Regulating for freedom: media lessons from Australia

A comparison in the standards of journalistic professionalism between Rupert Murdoch-owned channels in the UK, the United States and Australia reveals much about the impact of different media regulatory systems on the performance even of putatively ‘global’ media providers.

In Australia, by sitting still long enough, you can compare the effects of three different national media regulatory systems on Rupert Murdoch’s television news channels. Pay-TV news provider, Foxtel – co-owned by Murdoch – rotates domestic Australian bulletins and British news feeds on its Sky News channel and supplies Murdoch’s own Fox News channel from the US. (Cross-media ownership rules keep Murdoch locked out of free-to-air TV, so Sky News’s local input is supplied by two free-to-air licence holders.)

The British model: ambiguous impartiality

In Britain, the impartiality codes provide highly specific guidelines about what professional journalism permits. For instance, there are clauses that provide highly detailed interviewing protocols designed to ensure ‘balance’.

David Elstein’s contribution to openDemocracy’s Journalism & War debate looks at the contrasts between the strident wartime coverage of Murdoch’s Fox News channel in the United States and the locally-licensed news services produced under ITC and BBC impartiality codes in Britain.

Elstein argues that the increasing access restrictions applied in recent wars like Iraq compromise the autonomy of these guidelines. Moreover, the way that the impartiality codes require domestic political reference points carries the risk of parochialism. Finally, the large resource commitment to war coverage itself of British broadcasters sets the stage for, in Elstein’s words, “the disturbing process by which broadcast professionalism is converted to stage-managed triumphalism”.

Several months after the war, the mood in Britain is of course anything but triumphalist and the BBC’s problems seem if anything larger. In Australia, the situation of the BBC’s equivalent, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is interestingly different. The ABC also employed conventional journalistic scepticism to counter PR ‘spin’ during the war. However, the Australian minister for communications has interpreted this as evidence of occasions of anti-American ‘bias’ on sixty-four separate occasions. These charges are regarded by informed commentators as comically inept, partly because they do not begin to understand the ABC’s own detailed ‘editorial guidelines’.

But in Australia, only the public broadcasters (ABC and SBS) have ‘editorial guidelines’ that resemble the British impartiality codes. The ABC currently sits alone under fire with nothing like the level of support the BBC has received from, for example, print-based investigative journalists. This is the crucial difference between the Australian and British cases: the British impartiality rules are part of an arguably hegemonic professional broadcast journalistic culture. (This is not to deny that some aspects of Andrew Gilligan’s journalism might be seen to fall outside such professional practice.)

Indeed, it is perhaps not going too far to suggest that, of the former ‘coalition of the willing’, only Britain seems to have had the necessary combination of institutional elements that has led to the calling to public account of some of the arguments for war. So, amongst wartime coalitions at least and perhaps more widely, national public spheres are increasingly interdependent. While professional journalism is only one key element in such processes, the fostering of such journalism emerges as an even more crucial national and international public policy goal.

The broader significance of David Elstein’s article is its implicit linkage between regulatory regimes and the goal of fostering professional journalism within commercial media. It thus combines issues previously raised discretely in at least three other openDemocracy debates: global media ownership, the future of public service values, and the politics of digital television. This provides an opportunity to see some of the proposals generated in these debates in a fresh light.

Australia: markets, media and moguls

The contrast between Australia and Britain highlights the local variations within Rupert Murdoch’s global empire. In and out of wartime, the British news programming (via Sky) easily surpasses the Australian (as well of course as the opinionated extremes of Fox News) in professionalism. This demonstrates that Murdoch’s institutions can produce news programming that is both more costly and of higher quality – even via subscription – but will only do so in the right regulatory environment.

I agree with David Elstein’s earlier rejection of the demonisation of ‘media moguls’ and his emphasis on the need for greater complexity in the media policy debate. But a comparison of ‘Murdoch US’ with ‘Murdoch UK’ is precisely an example of this complexity – and indicates that the British regulatory system offers a successful template that can improve other nations’ media policies.

That template is the ITV model: regulation of commercial broadcasting according to public service values. Historically, this was achieved via content regulation by programme codes in combination with structural regulation.

This structural regulation took two forms: first, the delimitation of direct, ‘head-to-head’ competition by the granting of regional advertising monopolies to licence-holders; second, the ‘nominated news provider’ model of externally-sourced news provision to licensees. It was this second innovation that fostered the development of Independent Television News (ITN) as a ‘quality’ competitor with the BBC, so removing much of the temptation to compete ‘downmarket’. (ITN is the chief international news source for PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in the US.)

This argument for the continuing viability of the ITV/ITN template is not often made today; even its strongest advocate in the openDemocracy debate, Jean Seaton, speaks of it mainly in the past tense. But I would respectfully suggest that such views – while undoubtedly fair comment within Britain – appear from an Australian perspective blind to the continuing comparative advantage of what used to be called “the least worst broadcasting system in the world”.

Consider, for example, the radical consequences of the outsourcing of all US or Australian commercial free-to-air television news provision to an ITN-like provider that is subject to ITC-like positive programme codes. Such a system would go a long way towards redressing the decline of professional journalism that Robert McChesney rightly laments – without any need to resort to large-scale public ownership.

But arguments for an ITV-type system usually provoke in response a commonsense misunderstanding: that ‘the British regulatory system’ is synonymous with ‘the BBC’. The ITV system is either ignored or misunderstood outside Britain (and perhaps there also).

In a local version of this misunderstanding, the Australian ‘dual system’ of a marginalised public broadcasting sector (ABC, later joined by the multicultural SBS) plus a US-cloned commercial sector has been routinely legitimised as combining ‘the best of both worlds’.

The ABC was certainly modeled on the BBC, but it never enjoyed the BBC’s long period of monopoly (ITV was created in 1954, the BBC had been around since 1922) and its continuing, if challenged, leadership role. The Australian commercial broadcasting sector was never subjected to the levels of regulation expected of its counterpart in Britain but nor even (in the case of news) to the levels expected by the US’s former “fairness doctrine”. The complacent myth of ‘the best of both worlds’ conceals in fact the remarkable market dominance and influence of the Australian press/media ‘barons’ since the establishment of television.

I do not wish to resort to the ‘demonisation’ of moguls here. While the editorial interventionism of Rupert Murdoch and his peers is well-documented, their impact on Australian policy-making is far more significant. Whatever their editorial influence on public opinion, Australian politicians certainly believe the barons can ‘deliver’ electoral consequences. Their preferences have been indulged in media policy-making, most recently in the absurd digital television policy detailed by Julian Thomas.

Each major political party now believes it needs, in Paul Chadwick’s memorable phrase, a ‘media mate’ to attain office. Even Paul Keating, the prime minister who most challenged media policy orthodoxy by introducing cross-media ownership rules in 1986, later referred to their purpose as a ‘diversity of media power bases’.

The resulting oligopolisation of media ownership and deregulation of programming has left Australia with an increasingly marginalised public sector – (one still far stronger than PBS but incapable of BBC-like public service leadership), and a commercial sector that demonstrates ‘market failure’ to provide professional journalism (especially in radio and television current affairs).

All Australian commercial broadcast journalism is effectively self-regulating. The only exceptions are a number of short-term rules introduced by the Australian Broadcasting Authority following its inquiry into the corruption of the ‘cash for comment’ fiasco .

Mediawatch, the weekly ABC programme that tracks examples of professional failure (and worse) in the media industry had revealed that undisclosed ‘payola’ arrangements were being made by major corporations to ‘buy’ approving comments from leading talk-radio figures. These are the same figures or ‘media mates’ that national political leaders continue to patronise at each election because of their ‘reach’ into key constituencies.

The global significance of these developments is considerable. If Robert McChesney is right in describing the US as the ‘spawning ground’ of neo-liberalism, then the undoing of Australia’s half-formed social democracy has provided a very useful incubator.

The road to informed citizenship

A pattern of Australian anticipation of later European developments has recently emerged across a range of policy areas: from the retrospective ‘cost-recovery’ taxing of university graduates to the rejection of asylum-seekers. Australia’s ‘dual system’ anticipated the media structure of those European states that weakened the role of their public broadcasters. The consequences of Australia’s further deregulation could reasonably be read as an early warning of more to come.

Indeed, Pippa Norris’s recent large Europe-wide survey-study that researched the audiences of ‘dual system’ broadcasting regimes – already suggests as much. She found crucial differences in the political knowledge held by the audiences of public and commercial channels, and further differences between the audiences of news and entertainment programming.

Such findings reinforce ‘the bottom line’ most contributors to recent media debates, including those on openDemocracy, have accepted: that if a media regulatory system is not adequately fostering informed citizenship, then something is fundamentally wrong.

Yet here also, Australia might offer a glimmer of hope. The current government led by John Howard has now tried and failed three times to undo the cross-media ownership rules. With each round of debate an interesting undercurrent has grown. Participants are increasingly using the language of ‘freedom of communication’ (which is common currency in debates on the regulation of the internet). Australia still has no bill of rights but the Australian High Court decided in favour of an implied constitutional freedom of communication during the 1990s. Shortly after retiring in 1996, the Chief Justice who presided over those decisions drew on the positive freedom of informed citizenship to publicly defend the ABC.

The most broad-ranging Australian inquiry into media regulation in over a generation was completed by the Productivity Commission; its report recommended that freedom of communication be adopted as a new objective of broadcasting legislation. Concerns about the violation of freedom of communication principles played a small but significant role in defeating the most recent deregulatory government bill.

There is a tendency amongst media policy critics to see freedom of communication only in its negative sense of ‘freedom from’ state intervention and so the sole property of advocates of marketisation. McChesney recently referred to such use of this negative sense by deregulators as ‘the new theology of the First Amendment’. But freedom of communication’s positive sense of informed citizenship also provides a means of arguing for regulatory instruments like the ITV template. These instruments can be justified within free speech discourse as legitimate ‘burdens’ on free speech that ensure informed citizenship.

The increase in usage of freedom of communication discourses via international precedents employed by constitutional courts and related ‘harmonisation’ legislations is not a widely discussed aspect of globalisation. Yet this must surely be the site of increasing contestation in media policy – and a necessary component of any imaginative political will for more participatory democratic global futures. Then, at last, we might indeed have the best of both worlds.