Channel 4 chief executive Alex Mahon has said the UK media industry must avoid becoming an “American news swamp” where young people get their news from unregulated platforms such as social media.
The 51-year-old said that if a “British solution” to Gen Z getting news from unverified platforms was not found, then “an international market force will impose on us some other reality that we can regret at our leisure”.
Speaking at a Royal Television Society event called Gen Z: trends, truth and trust, Mahon said: “The simplest case would be the United States Of America, where many people get their information from non-verified platforms, or from those with a vested economic interest in the algorithms that are set to produce popularity rather than promote factuality.
“Here in the UK, I believe we can still resist sliding into an American news swamp.
“So what are we doing? The first thing is that we have to adapt what we ourselves as news providers do.
“First, we have to rapidly change how we make things, where we publish them and how we promote them.
“Public service media needs to accelerate delivery of our news to the platforms where people consume it.
“Young people want their news to be rapid, easy, entertaining and digestible.
“They want it to be timely, well-made, engaging and accessible, and it needs to be in an appealing voice.
“We need to move from text to video, from long to summary, from our networks to theirs, and to always be entertaining and accessible, all while working to retain impartiality.”
Her comments came after she told the event that “a third of the UK public say they believe conspiracy theories about Covid-19, mainstream media and government efforts to control people”.
She added that the percentage of young people in the UK who get their news from print or television news was “effectively zero”.
The Channel 4 boss said that social media companies, where a large percentage of young people get their news, did not “need to take responsibility for what they publish, nor prioritise facts over opinion” as the US had made it so they were “not regulated to be concerned about such issues”.
Looking at the British news landscape, Mahon added: “We live here in the UK with what I see as a rather ludicrous juxtaposition.
“On the one hand, we have a brilliant array of public service media adapting content to make it work differently in different places.
“On the other hand, we remain filled with concern, about young people’s relationship with facts, and fearfulness about the impact of that.
“In the UK, media exists under a patchwork quilt of regulation, which is looking increasingly frayed and anachronistic, and it gives both regulators and broadcasters problems they used not to have.
“We bind broadcasters with things like the delivery of lunchtime news bulletins, requirements from a different century, in return for increasingly low value spectrum, yet we give no policy incentive for the modern delivery of news or of current affairs.”
At the event, Mahon called for new regulation and joint industry action to ensure young people can find verified, independent news easily on social media.
