Media Regulation

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 11:28 am on 28 February 2012.

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Photo of Peter Bottomley Peter Bottomley Conservative, Worthing West 11:28, 28 February 2012

People in Westminster Hall have listened with interest to Chris Bryant. I come with a slightly different perspective. I should declare that I have taken successful defamation actions against a number of newspapers, but they are not relevant to what I will say. I put on the record that the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe has a media self-regulation guide that I commend to all. It takes a perspective beyond this country.

Media regulation can be seen as what the media themselves should be doing, or as what people do to the media. On the whole, I am more interested in what the media choose to do themselves. I regret that the ways of holding print journalism to account basically disappeared when the Hard News programme with Ray Snoddy was dropped. We ought to be able to justify a weekly serious news television programme looking at what the media do. I recognise that the media pages of the broadsheet newspapers include serious coverage by people who have had a great deal of experience in the media, but the ability to use the power of broadcasting to hold people to account and to make available to all what is known to a few would be useful.

I do not stand here as a supporter of News Corp, or News International, or the papers to which the hon. Member for Rhondda referred, but I am not antagonistic to them in general. However, I recollect that when John Biffen was Secretary of State for Trade he did not refer to the Monopolies Commission the takeover of The Sunday Times and The Times, when The Sunday Times was profitable but The Times certainly was not. Two Government Back Benchers voted against the Government. One was Jonathan Aitken, and I was the other. I am not suggesting that the takeover would not have been cleared, but it should have been referred. Before that debate and vote, I asked Harold Evans whether he would let me have some information. He said he would, but he did not. When he later fell out with his proprietor, he asked me to join his campaign to expose the wrong that had been done, and I said, “You’re a bit late, mate.”

A programme this morning—I forget whether it was on BBC 1 or Sky News—had an excerpt on elements of the independent media in Russia, where some proprietors of independent television and radio channels are having great pressure put on them by powerful people. We should know more about what is going on around the world when people suffer such pressure, and there should be a way of providing international interest and pressure so that the sort of media dominance that former President Berlusconi developed in Italy can be challenged. If what is happening in the media in one country cannot be challenged, persistent and reasonably consistent international pressure and interest is necessary.

The only profitable paper that Rupert Murdoch and his media took over in Britain was The Sunday Times. The Times was not profitable, and what became The Sun was not profitable. He started his satellite television service from scratch, and it is arguable that by choosing analogue he stopped us having a world lead. Robert Maxwell’s competitor satellite service, which was digital, could have taken us further ahead, but one was commercially successful and one was not. That is the way the market goes.

I realise that the hon. Member for Rhondda and our current media have a great interest in what the News of the World and perhaps some of its fellow papers did, but we should not believe that they are the only ones to have caused casualties in some of their ways of operation. Mostly, they gather news and entertainment, putting it all together, and sell it commercially. There are times when it is possible to apply pressure. I remember being asked to go on Radio 4’s “Today” programme when The Sun had published a photograph of one of the Queen’s children, taken 16 years ago when he and various friends in Canada were jumping into a lake without clothes on. Crowns were drawn across their middles in the photograph. The deputy editor of The Sun was asked about that before I was interviewed, and he explained why he thought that was legitimate. I was then asked what I thought, and I said that if anyone was looking for naked bodies in the papers, there were more in The Guardian, but in the arts pages rather than the so-called news pages. I said that anyone who is frightfully worried about naked bodies should never have a bath, because all of us have one. I also said that if anyone thought that The Sun had made a mistake in publishing the photograph, there was no point telling it because it had explained why it thought it was all right. I suggested going to a branch of one of the 10 named advertisers who had full-page advertisements in The Sun and saying, “I’m not going to boycott you; I’m not even going to boycott The Sun, but if you talk to The Sun could you please say that I think it made a mistake.” Within 36 hours, The Sun had apologised. There was similar pressure when The Sun published the Queen’s Christmas message in advance, and it apologised for that.