TOM MILLS
Tom Mills is a sociologist and lecturer whose work focuses on media and communications, elite institutions and digital infrastructure. His book, The BBC: Myth of a Public Service (Verso, 2016), examined the close relationship between the BBC and the state, and has been described as “required reading for those who want to understand Britain, and an invaluable resource for those who want to change it for the better”. Mills is chair of the Media Reform Commission (MRC), which was set up in 2011 to advocate for democratic and accountable media that operate in the public interest as opposed to those of owners and shareholders. In late April, the government released its white paper on the future of broadcasting, which included plans to privatise Channel 4, a move MRC described as “spiteful and ideological”. Mills spoke to TANK about the government’s approach to the media, and the history of Channel 4.
Interview by Masoud GolsorkhiPortrait courtesy Aston University
MASOUD GOLSORKHI Hot on the heels of the Election Act and the Nationality and Borders Act comes the government’s white paper for broadcasting, yet another fundamental assault on civil life in the UK. You’ve been quite vocal about what it means. Could you unpack its broader scope?
TOM MILLS This government has been characterised by its general hostility towards the tradition of public-service broadcasting typical of Conservative governments, even if the New Labour government also saw the media in broadly the same market-based terms. There’s two elements to the government’s approach. One is connected to the culture-war agenda, seeing these institutions as inherently biased against them or representing “wokeness”, an accusation they’ve made particularly against Channel 4, which relates to the channel’s original remit to represent alternative and underrepresented voices in British society. The appointment of Nadine Dorries as Culture Secretary is symbolic of that: she has very little grasp of policy areas; she’s a government loyalist very much on board with that kind of petty-minded cultural antagonism. Related to that, the government has pursued a kind of authoritarian agenda in its willingness to use its power of appointment to media institutions and the regulator, seen in Michael Grade’s move to Ofcom, and the prominent war of words waged in coalition with the newspapers. Secondly, to support this, they also argue that any public-based provision is outdated, and the media must “modernise”, using the same technocratic, pro-market argument that has been made by governments since the 1980s. The variation that we see now is the idea that these particular types of broadcasters are obsolete in the era of video-on-demand streaming platforms. That’s the rhetoric. Now in terms of the policy itself, the most significant is the privatisation of Channel 4, a channel that, whatever the reality of the institution, represents a certain political force that is anathema to the political character of the Conservative government. Despite producing programmes with the private sector, Channel 4 has a non-market ethos the government essentially wants to get rid of. They don’t have a democratic mandate to do so and not a lot of support from the industry, so I was slightly surprised they were pushing ahead with it, but it’s hard to read the tea leaves of this government. They claim that the privatisation of Channel 4 is going to preserve the traditions of public-service broadcasting, but in reality it’s going to do nothing of the sort.
MG Channel 4 itself is a child of Thatcherism, launched in 1982, and even though it was substantially reformed in 1990, it was presented as a market-oriented experiment from its creation. What was the 1982 version of Channel 4 and what did the changes in 1990 bring about?
TM It’s true that Channel 4 was originally a creature of Thatcherism in the literal sense but, to be honest, this perspective is slightly overplayed. There was an extent to which it fitted in with the Thatcherite rhetoric of the market providing more diversity, but if you look at the original model of Channel 4 and its ongoing remit – whatever your views on how it achieves that – the rationale was not that the market would provide more diverse content. The recognition was that you had this non-market provider in the BBC and the market provider in ITV, but both that private and public broadcasters were serving broad audiences, meaning that certain audiences were underserved. British society had become much more diverse in the in the post-war period, and the 1960s into the 1970s saw widespread cultural movements – anti-racist, feminist, pro-gay rights and the workers movement – and there was much campaigning against the existing media structures as unrepresentative. Then, the Annan Committee recommended the creation of this new channel. The market ethos that shaped Channel 4 was what we would then have called “liberal pluralism”, the idea that the way to diversify content isn’t by marketising it, but by taking advertising revenue from existing commercial channels and then distributing that, through commissioning, to the private sector. A lot of what informed Channel 4’s commissioning decisions was based on an institutionalisation of some of those 1970s social movements, which is a really important thing to bear in mind. What happened in 1990 was basically the legislative culmination of Thatcherite efforts to commercialise broadcasting, which had two major elements to it: the commercialisation of the BBC and the lifting of certain regulatory restrictions on ITV. Originally, there was no immediate commercial pressure on the commissioners at Channel 4 to have eyeballs on the screen at particular times because they had a guaranteed income revenue that was coming from the private sector, so there was a firewall between the commissioning of programmes – which is what Channel 4 does instead of making its own – and the pressures to ensure a revenue stream from advertising. That firewall was effectively removed when the Broadcasting Act of 1990 required Channel 4 to sell its own advertising. After that, it moves somewhat away from that alternative ethos, which – while not explicitly left wing – was an eclectic, innovative mix, with its fair share of contrarian, culture war-y, reactionary programming. Once you commercialise production, that begins to be flattened out. The “common-sense” idea that markets bring innovation and creativity is complete nonsense.
MG You get consolidation, not diversification.
TM Exactly. That’s why if you flip through the channels a lot of the formats have a very similar feel, because they’re made by a small number of companies in a way that’s economically viable, resulting in these standardised sets and formats, and rhythms where the advertising fits. Markets make cultural production less innovative, because if you want to produce mass-cultural content, you need a broad audience. What we’ve argued at the Media Reform Coalition is that we shouldn’t be shying away from the idea that we need to adapt the public-media vision for the 21st century; the government’s not wrong about that – what they’re wrong about is almost everything they say about the solutions.
MG What’s shaping the landscape and the big platforms is transnational, the global market formalising into monopolies. What specifically could be learned from the 1980s Channel 4 model, which has the potential to let many flowers bloom?
TM What can be delivered by Channel 4 and the BBC, and to an extent other broadcasters, is content that’s uncontroversially required for democratic participation, such as news and current affairs; things that don’t tend to be particularly commercially viable. Usually how this works is that you have a system of cross-subsidisation between different departments, so the regulator says, “Look, you have to deliver X, Y or Z”, and then you take the money elsewhere from more profitable areas and subsidise them. On a purely profit basis, you wouldn’t be delivering journalism. It’s completely uncontroversial to say that those particular types of information and particular types of regulatory constraints on how journalism is conducted are very important in terms of undergirding democratic participation, but I would also say that access to cultural goods is part of what I would see as broader cultural democracy. What we want in terms of genuine democratic societies is a much broader sense of education, culture and comprehension. Do YouTube, Netflix or Disney offer any of that? No, they don’t. They offer entertainment. Some of it is good; some of it is bad. Are they required to produce the particular types of content that support democratic participation? No. Do they have a market incentive to support and represent the diverse perspectives of these particular societies? No, they don’t.
MG There’s a question among progressives, “Do I really want to defend Channel 4?” Considering the widespread loss of the public faith in broadcast journalism, isn’t there an argument to let the whole thing collapse with the idea of building from the rubble?
TM This is precisely the dilemma. The underlying problem is longstanding, that journalism is embedded within the same power networks as the people in Westminster, and is completely unrepresentative of the interests of young people. But my own view is that I think it would be very foolish for progressives to abandon either Channel 4 or the BBC, and even the regulatory restraints that are placed on broadcasters. I completely understand the impulse and the sentiment, but I just think it’s bad politics. If you completely lose an institution that, whatever its faults, embodies certain forms of democratic accountability, then you’ve made a much bigger uphill struggle for yourself. Let’s defend a public institution that has embedded within it a certain amount of political accountability because what we need is a form of public revenue that will be able to support cultural production. The people who could produce wonderful cultural content are out there, but without the resources that come with a particular type of public production model, we’re not going to be able to do that effectively. The very principle of public provision, public cultural production and cultural democracy is something that we should aspire to expand and in order to do that, we need to be defending these institutions, not in their actuality, but in their potential. We’re on the brink of ecological catastrophe, democracy is being eroded across the world, and we’re in a protracted economic crisis. What media system would we need if we were going to be addressing those kinds of political problems? What we’ve argued for at the Media Reform Coalition is to say, look, if we were going to implement the original remake of Channel 4 today, we would be taxing online advertising and redirecting that into socially beneficial content. Who gets to decide what the beneficial content should be is a much bigger conversation. How could that compete with Netflix? It couldn’t. Why should a national institution be competing with with an unaccountable corporate giant like Netflix, which is expanding internationally, but which is – by the way – now rapidly losing subscribers? ◉