The delusions of the DCMS

In March 2000, Bill Clinton famously compared early Chinese attempts to censor the internet to “trying to nail jello to the wall”. It seems remarkable to look back on that attitude now, now that jello-nailing is considered the only moral and sensible option by pious liberal Westerners. Nevertheless, it is still depressing to remember the naivety and optimism of western elites about the internet a few decades ago, when we are presented with a document like “Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media”. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s new Green Paper and public consultation is a euphemistic attempt at a mixture of sophistry and sleight of hand, whose authors either lack the wit to conceal their grotty authoritarianism, or else see no point in bothering.

Credit where it’s due, though — this document does provide us with one helpful and sorely needed item of terminology. We previously lacked a handy and universally understood shorthand for what we would call “regime media” in the kind of country whose government we refer to in those terms. The “mainstream media” or “MSM” doesn’t convey the basic grievance properly, and has anyway become irredeemably low-status. And calling it “regime media” might seem overwrought and is liable to alienate neutral listeners. But this Green Paper gives us the offering of “PSM” or public service media. 

This refers to regulated broadcast channels such as the BBC, Sky News and ITV, who put out the content that we all know and love. That is to say, reports of incidents and events with critical details left out, obfuscated or relegated to the final paragraph, should they be deemed unconducive to the public good or reflect poorly on official policy. This is, as the paper refers to it, “trustworthy” media. The basic argument of the paper is that the internet age has seen the reach and influence of PSM sharply reduced as the public has gained access to alternative sources of reporting, and that this needs to be addressed by government intervention. Needless to say, no attention is paid at all to why a market exists for alternatives to PSM, particularly for news, and the changes to the media environment in the internet age are framed solely in terms of changing technology giving unscrupulous or manipulative provocateurs access to a lumpen and unthinking public. 

The paper opens with references to classics of late 1980s and early 1990s light entertainment, such as Noel’s House Party and The Generation Game. This is designed to trigger a warm, nostalgic glow as we remember Friday or Sunday nights around the television with our parents, or with our children when they were still young. The nostalgia isn’t because any of those programmes were particularly good — far from it. But they reflect television’s role as the basis of a genuinely national popular culture. It is a role television has now lost; that national popular culture — points of common reference that cut across divides of generation and class — is a thing of the past. For what it’s worth, I think it is regrettable that we have lost that universal culture; it was one of the things that was best about the 20th century and we are poorer without it. But this paper has nothing to say about why we lost this phenomenon, and it invokes those memories in the service of an entirely different and far more sinister agenda. It is the manipulative opening that sets the cynical tone of the rest of the document. 

This paper is about the contrast between the highly regulated realm of British broadcast media, and the far more open media environment on the internet and particularly on social media. In recent years, the former has lost audience share to the latter, which is clearly having an impact on the sustainability and relevance of institutions like the BBC and Channel 4, in which the DCMS has a statutory interest. But the transparent impulse behind the paper is to assert the degree of control stipulated in the Broadcasting Code far beyond the boundaries of broadcast media. This is justified by the fact that we now consume audio visual content via non-broadcast means. The interventions it recommends are crass, obtrusive and still unlikely to be effective unless the government follows through by closing off swathes of the internet for users with British IP addresses — a move it is now clearly considering. 

The main body of the document begins with the ominous warning that a period of “stakeholder consultation” will be undertaken, which is what the British state does when it has made an unshakeable resolution to do something dreadful.  Government consultations have become something of a joke generally for the transparent ways in which they guide respondents toward pre-determined conclusions, but the questions set out at the end of this paper stretch the limits of plausible deniability.  Question 3 invites respondents to state a degree of alarm regarding the “untrustworthiness” of the news they see on social media, and introduces the undefined concept of “misinformation”, which is universally used now for things people disagree with. Question 4 is a motherhood and apple-pie question about the availability and prominence of “trustworthy” media, which the respondent is unaware that the authors have pre-defined as “PSM” content from the BBC etc.  

Nowhere are respondents invited to give their view on whether they consider the content of regulated broadcast media to be trustworthy or reliable — although the consultation tries to give the impression of doing so at Question 9. However by this point in the consultation, the subject has been subtly shifted on to “media literacy” and the role in PSM in helping people “critically engage” with information they encounter online. I put these concepts in scare quotes advisedly, as respondents will be unaware that two contentious concepts from the specious world of academic media studies have been introduced. The question invites respondents to rank regulated outfits like the BBC on how well they are currently doing this — many respondents are likely to tick the first box which superficially reads as the answer that indicates displeasure at their current performance, without realising that their answer will be read as support for the kind of editorialising that ensured that “BBC Verify” died an obscure and early death.

The intentions in this regard are then revealed in Question 11, which is the only real occasion that the authors slip up. It asks: 

How valuable, if at all, do you believe collaboration between public service media, civil society organisations (for example charities and education groups), and the media sector could be in supporting people to critically assess information?”

The authors here assume respondents will automatically pick what to them would be the positive sounding option, thus giving consent for the BBC to churn out more press releases from NGOs paid by the government to tell it things it already wants to hear. What they forget is that the word “collaboration” doesn’t have the positive connotations that it does in the civil service among the general public, who still largely associate it with betraying members of the French resistance to the Germans in return for nylons and chocolate. 

The document is laced throughout with the paranoia about words, ideas and information that characterises the British elite today

The most revealing bit of the consultation is the section titled “the Prominence of PSM Content in the Platform Age”, in which the government’s real agenda is gingerly presented. The idea, as set out in the main body of the document, is to force online platforms to downrank independent content in favour of the output of regulated broadcasters — this is presented as making it “easier to find”. The questions either deliberately avoid giving respondents the option of not doing this, or present it in as unreasonable a way as possible, as Question 22 does: “it should definitely not be easier to find public service media content on these platforms”. 

The document is laced throughout with the paranoia about words, ideas and information that characterises the British elite today. It is peppered, for example, with references to moments of “heightened public tensions” and “times of social unrest and crisis” at which the government needs to have powers to stop the spread of dangerous communication. It is often tempting when thinking about state censorship to lurch toward comparisons to communist regimes and the Eastern bloc, but the British establishment’s attitude at the moment is perhaps better likened to that of imperial Russian elite in the years before the revolution. They see the general population as restive and permanently on the verge of a murderous rampage. Appeals to principles of free speech are not going to work on a political class that no longer recognises the public as adults capable of reason, but as a threat to be contained. They hope to lull the public with comforting noises and images, as one might a semi-lucid and potentially violent drunkard.

Britain’s grubby secret that lends authority to authoritarianism when it comes to free speech is that we lived for a long time in an information space dominated by broadcast media which was governed by a code of practice completely divorced from our own professed ideals of liberty and free exchange. We tolerated this partly because we had a raucous and competitive print media that we could rely upon to keep the ruling class partially honest, and also because there was something comforting in Reithian doctrine that appealed to the better side of our nature. But our embrace of this was dependent on public trust in a patrician class that seemed worthy of the responsibility of giving audiences what they ought to have rather than what they wanted. It may be argued that in some ways, the BBC continued to maintain that mirage long after that patrician class had vanished or been expelled. But in any case it is long since gone, and what we are left with is this callow and overpromoted cadre of censors, utterly incapable of impartiality and insisting on being shown the same deference that we extended — mistakenly, in hindsight — to their predecessors. 

Beyond this Green Paper, Labour is clearly on manoeuvres for major interventions in the way the British public access the internet, which will put the country at odds with that of the free world. The DCMS’s Secretary of State Lisa Nandy has announced that she personally and her department will no longer be using “X”, formerly known as Twitter, describing it in excoriating terms. The incoming prime minister has indicated that he will look to ban VPNs which (among other things) allow internet users to access websites blocked in their home countries. Taken together, we can assume the government is considering banning X for British users. It is no exaggeration to say that X is the principal nexus for political opposition in Britain today, and is by far the most important means for publicising stories that are embarrassing or inconvenient for the government. 

This Green Paper is a desperate and embarrassing attempt by the government to keep a population they distrust in the dark

Almost all of these damaging stories that have been exposed on social media have been to do with the consequences of immigration, and the British state’s approach to race relations. So too are the “heightened tensions” and “times of social unrest” referred to in the Green Paper. The government have, like their Conservative predecessors, paid lip service to public concerns about these issues but, as revealed in legislation like that of the Home Secretary last week, they are committed to persisting with the policies that have most antagonised the population. Whereas the Chinese implemented their Great Firewall in order to preserve one party rule in the internet age, Britain’s elites are considering it in order to persevere with mass immigration, which they have revealed to be the one and only thing that matters to them. 

A ban on X will not stop the regular drumbeat of stories like that of Henry Nowak and the attempted beheading in Belfast, but it will mean that Britain joins the ranks of countries about which the most important reporting goes on abroad. As in an autocracy, Britain’s “Public Service Media” is far more firmly devoted to maintaining internal harmony than it is to the truth, which is why much of the public have tuned out and look elsewhere for their news. This Green Paper is a desperate and embarrassing attempt by the government to keep a population they distrust in the dark. It will not hold and it will be looked back on in ignominy.