“Say what you want about a conspiracy theory, but at least it’s affordable,” comedian Roy Wood Jr quipped at the White House correspondents’ dinner on Saturday night. It is the night when politicians in Washington and the press that seeks to hold them to account gather in controversial cosiness. “People can’t afford rent, people can’t afford food … they damn sure can’t afford to pay for the truth,” said Wood, as part of his routine. How the US will fix this and restore some kind of democratic accountability is a question that preoccupies centrists here. The stability of well-funded journalism is central to that equation.
Contemplating the economics of journalism, what it means to have a free press and the issues of political control and access was on the menu in Washington, but it also had resonance across the Atlantic.
Last week, Richard Sharp, the man who should never have been appointed the chair of the BBC in the first place, was forced to resign as a result of his closeness to Boris Johnson. Before being appointed to the position, Sharp helped the then prime minister gain access to lenders who would loan him £800,000. A report from the commissioner for public appointments concluded that Sharp “failed to disclose potential perceived conflicts of interest”. Even when the market does not force a crisis, as elsewhere, the current government has had no difficulty pushing the BBC into one.
Journalists know that nothing is free, even lunch. And whether the financing comes from a Substack subscription, an endowment, a paywall, advertising or the public purse, someone has to pay for the work. But the results of journalism have to be free, and made freely available. The turbulence in the US media market over the past two weeks has been disorienting: newsrooms that rose on a digital tide, such as FiveThirtyEight, BuzzFeed and Vice, are suddenly gone or heavily reduced.
Twitter has become an unusable, disorganised mess under its new owner, Elon Musk, demonstrating that even rickety community infrastructure that takes years to build can take just days to ruin. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News defenestrated its highest-rated star, Tucker Carlson, in the wake of a highly damaging lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.
These events are seemingly unconnected. But they have the same root. Truthfulness and integrity in journalism are hard to sustain in any market. In a market where advertising has migrated elsewhere and news is difficult and often dangerous to produce, it is impossible without external help. Fox News was successful over the past decade because it gave its audience what it wanted. Media markets are not fixed in favour of consensus and sense; they are easier to profit from if decoupled from both.
Europe and Britain have sometimes felt distant from the US crisis in confidence around media and democracy, but they are far from immune. In Britain, the fluctuating fortunes of media are underwritten partially by having one of the highest per capita contributions to public service broadcasting. There is longstanding Conservative animosity towards funding the BBC, stretching back to Margaret Thatcher. Her hostile attitude towards the legitimacy of the BBC came both from an ideological opposition to the public sector and a close personal relationship with Murdoch. Governments of all hues have been achingly attentive to Silicon Valley companies, while failing to adequately strategise a future for their own potentially valuable global players.
The chair of the BBC is ultimately a prime ministerial appointment. Keir Starmer was eager to say on Sunday that under a Labour government it would not be a political appointment, and the shadow culture secretary, Lucy Powell, has already convened a panel to examine the independence of the BBC and ways to strengthen the organisation. But Labour does not have a particularly gilded past with the BBC either. The Tony Blair government became embroiled in a fight with the director general and the chair that ended with both losing their jobs, for one piece of coverage of the Iraq war. If Powell’s panel is going to succeed, it will need to look way beyond the political ties of the BBC’s governors and chair. The recently published draft media bill will introduce more regulation for non-UK streaming services, and loosen some requirements on public service broadcasters, but it is a timid document.
While the BBC governance debate has been tightly and rightly focused on political independence, the next chair will need, above all else, a high degree of industry competence. The lack of editorial background at the top of the BBC (the director general, Tim Davie, has a marketing background) has been exposed most recently by its handling of Gary Lineker’s tweets about government policy on asylum. Richard Sharp was an extremely successful financier, but he had no expertise in editorial process or media policy.
The most damaging aspect of limiting appointments to friends of any serving government is that it fatally narrows the talent pool for strong governance in a highly complex and rapidly evolving area.
The issues for the UK are the same as those laid out before the black ties and ballgowns in Washington. We are in the early stages of a communications revolution that has helped upend a sense of shared democratic values and disrupted existing media institutions without adequately replacing them – or even marginally improving them. Democracy and a free press cannot be defended by warm words, nor can a sense of cultural shared values. It takes policy, investment and competence. Thus far our most valuable institution has been starved of all three.
Emily Bell is director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and a Guardian columnist
