Media Regulation

The news that Vince Cable has ordered media regulator Ofcom to examine News Corporation's £12bn bid to take control of BSkyB has returned my thoughts onto a subject I thought quite a lot about over my travels – How media influences what we think.

An amusing example I came across on my travels to demonstrate this is something that most Koreans believe and that is if you go to sleep with the windows and door closed to your room and you leave an electric fan on you run the risk of dying due to ‘fan death’.  Although no real, and by real I mean peer reviewed, scientific evidence exists to back up the fans causing the deaths but the Korean media continually report that people have died from the phenomenon. It is because the media continually report these ‘fan deaths’ that people now generally believe the myth. An English teacher I met on the flight home once asked his university class about it and found that almost everyone believed it is true and that they were astonished that he didn’t believe it.

It is not just in Korea where the media can influence the beliefs of the population. Everywhere in the world it happens, in China only government agencies can own media for the precise reason of controlling what information is fed to the public. Having an individual, company or government which controls a large proportion of the media means that they are able to push their own views and agenda on the people of that country.

Sending News Corporation, which already owns four national newspapers, to Ofcom as they try to take full control of BSkyB is not enough. Legislation should be introduced which limits individuals and companies to only be able to control one national newspaper and perhaps one television channel.  This will also have a positive effect on democracy and might limit the effect campaigns such as The Sun’s 1992 general election campaign against the Labour party which The Sun itself highlighted their influence by running the headline ‘It’s the Sun Wot Won it’ after Neil Kinnock’s Labour party loss.

The regulation should not just limit control of the newspapers but regulate the content. There should be a difference between News and Gossip and they should be clearly labelled as such;

News should have facts which are backed up with evidence – scientific facts used should have been scientifically peer reviewed; quotes and citations should be referenced so that they can be checked and scrutinised; quotes from interviews should have the entire script published so that quotes cannot be taken out of context. With the use of the internet this could be easily implemented, it may mean that journalists have a harder job but they should be held accountable for their reporting.

Gossip can be reported without references and scientific facts so that Celebrity gossip can still occur, bloggers and columnists can still thrive and news can be reported before the whole truth has materialised.

If this is implemented then perhaps newspapers such as The Sun will no longer be called newspapers but Gossippapers or better still Gossipers. This way people will know whether they are reading articles that are based on truth or on half-truths and possibly lies. If newspaper are found to be reporting news with non-peer reviewed scientific information or not referencing information sources that is to say not following the regulations then they should be fined for doing so and should be made to report that they failed to do so. This way people will know whether what they are reading can be trusted. It is not in the peoples interest to be influenced by media and neither is it in the governments interest either.