About eight months ago, shortly before the general elections in the UK, The Independent, a daily newspaper in England relaunched with a new design and a banner at the top its front page which proclaims: “Free from party political bias / Free from Proprietorial Influence.” At the relaunch, the paper’s editor-in-chief, Simon Kelner stated: “We believe that what is most needed in the media landscape is a newspaper that is truly free of proprietorial influence and political affiliation (something no other newspaper can claim) to make some sense of the world around us.” Others observed, with some amusement, that the statement came only weeks after the acquisition of the paper by Alexander Lebedev, a Russian oligarch and former KGB officer and the departure of its editor.
In recent months, the question of media ownership and who pulls the strings has come to the fore in the UK. News International (the huge media corporation, which owns a fleet of newspapers, TV stations and publishing houses across the world) has been the subject of many column inches partly because Mr Murdoch’s company is facing charges of trying to create a monopoly in its acquisition of the remaining portion of BSkyB. Then a week ago, two football presenters left Sky, the TV arm of the Murdoch empire. One was fired for sexist remarks about a female linesman. After footage of a similar incident involving the other, Richard Keys, was released to the press by Sky Sports (and aired on Sky News), Mr Keys resigned citing “dark forces” at work within the corporation. It is significant that, while none of these incidents occurred on air (‘live’ so-to-speak), they were deemed worthy of censure only after they had been publicised. In another news story, a previous editor of one of the corporation’s newspapers, the News of the World, has just resigned as the British Prime Minister’s spokesman because of repeated allegations of the phone-tapping of various celebrities by senior operatives during his tenure at the paper. His words, on announcing his resignation, were: “When the spokesman needs a spokesman, it’s time to move on.” There is a clear sense, in those words, that those in charge of managing or producing the news should not, in themselves, become newsworthy.
The traditional divisions between news and entertainment, news and views and news and mere (unsubstantiated) gossip are also increasingly blurred; current events in Italy illustrate this. Mr Berlusconi, who owns three Italian TV stations and a daily newspaper, has not been shy of wielding his enormous media influence to counter repeated and widespread accusations of misconduct. Indeed, some allege that he has gone much further than this. Erik Gandini, a film director, who won an award for a documentary about Berlusconi, speaks of Berlusconi’s TV empire initiating “a cultural revolution” in Italy in the last 30 or 40 years which even has its own name: “Berlusconismo.” He estimates that 80% of Italians use the television as their main source of information. “We have,” he concludes, “been subjected to a culture that is actually the expression, the mirror, of his own personality. For example, he likes women a certain way, he likes women to be big-breasted and very exposed. He started this probably as a business idea, to show something that the other TV networks were not showing. But then it became really totalising and dominating in a way that has no equal in other countries… we will all become like him somehow. All these cultural elements, which are typical of his own view of the world, of his values, have become Italian…” If this analysis is correct, it describes a scenario where one man has, over time, acquired a virtual monopoly of the news and moulded the popular culture of his country through his control of the media.
It is, however, facile to cast mega-media entrepreneurs simply as schemers and manipulators. Many, such as Murdoch, have shouldered significant risk and endured years of unprofitability in order to upgrade their empires technologically and to weather downturns in the economy. It is easy to carp about the handsome profits some now stand to enjoy but the various forms of media (print, TV, radio and online) are all in a considerable state of flux and anyone investing in these areas even now is taking a considerable gamble. Someone has to own the media. Someone has to be prepared to take the risks. The question is, how far does ownership of the media entail control of what is produced and, specifically, of the news?
This question has particular pertinence right now, in the Arab world, where newspapers and television stations have traditionally fallen within the control of the state either implicitly or explicitly. Al-Jazeera, the Arabic television news network started in 1996 (with an English language version from 2006) is, of course, an exception to this. The network is based in Doha, Qatar, a small Arab neighbour of Saudi Arabia and funded mainly by Qatar’s royal family. Although it has a massive audience, Al-Jazeera has repeatedly been banned and boycotted by regimes (Egypt has just shut down its operations there). In a familiar pattern, it is consequently shunned by advertisers and is therefore still reliant on its royal patronage. Before we smirk at the implications of this, however, we should be aware that Al-Jazeera is also effectively censored in most of the United States because it is unavailable for viewing. As its director general pointed out a few days ago on the Huffington Post website, “in the United States, Al Jazeera faces a different kind of blackout, based largely on misinformed views about our content and journalism. Some of the largest American cable and satellite providers have instituted corporate obstacles against Al Jazeera English.” The net result is that, in the land where freedom of information is a basic tenet and freedom of choice a basic creed, a major foreign news network is still withheld from much of the viewing public.
The new forms of communication open to the media have been a boon and a curse. The director of Al-Jazeera’s inventory of recent tactics used by his network to garner the news makes fascinating reading: “We were also banned in Ben Ali’s Tunisia. We overcame this through the use of social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.” Undeniably, these tools are invaluable in subverting official news blackouts. And yet, where they excel at streaming information, these formats also militate against detail and complexity. Many media observers now conclude that the advent of these communication networks along with the 24 hours news networks (with their rolling coverage and relentless stream of news) have conspired to dumb down news coverage rather more effectively than any disgruntled potentate could have hoped. We live in the world of the news-flash and the soundbite, not the painstaking documentary or the lengthy interview. News, views and entertainment now exist on a continuum not as distinct entities. Witness the rising popularity of a Taiwanese animation studio, Next Media Animation, which concocts its own cartoon version of news events. The company, which now has 300 animators, came to prominence in November 2009 with a cartoon clip of the Tiger Woods marital spat.
At the The Independent relaunch, the editor-in-chief said of his publication, “We make no apologies for erring on the side of seriousness; these are serious times.” He also laid claim to “a standpoint that’s untainted by commercial or political imperatives.” Similarly, in his piece, Mr Khanfar of Al-Jazeera disdained the penchant of other (commercial) networks for ‘headline grabbing stories’ which oversimplify complex issues or simply offer a comfortable prism through which to view the world. He attributed the network’s quality of coverage of events in Tunisia and Egypt to “more pedestrian, if nuanced, perspectives” and, most importantly, editorial freedom. News production is an increasingly complex task where editors face the familiar tensions of political and commercial pressures but also grapple with the possibilities and limitations of new technologies and the growing public preference for news packaged in tasty morsels of a few paragraphs or a few minutes.
