On British and U.S. electorates, and their media

The New York Times' Adam Nagourney returns to what is a familiar theme for people interested in US-UK relations: the growing political, cultural, and ideological divide between these two countries. The news peg is of course the upcoming British general election, slated for May, 2005. This promises to be one of the most boring, lacklustre elections in modern UK political history - but only because Prime Minister Tony Blair has managed to dominate the UK with his center-left approach even more comprehensively than Bush has done with his hard-right approach in the U.S. In particular, this has hobbled Britain's main traditional party of the right, the Conservatives. As Nagourney puts it:

In many ways, the Conservative Party in its post-Thatcher era is like the Democratic Party in the post-Clinton era. Each is struggling to find a new defining theme in the face of an ideologically changing electorate and declining support.

In some key regards the contrasts between the UK and the U.S. are quite stunning, indicating "what analysts describe as a growing divergence between the conservative movements here [in the UK] and in the United States, a decade and a half after the end of the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan." Hot-button social issues like abortion and gay marriage have no traction in the UK. Meanwhile, the post-Thatcher electorate is much more lukewarm on tax cuts and much more supportive of strong government action to cure society's ills. This prevailing social-cultural sentiment is something that Blair has capitalized on with great skill - much as Bush and the Republicans have capitalized on the prevailing mood in America to push their radical conservative agenda.

The implications for media editorial policy are equally fascinating. The media in Britain - not only the BBC, but also most of the press, including the conservative tabloids - have, with the exception of immigration policy, effectively indexed themselves to the dominant center-left political-economic climate manufactured by Blair and finance minister Gordon Brown. Even Murdoch's Sun newspaper has endorsed Blair "in what was widely seen here as an example of Mr. Murdoch's placing pragmatism (he has a history of going with a winner) over ideology." (The difference between the political orientations of News Corporation's media operations in the U.S. and Britain is a study in itself - and something I'll definitely return to.) And conservative Americans are staying out of the proceedings, not wishing to offend Blair (whose foreign policy has so closely aligned itself with that of Bush). Thus Nagourney notes:

While it is hard to walk through Labor Party headquarters without spotting some familiar Democratic Party face who has flown over to help out - Bill Clinton appeared by satellite hookup to speak in support of Mr. Blair at a rally on Sunday - there are few if any American Republicans helping out the Conservatives. Mr. Bush, grateful for Mr. Blair's unwavering support on Iraq, has kept out of the contest.

When it comes to each country's national media and their relationship to their respective populations, the differences between America and Britain might be even more pronounced than the political positions of Bush and Blair, respectively, might suggest. Certainly this seems to be the case in relation to the Iraq War. While it is clear the the agenda-setting U.S. media effectively neutered criticism of Bush's policies, the UK media generally took a much more critical stance on the Blair-Bush policy (as we've talked about in the past). And when Blair attempted to use the Hutton inquiry to punish the BBC over the Kelly/Gilligan affair, it was public opinion that persuaded Blair to back off. This reflects not only the dominant political climate in both countries, but also the greater trust the British public seem to have for the socially and culturally liberal BBC (compared to the increasing disdain Americans have for all their domestic media.)

Of course the key thing for this blog is to understand the relative impacts of each country's media on the other. This is something I'm working on, but I think it's fair at this point to take a position that, in news terms, direct U.S. political influence on British news media is not as strong as you might think. Again, the best place to look for evidence of this is with News Corporation's activities on both sides of the Atlantic. Jane Kirtley, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review back in December 2001, favorably compared UK news media - including Murdoch-owned Sky News - with the U.S. networks’ submission to a Bush administration “suggestion” that they don’t run tapes by Bin Laden, or broadcast his voice. Incredibly, it seems (to someone based in the U.S.) Sky News (as well as ITN) sided with the BBC’s position. Notes Kirtley:

Ironically, on October 15 [2001] when British Prime Minister Tony Blair's director of communications tried to persuade the BBC and the other two British TV companies, ITN and Sky, to similarly censor themselves, they politely turned him down, reserving the right to make their own editorial judgments. And they don't even have a First Amendment to protect them.

Of course the other side of the question is discerning UK media's impact on the U.S. - or at least those parts of the U.S. and those populations in the U.S. not defined by Bush's agenda. Some good stuff to be getting on with here.

BBC in the podcasting vanguard(?)

Since I'm getting right into podcasting these days (it gives me something new to listen to in my car during my daily 35-minute commute to and from school) I'm thrilled to see the BBC jumping on the podcast bandwagon early. The Beeb has announced that it is making 20 radio shows available for its listeners to download as podcasts into digital media players. The ones on the list that U.S. audiences are likely to be particularly interested in include:

• Today (Radio 4, daily) - 8.10am interview
  
• In Business (Radio 4, weekly)
  
• From Our Own Correspondent (Radio 4, weekly/twice weekly)
  
• Mark Kermode film review slot (Radio Five Live, weekly)
  
• Go Digital (World Service, weekly)
  
• Documentary archive (World Service, twice weekly)

In announcing the move on its web site, the BBC quotes Simon Nelson, controller of BBC Radio and Music Interactive, who claims: "The BBC was the first British broadcaster to podcast when we made In Our Time available last year". The same article notes that Virgin Radio - also quite popular among Americans listening on the web - "has also started to make talk-based highlights of its breakfast show available as podcasts" (although they avoid podcasting music, as the right issues haven't been sorted out yet).

All well and good. Unfortunately the podcasts don't seem to be up yet - or at least I haven't found them when I checked on the Today and In Business program websites (on Radio 4). But I did notice that BBC/NPR's co-production "The World" definitely is available on podcast here. So that'll be something else to listen to in the car.

WPP leads the way for UK ad agencies

MediaGuardian reports on the latest success of the British-based advertising conglomerate, WPP, which saw its sales rise 16 percent in the first quarter of 2005. For WPP, run by Sir Martin Sorrell, it was a reward for its decision to buy U.S. rival Grey Global - as well as "big account wins from Samsung and Unilever." WPP, which also owns the J. Walter Thompson and Young & Rubicam advertising agencies, is (with the purchase of Grey Global) now apparently the world's second largest advertising services operation - just behind its number one U.S. rival Omnicon. WPP got a huge boost in profits last year with the Olympics, Euro 2004, and the U.S. presidential elections - profits that surely helped it in its latest U.S. acquisition.

It's sometimes forgotten just how important the advertising industry is to Britain and its influence around the world (and in the U.S.). The UK was for a long time the world's second largest market in terms of media advertising revenue, after the United States. Television advertising got an early boost in the UK in 1955, when the Independent Television (ITV) network began operations - the first national commercial television operation outside the U.S. Over the years British ad agencies became true global players, taking on and often beating their U.S. counterparts - even in the U.S. Even as famous UK agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi got gobbled up by competitors, WPP emerged as Britain's main "flag carrier" in global advertising.

Jim McGuigan, Georgina Born, and the BBC

Yes, I know, it's another post on Auntie Beeb - and there's lots of other UK media and their impact in the U.S. we need to keep in mind - but this is worth reading. I found a piece, by Loughborough University's Jim McGuigan, in the latest issue of Flow. McGuigan's commentary is on the future of the BBC in an age of neo-liberalism, though in effect it turns into a book review of Georgina Born's Uncertain Vision - Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (2004). Born's book, which I haven't yet read, is an ethnographic study of the BBC, in the tradition of Tom Burns's The BBC: Public Institution and Private World (1977) and Philip Schlesinger's excellent Putting 'Reality' Together (1978). Born combines ethnographic study, critical analysis and policy prescriptions as she "draws upon Seyla Benhabib's notion of a 'politics of complex cultural dialogue'" to call on the BBC and public service broadcasting to "'cultivate commonality, reciprocity and tolerance'".
McGuigan concludes his piece with the following:

Born identifies 'five structural forms of mediated exchange' that may be facilitated by broadcasting organizations retaining a genuinely public service purpose in spite of the forces that threaten to destroy it in our current age of neo-liberal dominance. These are when:-


1. 'the majority hosts divergent and contested minority perspectives';
2. 'minority speaks to majority and other minorities [-] inter-cultural communication';
3. 'via radio, video, cable and satellite television or the net, minority speaks to minority (or to itself) [-] intra-cultural communication';
4. 'territorially-based local and regional community networks' are facilitated by 'interactive project[s]' and 'experiments in online local democracy';
5. 'issue-based, non-territorial communities of interest are linked by point-to-point networks'. (2004, 516)


Born's list registers the BBC's pioneering role in the development of online services to supplement conventional broadcast material.

In conclusion, it is important to stress the need for public services delivered online without charge, exemplified by the BBC's efforts in this respect, as well as through broadcast-scheduled television and radio. Otherwise, the communications field is abandoned entirely to commercial, market-based services that represent the overwhelming privatization and commodification of information, knowledge and culture, which has been taking place and seems, to pessimistic observers, unstoppable.

I wonder if BBC Director-General Mark Thompson, currently engaged on decimating his workforce (actually, double-decimating, since he wants to get rid of 20% of his employees), is paying attention?

BBC's success under fire from all (commercial) sides?

I love the fact that the BBC is able to put so much of its material on the web. I absolutely love it. But I fear that with every time I get some wonderful new piece of information - in text, audio, or video - from the BBC's enormous free web archive, I (and millions like me) piss off numerous commercial operators who would like to charge fees for similar services, but who are unable to do so because of the BBC's dominant presence. I worry that the government, pushed on by the increasingly powerful commercial lobby, will continue to try to undermine the BBC's funding and its editorial independence. And, most of all, I worry about the anti-BBC fight being taken from the shores of Britain to the boardrooms of the global media corporations and the halls of Republican-controlled Congress.

Some background. Of course, the BBC has been under British government assault for years. Margaret Thatcher and her "rottweiler press secretary" Bernard Ingham hated the BBC in the '80s, especially in light of its relatively balanced news coverage of the Falklands/Malvinas conflict and the IRA campaign (Click here to see how Peter Snow covered the Falklands for BBC Newsnight in 1982; and Gavin Esler's piece on the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA)). Thatcher's ideological opposition to public service broadcasting also led her to push hard for commercialization of the corporation in the 1980s - though the 1986 Peacock Report rejected that strategy and helped preserve the license fee funding model. (See this piece by Jean Seaton in British Journalism Review for some more context).

The BBC survived - somehow - the era of director-general John Birt and succeeded in having its charter renewed again in 1996. However, the Blair government itself became a source of opposition to the BBC, especially with the Iraq War. Blair attempted to use the Hutton Inquiry (into the suspicious death of a UK weapons inspector, Dr. David Kelly) as a stick with which to beat the BBC into quiesence. Again, Lady Luck was on the Beeb's side, and an outporing of public support for the corporation over the duplicitous government persuaded the Blair administration to back off (especially after the resignation of communications director Alastair Campbell).

Another source of attack has been the growing power of the commercial media in Britain. the private press has always been lukewarm about the BBC. But the proliferation of new over-the-air, cable, and satellite channels brings with it new battalions of media lobbyists committed to the U.S. commercial model and fundamentally opposed to the notion of public-financed broadcasting. In particular, the BBC's massive presence on the Web has drawn fire from commercial operations complaining about their inability to compete against this free treasure trove of news and information (and this has led to occasional calls for the elimination of the BBC's web presence. More broadly, commercial pressure groups have attacked the BBC and its license fee financing system. (To get a flavor of the debate see the following selection of articles from The Guardian and The Observer, tracking pro and con arguments: pro-license fee; BBC's excessive commercialism; BBC web operations; Channel 4 attack; anti-BBC.) The BBC is, as DoctorMedia points out, certainly winning awards, and it's even getting more "cool" again. It still has strong public support - that's what has saved its bacon a number of times during disputes with the government - but the corporation is steadily amassing enemies all over the place. As a British Journalism Review editorial reminded us at the height of the Andrew Gilligan/David Kelly affair: "Among journalists who work for rival news media, the BBC has never had a great number of friends." And, to paraphrase Elrond's reminder to Gandalf in "The Fellowship of the Ring": The BBC's list of allies grows thin.

But the BBC battles on regardless. British governments setting out to hobble the BBC for one reason or another have usually pulled back from the brink. (Incidentally, for a quickie guide to BBC-government controversies down the years, check out this Answers.com page, titled "BBC Controversy".) And the BBC's commercial opposition has failed - so far - to land a telling blow. The BBC is to get its funding renewed for another 10 years, taking the current system potentially to 2016. And the BBC continues to argue for its unique position in British society - and indeed, as DoctorMedia's post makes clear, it seeks to expand that role, most prominently in cyberspace (see the Beeb's own arguments in its Future of the BBC report.)

But here's what really worries me. The question arises as to how the BBC would fare if it came under sustained assault from the much more conservative global and especially U.S. political-business establishment. As the BBC expands its reach - geographically, around the globe, and rhetorically, through providing a broader range of opinion both from within its walls and from greater interactivity with its audiences - it is open to the threat of retaliation not only from domestic commercial media in the UK but also, increasingly, from global (mostly U.S.-owned) transnational media corporations. This is a potentially fatal development for the hard-earned integrity and political/economic independence of the BBC. It is not unreasonable to speculate that if the BBC continues to extend its reach into the U.S. market, becoming dependent on U.S. revenue and coming to be perceived as “domestic” U.S medium, this could have a deleterious impact not only on its “alternative status” in the States, but also on its independence from American political forces. In others words, if the BBC moves from being considered an alternative news outlet to being a mainstream outlet it risks being drawn into the same political-economic pressures that have so successfully constrained U.S. news media in recent years.

That would be very bad.

Rocky road ahead for First World news?

An iceberg dead ahead, or a rocky road? I don't know. But DoctorMedia's piece on Reuters news agency offshoring its jobs to outposts of the former British empire (here's another piece on the subject, from globaljournalist.org) is fascinating - and ironic given the company concerned. Reuters came of age during the late 19th century era of transoceanic telegraphic cabling of the globe. Its early economic success was largely dependent on its close association with the British government and the Colonial Office, and the company was obliged to operate effectively as the mouthpiece of the all-powerful British empire. At one point the company was so powerful that it effectively held the United States in a neocolonial news relationship when it came to U.S. access to international news. Reuters has of course long since divested itself of its overtly colonial role, as it has endeavored to become a truly global player in transnational financial and business as well as political news. However, at least until recently, its operations still largely followed the neocolonial core-periphery news model. Now it seems, perhaps, that global capitalism is catching up with the old colonial news centers, and some postcolonial chickens are coming home to roost.

Finally, I'm tempted to speculate whether many or any of those threatened U.S. Reuters journalists gave a thought or care to offshoring back when it only seemed to affect blue-collar workers in rustbelt towns. It's a little different now that the middle-class information sector is under threat as well. What's next? Higher education? :-(

Nudge nudge, wink wink?

The New York Times seems to think that the U.S. media coverage of Charles & Camilla has been a little cheekier than I give them credit for. Headlined "For American Royal Watchers, Wink-Wink, Nudge-Nudge," Alessandra Stanley paints a picture of royal wedding coverage that is perhaps a little less obsequious than the typical American fare - but there's still the sense of an enduring love for all things British and Royal. Again, not like those nasty Brit tabloids.

Nudge nudge, wink wink?

Say no more.

Now that's a good idea.

Pomp and circumstance rule!

Today was, of course, Charles and Camilla's big wedding day - one day late, since in this media age even Brit royals have to concede to a papal funeral. But no matter - it seems that the royals have won what has seemed like an internecine battle with Fleet Street. Back on March 20, I asked whether the U.S. media would frame this royal union as a tacky affair, or would they "fall into line with the whole royal pomp and circumstance/Ye Olde Englishe fairytale thing?" Well, from the limited amount of media coverage that I've forced myself to watch, it definitely looks like the latter. Pomp and circumstance seems to have won the day. I also wondered whether the U.S.media would take their cue from the British press. Well they have, in a way - if only to make the reporting of the "rabidly" anti-wedding British press a key part of the Charles and Camilla "story." In fact, the state-side pundits - at least on CNN - seem quite happy slamming the nasty old British tabloids for having dared to tear into this somewhat tacky union that has finally been made legal. It seems that quite a bit of the U.S. media are now becoming more "royally" respectful than their tawdry, muckraking Brit counterparts. Am I surprised at this development? Well, no: It's been a long time coming. I've been thinking for some time that the Royal Family would find a more natural home in the conservative bastion that America has become. Nothing I've seen from the current U.S. coverage is likely to change my mind on this. Britain, like Australia, is simply becoming too disrespectful, too cheeky, to take the royals seriously. The royals would be much happier over here - say, in southern California or Florida - where they could set up shop in a specially constructed Royal Theme Park. The tourists would come, and the British press would stop paying attention - at least until someone "Royal" got their kegs off or their tits out!

Back to "The Office"

OK, I might have to admit I'm wrong about NBC's Brit transplant, "The Office". I wrote the other day that it might well follow other Brit comedy clones and bomb Stateside. But early indications are that the show in fact did quite well with its pilot episode, securing 11.3 million viewers, according to the Nielsen ratings. Overall, it ranked third in the ratings for the Thursday night it ran, behind only Fox's "American Idol" (itself a Brit reality TV transplant) and NBC's "ER" (which now, incidentally, includes Asian-British actress Parminder Nagra as one of its stars). Not bad. Perhaps this show can buck the trend, survive the Anglophile critics' barbs, and become a genuine success. We'll see.