was appointed head of programmes for the new channel, BBC≤.

The BBC recruited young directors, writers, and script editors to staff the new channel – people who were not restricted by previous practice and could move away from the metropolitan, southern English culture.

Stanley Newman, who became head of drama at BBC2, said: “I am proud that I played some part in the recognition that the working man was a fit subject for drama, and not such a comic foil in a play on middle-class manners.” He started the Wednesday Play series, which had scripts by writers like Jim Allen and Barry Hines.

Jim Allen wrote scripts for Coronation Street, left the Granada soap and moved to the BBC, collaborating with Tony Garnett on classics like The Lump (1967), The Big Flame (1969) and The Rank and File (1971). Barry Hines started at the BBC north region. He wrote a novel called A Kestrel for a Knave, which became the script of a classic film on working life: Kes, by Ken Loach, then a BBC drama director.

These plays’ impact derived from the reality of the fictional world they presented. TV critics described them as documentary drama, “faction”, or drama-doc, because producer Garnett and Loach used lightweight 16mm equipment to film in actual locations rather than in TV studios, often using untrained performers in the plays.

Predictably the subject matter and emotional impact of the plays triggered angry coverage in the right-wing press. The new Ken Loach documentary Versus covers some of the press response to his plays.

It was politics that did for this strand of politically committed drama. Its last flowering was Boys From The Blackstuff, written by Alan Bleasdale and directed by Michael Wearing. The series was first shown in October 1982 on a BBC2 Sunday night arts slot and the publicity for it in the Radio Times emphasised the comic elements at the expense of the political thrust. Such was the response to the five episodes it was shown again on BBC1 in a prime time slot eight weeks later.

The 1979 election victory of Margaret Thatcher made it difficult for BBC managers to defend such productions in the face of constrained budgets and political pressure. Thatcher appointed Marmaduke Hussey, who worked for Rupert Murdoch, as BBC chairman in 1986. He sacked the progressive Director General Alasdair Milne, and curbed the creativity in BBC programming. It never got it back.

Tony Garnett pointed out: “This sort of control is the enemy of creativity … the main effect of the kind of supervision which penetrates into the details of productions, leading to artistic decisions being made further up the hierarchy, is to stifle the creativity which the organisation is supposed to be encouraging.”

But that was what public service broadcasting can do. This should not be forgotten by people who don’t remember when it did.

Tony Garnett’s memoir The Day The Music Died is published by Constable. He will be speaking at a CPBF North event on Saturday 16 July – see below.

Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach directed by Julie Osmond went on release in June.

THE ALTERNATIVE WHITE PAPER

The workers know best

BBC staff insist that it should remain the cornerstone of UK broadcasting and content production. So says the Federation of Entertainment Unions – which includes unions covering all BBC staff and contributors – in the Alternative White Paper it produced in March.

To ensure this the BBC must be reformed to meet the expectations of licence fee payers and to uphold the highest standards of public service. It must:

Maintain regional television news and local radio and spending more on original drama production in the regions

Make all content available free at the point of use, on as wide a range of platforms as possible including expanded services online

Robustly safeguard its independence

Provide news free of bias and maintain journalistic of accuracy and integrity.

The BBC’s governing structure should have representation from licence fee payers, stakeholders in the cultural sector and staff and other workers.

It must be sufficiently funded to remain the biggest commissioner of written work and new musical composition. It should continue to maintain orchestras, new music, online and broadcast news, television and radio comedy and drama production, original scripted content and content for children. In-house programme making capabilities must be maintained to retain a critical mass of talent for the content production sector.

The BBC spends 56p of every pound it receives on first-run TV content. Other public service broadcasters spend an average of 44p, while non-PSB broadcasters devote only 9p.

The unions warn there is little scope for more efficiency savings. Over the last 10 years there have been £1.5 billion cuts per year and the real value of the licence fee has fallen by 12 per cent. The BBC was given responsibility for the costs of the World Service, the majority of S4C’s budget, and assistance to local TV, which cost it £340 million a year.

The licence fee must not be used to fund other projects such as local TV services. A cash-starved BBC will not only be disastrous for the corporation, it will also have a dramatic effect on the creative industry as a whole.

RECLAIM THE MEDIA

Campaign brief and invitation to participate

A NATION-WIDE campaign – RECLAIM THE MEDIA – is planned for the autumn. There will be gatherings in ten cities and a final day festival in London in December. It will be run by the Media Reform Coalition and by Real Media, a grouping of radical independent news producers.

At the events speakers will debate issues facing the media including the future of the BBC, press regulation, digital monopolies, and the local news gap.

The tour will culminate in the second Media Democracy Festival in London on December 10 which will feature addresses from politicians, celebrities and journalists.

The campaign will be supported by a dedicated website and social media channels, as well as a number of digital resources. These include:

Real Media is to launch an app to facilitate easier search and access to independent news sources, and enables users to sculpt their own news feeds free from personalising algorithms of search and social networking sites. It will also provide a space for users to congregate and organise on media issues and coordinate action and campaigns.

An exclusive interactive map of media ownership in the UK developed by MRC.

Draft templates for emailing MPs.

At the heart of the campaign will be a charter of principles for media reform based on the MRC’s draft Media Plurality Bill, expressed as a series of five urgent demands:

A BBC firmly in public hands and wholly not for profit but with a more secure and long term funding mechanism, devolved editorial responsibility, and enhanced accountability to audiences and the public

A new levy on major online search and social networking services to support local and investigative journalism in the public interest

New rules on media ownership to prevent dominance of public conversation by wealthy individuals and private corporations

New and tougher rules on meetings between government ministers/officials and senior media figures to ensure greater transparency

Government must implement Leveson proposals IN FULL and carry out part two of the Leveson Inquiry to get to the bottom of the phone hacking cover up.

ALTERNATIVES PRESS REGULATION

They don’t have to be like IPSO

THE ALTERNATIVE press regulator IMPRESS is amassing a bank of alternative publishers promoting themselves as willing to submit to independent scrutiny in line with the proposals of the Leveson Inquiry.

While the so-called Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) has gathered nearly all the national press and the big regional groups into its publisher-controlled safe haven, IMPRESS is signing up a number of small and local ones – 31 in all so far – as it goes patiently through the painstaking process of getting recognised under the Leveson procedure.

This involves a lengthy examination by the Press Recognition Panel (PRP), set up under a Royal Charter by Parliament in the Crime and Courts Act three years ago. The PRP is dragging its way through the extensive consultations apparently required to conform to the requirements of the Act.

It has just ended its second two-month consultation on IMPRESS’s application – and IMPRESS itself has launched two more, on its financial structure and its proposed Code of Standards.

The CPBF has supported IMPRESS’S application at each stage, as has the National Union of Journalists, but others are not so keen. Notably IPSO, responding through a front organisation, the News Media Association (NMA). The NMA is run by the Regulatory Funding Company (RFC), which funds and controls IPSO, though it does not declare the fact in its responses to PRP consultations. This is significant, because in its responses to PRP consultations it routinely repeated attacks IMPRESS’s own funding.

The NMA says it would be “a travesty” if IMPRESS were granted recognition as an effective and independent regulator, because of “IMPRESS’s dependency for its funding on Max Mosley, a wealthy donor engaged in a personal campaign to bring the press to heel following tabloid revelations about his own private life … the Mosley funding could be withdrawn at any time.” The NMA continues: “IMPRESS’ lack of credibility as a regulator due to the absence of any support from the mainstream press industry.

“IMPRESS was created by individuals seeking to reform the press rather than from a desire to implement self-regulation.”

Just as IPSO, you might say, “was created by newspaper owners seeking to prevent regulation rather than from a desire to improve the press”.

Walter Merricks, Chair of IMPRESS, said: “It is regrettable that the trade body behind IPSO is trying to prevent competition from a truly independent and accountable press regulator … even though IPSO has no intention of meeting those standards itself.”

The new list of local media that have agreed to submit to regulation by IMPRESS include a number that have been reported in Free Press, including Bristol Cable, the Brixton Blog and Bugle (last issue), the crowdfunded investigative reporting group Byline and the Port Talbot Magnet and Caerphilly Observer workers’ co-ops in South Wales. So has the long-established pro-third world monthly New Internationalist.

Walter Merricks said: “We are building our membership from the ground up, working with independent publications first. The publishers joining IMPRESS tell us that, in this challenging environment, they value the trust and reassurance that we can give them. At a time when the news industry is under intense commercial pressure, audience trust is more important than ever.”

OVERSEAS

Not just a racist, a brute and a profiteer, he’s Murdoch’s

AMID the scrum of far-right bigots, racists and religiose reactionaries that comprise the corps of aspirant Republican candidates for the US Presidential election, the one that emerged was Rupert Murdoch’s man.

When Donald Trump crushed powerful rival Ted Cruz in May, the defeated Senator from Texas said: “Rupert Murdoch is used to picking world leaders in Australia and the United Kingdom, running tabloids, and we’re seeing it here at home.”

Murdoch’s right-wing TV network Fox had given Trump more than twice as much airtime. Cruz called Fox News “the Donald Trump network 24/7.” Trump led all candidates in interview airtime in every month since he formally announced his candidacy in June 2015.

And in addition to getting more than double Cruz’s airtime, Trump had more than three times as much interview airtime on the network as Ohio Governor John Kasich, who was the last challenger to drop out of the race on May 4.

The relationship between the Murdoch media and the Donald has been craftily managed. There was a flood of hysterical media chatter when Trump boycotted one televised debate in a huff about the way he had been treated by Fox presenter Megyn Kelly in a previous encounter. He then insulted her with a clumsy sexual reference.

The two egos exchanged abusive tweets for some days. The supposed “feud” was blatantly contrived, but this is what passes for political reporting in the USA, while the powerbrokers get on with the real business behind the scenes.

It’s not unlike the relationship between the BBC and Nigel Farage, in which the UKIP leader tirelessly complains about the hostile reporting he has to suffer, while enjoying more access per voter than anyone.

A second illusory snag was the putative Republican candidacy of Ben Carson, the dim doctor whom Fox picked up early on and Rupert Murdoch praised to the skies.

Fox mysteriously made an hour-long programme about him after he was filmed making conservative arguments about health care, tax policy and “political correctness” and national debt at a National Prayer Breakfast.

Murdoch tweeted a call for “a real black president” – in contrast to Barack Obama, by which he presumably unwittingly considered Carson a “real black” because he knows his place. Fox made Carson a formal “contributor”, pushed him for President and started reporting a non-existent “buzz” around his candidacy.

They couldn’t keep it up for long. Carson said such stupid things – comparing healthcare to slavery, while denouncing his critics as racists – that he soon imploded. He now says he wants to be a TV talk show host and has advanced this career with an assessment of Fox rather different from Ted Cruz’s: “The media tries to shut me down. But they can’t because the good Lord has provided me with mechanisms like my syndicated column and like Fox News. We’d be Cuba if there were no Fox News.”

BIG CASH FOR HILLARY FROM MURDOCH EMPIRE

MURDOCH buys Democrats too and his companies have generously funded their leading candidate Hillary Clinton throughout her career.

21st Century Fox and News Corporation together rank ninth on the list of the top “corporate and union donors to the Clintons over two decades”, according to a list in The Wall Street Journal (owned by News Corp) in 2014. The list counts donations from “companies, foundations, and employees”.

21st Century Fox also ranks as the 13th biggest contributor to Hillary Clinton during her political career, according to a database maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics, with $340,936 of donations.

“The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organizations’ PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals’ immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates,” the database notes.

Murdoch’s charitable foundation and his son James are also contributors to the Clinton Foundation, now being investigated by the FBI over possible instances of “public corruption”.

The News Corporation Foundation is listed on the foundation website as a donor to the tune of between $500,001 and $1,000,000, placing it alongside progressive donor heavyweights like Peter Lewis and Paul Newman’s foundation.

Rupert’s son James is himself listed as giving more: between $1 million and $5 million.

The Murdochs do not however appear to be backing Hillary Clinton in the current race to the same extent. Their companies do not feature in published lists of big donors. But the Democrat front-runner has so far managed to amass more than $300 million without them.

UNFAIR TO BERNIE. AND WHAT WOULD YOU EXPECT?

THEY ARE calling it the “Bernie Blackout,” a failure of news organisations, particularly television networks, to seriously cover the candidacy of the socialist Democrat Bernie Sanders.

A New York Times report in May pointed out that Hillary Clinton had received more than twice the “news and commentary” about her campaign.

And an analysis of coverage of all candidates in 2015 found that Clinton received more than six times the coverage on the TV networks – 121 minutes a day while Sanders received only 20 minutes.

Of course, much of the time given to Clinton is negative coverage relating to her various legal transgressions. It is also true that Sanders gets much more attention on social media, appealing to the younger age groups that support him, but this cannot be quantified.

In print, the New York Times was caught out imposing a negative editorial slant on a major feature on the Sanders campaign.

The article, published online, described the way the Vermont senator had managed a significant number of legislative victories in Congress.

It had been up for several hours when Times editors made significant changes to its tone and content, turning it from almost glowing to somewhat disparaging.

The headline was changed and new paragraphs inserted saying: “There is little to draw from his small-ball legislative approach to suggest that he could succeed. (He) is suddenly promising … free college tuition paid for with giant tax hikes and) a huge increase in government health care, which has made even liberal Democrats sceptical.”

The Times duly ran into heavy criticism – which was upheld in an investigation by the paper’s public editor.

AWKWARD SQUAD

Tim Gopsill

Hillsborough: who profited but the owner of the Sun?

THE RETURN of the soccer hooligan in France brings recollections of the 1980s, when the smart colour magazines carried awestruck interviews with articulate City Boy bullies who travelled round the country on Saturday afternoons staging violent set-piece gang fights outside football grounds – like the international brand now celebrated in Marseille – while the ordinary fans in the stands took the blame in the tabloids.

This was Thatcher’s Britain, in which all football fans were cast as hooligans and lined up with trade unionists and socialists as “enemies within”. They were demonised by the press, dutifully following Margaret Thatcher’s crusade to destroy the traditional institutions of working class culture like unions, football and the old Labour Party. In her great social experiment working class people were to be transformed into property-owning yuppies.

Football was an area from which the middle class had supposedly been excluded by the thuggishness and crudity of people and their language. This was the story: all the family men who couldn’t think of taking their wives and children to games. Attendances fell drastically.

As fans came out of matches, they were set on by the police, like demonstrators, then blamed for the consequent fracas. (I was in such scenes myself – at both demos and football!)

The worst crime of which fans were always accused was running onto the pitch. This apparently harmless activity (did it myself at Villa Park) happened from time to time when exuberant fans rushed on to celebrate at the end. Commentators on Match of the Day, which in 1983 first took its massively watched Saturday evening slot, seethed with disapproval.

Thatcher threatened to impose a membership scheme on the Football League, so that only registered fans could get in. The clubs panicked and started building cages round the pitches, to keep the fans off.

That’s what killed the 96 people at Hillsborough in 1989. It wasn’t the police who let the crowd in; it was the cages that stopped them escaping. Stewards would not open the gates in the cages – even though they were there for emergencies – because the imperative was to prevent running on the pitch. The fans at the front were crushed to death.

The Daily Mirror ran a graphic photo of distorted, agonised faces pressed against the mesh, and was widely condemned – for showing the truth while the others printed lies.

The outcome of the Hillsborough inquest in May was a triumph. The police were stupid and they told stupid lies to try to justify themselves afterwards.

The Sun that printed them with such relish has deserved the condemnation it has suffered ever since, though the other right-wing tabloids did as well.

But that’s not the whole story. The demonising of football fans by the media was a big factor; yet it never features in reports or analysis, and nor did it, amazingly, at the inquest. The famous 14 questions for the jury asked about structural problems but barely mentioned the cages, nor asked about decisions not at first to open the gates.

Such inquiries are always set up to pile the blame onto a designated scapegoat which in this case was South Yorkshire Police.

But the collaboration of the press with Margaret Thatcher’s project to neutralise working class institutions and culture was an element in many of the catastrophes of the 1980s: most ostentatiously with the big industrial clashes and the turmoil within the Labour Party itself.

As for football, the Taylor commission inquiry into the disaster recommended all-seater stadia with no cages, and they came down within days. The sport has been comprehensively sanitised as a big-money spectacle with ticket prices beyond the reach of most ordinary fans, certainly of the sort to run onto a pitch. Instead, in their millions, they pay Rupert Murdoch for vicarious attendance.

You set the question: who benefits? The answer is always Big Media; like lawyers the only people who invariably benefit from disaster.

The loss of a few hundred thousand sales of the Sun on Merseyside has been paltry in comparison to Murdoch’s gains.

PRINT IS DOOMED? NO, THE WEBSITES ARE

WHEN THE Independent newspaper was closed down in March after 30 years, everyone said, it’s only the first, this is the way all the papers will go. If that is true we are doomed.

The Independent brand was kept on with its website, but it’s not working.

Figures in May showed the digital audience had fallen back below the level the site commanded before the paper disappeared.

Total daily browsers were down more than 7 per cent to 3,048,377, below the 3,082,936 average daily browsers it attracted in March, according to the latest monthly figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Before then, hits on the site were rising steadily. Now, people are losing interest.

So what was in the brand? The Independent had long lost its unique selling point, of being non-partisan amid the morass of bias and prejudice in the surrounding papers.

What it had left was a string of top-class writers – columnists and expert commentators, particularly on world affairs.

No-one bought it for its news, because the staff was tiny and the spread of stories, though interesting, was thin.

When the paper closed they sacked the reporters and kept the names. Not enough, strangely, to hold people’s attention.

The print sales were pitiful: around 28,000 a day at the end. Yet it must have had a presence in the market beyond its numbers.

What it had, which corporate executives couldn’t appreciate, was a critical mass of journalistic endeavour that attracted an interest was greater than its market presence.

Now it’s just another middle-of-the-road comment website. Who’s bothered about that?

Table of Contents

LEVESON 2

ALTERNATIVES REGULATION

ALTERNATIVES PUBLIC BROADCASTING

ALTERNATIVES PUBLIC BROADCASTING

THE ALTERNATIVE WHITE PAPER

RECLAIM THE MEDIA

ALTERNATIVES PRESS REGULATION

OVERSEAS

BIG CASH FOR HILLARY FROM MURDOCH EMPIRE

UNFAIR TO BERNIE. AND WHAT WOULD YOU EXPECT?

AWKWARD SQUAD

PRINT IS DOOMED? NO, THE WEBSITES ARE