Media in Wales Serving Public Values

Media in Wales Serving Public Values Geraint Talfan Davies & Nick Morris May 2008 ISBN 978 1 904773 34 4 The Institute of Welsh Affairs is an independent think-tank that promotes quality research and informed debate aimed at making Wales a better nation in which to work and live. We commission research, publish reports and policy papers, and organise events across Wales. We are a membership-based body and a wide range of individuals, businesses and other organisations directly support our activities. Our work embraces a range of topics but especially focuses on politics and the development of the National Assembly for Wales, economic development, education and culture, the environment and health. This research was produced with the support of a Welsh Assembly Government grant. Institute of Welsh Affairs 1 – 3 Museum Place Cardiff CF10 3BD T 029 2066 6606 www.iwa.org.uk Media in Wales – Serving Public Values CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1 CHAPTER 2 Broadcasting – Mixed Signals 5 CHAPTER 3 Broadcasting – Television 10 CHAPTER 4 Broadcasting – Radio 24 CHAPTER 5 Wales in Print 33 CHAPTER 6 Wales Online 47 CHAPTER 7 Journalism in Wales 51 CHAPTER 8 What the Audience Thinks 54 CHAPTER 9 Reflections 57 iii Media in Wales – Serving Public Values 1. Introduction extensive poverty both urban and rural, the prevalence of the small scale in broadcast and print media markets, external media ownership, and a In the past decade technological developments new democratic institution – more than justify a have wrought more change in our media closer look at how Wales is served by the media. landscape than ever before. The familiar peaks of BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and S4C no longer stand This report seeks to put Ofcom’s review of public out against a flat and featureless plain but are service broadcasting into the context of the totality increasingly hidden by a multitude of digital of means by which the public in Wales is informed. channels in television and, to a lesser extent, in Print media cannot be left out of account. radio. The internet has also reshaped the way in which we seek out information and The Ofcom Review entertainment. This has had an effect on every part of the media landscape, print, broadcast The Communications Act requires Ofcom to carry and electronic, without exception. out a review of public service broadcasting at least every five years. Its first review was carried out A broadcasting system largely shaped and driven between 2003 and 2005, and brought forward the according to public service values has begun to following definition of PSB: feel the force of markets as never before. Market • To inform ourselves and others and to increase pressure and technological developments have our understanding of the world through, news, forced change, too, in newspapers. Arguably, public information and analysis of current events and service values are more vulnerable than ever ideas. before. 2008 will be a watershed year, the • To stimulate our interest in and knowledge of beginning of the total switch from analogue to arts, science, history and other topics through digital television signals. content that is accessible and can encourage informal learning. This is the backdrop to Ofcom’s second review of • To reflect and strengthen our cultural identity public service broadcasting (PSB), being carried out through original programming at UK, national, as part of its obligations under the and regional level, on occasion bringing audiences Communications Act 2003. The speed of together for shared experiences. technological change and, in particular, the • To make us aware of different cultures and imminence of digital switchover will mean this alternative viewpoints, through programmes that review could be much more influential than the reflect the lives of other people and other first in reshaping public service provision for the communities, both within the UK and elsewhere. decades ahead. This is why the widest possible public debate in Wales is essential. It argued that public service broadcasting should be: • High quality – well funded and well produced. In the past, Welsh responses to Ofcom • Original – new UK content, rather than repeats or consultations have been restricted in the main to acquisitions. the broadcasters and to a formal response from the • Innovative – breaking new ideas or re-inventing Assembly Government. There has been little public exciting approaches, rather than copying old debate beyond the confines of the media industry ones. itself. That must not happen this time. • Challenging – making people think. This is particularly necessary since media policy This second review, which need not have taken has in the past rarely been shaped specifically to place until 2010, has been brought forward because Wales’s needs. With so much at stake in this Ofcom judged that ‘in some areas change has review, Wales must take the utmost care that it occurred even more rapidly than anticipated’, that does not end up as the final square on the Rubik’s pressure on services such as Channel 4 and on ITV’s cube that does not fit. regional services were growing, and that any change might need time-consuming legislation. The distinctive circumstances of Wales – two living languages, sparse population in places, difficult The terms of reference for the current review are as topography, pockets of multiple deprivation, follows: 1 Media in Wales – Serving Public Values • To evaluate how effectively the public service When ITV was first established in 1955 it was broadcasters are delivering the purposes and to be regulated by a public corporation. characteristics of PSB, particularly in the light of Balance and impartiality and an array of public changes in the way TV content is distributed and service commitments, including children’s consumed. programmes and religious programmes, were • To assess the case for continued intervention in imposed from the outset. It was to be an the delivery of TV content to secure public advertising funded public service, that – for service purposes. technical reasons and to avoid a monopoly • To consider whether and how the growth of new over programme supply – took on a ways of delivering content to consumers and regionalised form with a provision that each citizens might create new opportunities for station should include in its output ‘a suitable achieving the goals of public service broadcasting, proportion of matter calculated to appeal as well as posing new challenges. specially to the tastes and outlooks of persons • To assess future options for funding, delivering served by the station’. When Margaret and regulating PSB, in light of these challenges Thatcher’s government introduced the and opportunities, and uncertainty about the auctioning of ITV franchises in 1990, sustainability of existing funding models. Parliament insisted on adding to the financial bidding a ‘quality threshold’ that each bidder Ofcom’s Phase 1 consultation document seeks to had to cross. answer four questions: • What has intervention or regulation been aiming Faced with an increasing challenge to its funding, to achieve? the BBC has since the early 1990s responded with a • Have those goals been achieved? succession of documents – Extending Choice, The • What is likely to happen if there are no changes BBC Beyond 2000, Building Public Value – setting to the regulatory framework? out ever more fully dimensions of public value that • What does PSB need to deliver in the digital age? have included fostering an active and informed citizenship, developing British culture and creativity, A Phase 2 document, expected in the autumn of extending educational potential and community 2008, will present options designed to deliver public cohesion through online services and promoting the services effectively in changing circumstances. UK’s voice in the world. Wales, too, needs to ask how its own needs and aspirations will be served in the digital age. From 1955 to 1990, the 15 ITV companies that comprised the ITV federation responded to the Public value in broadcasting regular franchise renewal rounds, often with promises of increased regional programming, and At the core of the dilemmas facing Ofcom and community service initiatives such as the ITV society is the need to ensure that our media systems Telethon. For a period those same companies deliver and support important public values that are funded Channel 4 as it set a new course. relevant to our existence as citizens, values that might not survive in a system wholly given to Ofcom’s remit satisfying the desires of consumers. The nature of this ‘public value’ has been stated in many different ways. The same concern for public values was evident in the charge that Government laid down respectively ‘Inform, educate and entertain’ – in that order – for Ofcom in the 2003 Communications Act and for were inscribed in the tablets of stone that John the BBC in its new charter. Reith had carved for the BBC in the 1920s. The corporation created in 1927 was to be ‘a public Section 3 of the Communications Act states that ‘It service operating upon a democratic policy’, and shall be the principal duty of Ofcom, in carrying out Reith infused it with a sense of moral obligation their functions – towards the public, an obligation made a) to further the interests of citizens in necessary by ‘the brute force of its monopoly’. communications matters; and The same values that were embedded in the b) to further the interests of consumers in relevant radio medium were transposed to the BBC’s markets, where appropriate by promoting television service. competition.’ 2 Media in Wales – Serving Public Values The BBC’s remit Channel 4 has set out how it sees its public purposes in a document entitled, Next on 4, The Government, in its licence agreement with the published in March 2008. The document BBC, states the BBC’s public purposes as: emphasised that legislation defines Channel 4’s role • Sustaining citizenship and civil society purely in terms of the core channel, which it • Promoting education and learning regarded as anachronistic in a multi-channel world.

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