THE Media Bill is now an Act of Parliament, after it was pushed through its final stages within the House of Lords last week, despite concerns over its lack of protections for religious programming. It gained Royal Assent last Friday.
The Act legislates how the public-service remit is to be fulfilled to satisfy the needs and satisfy the interests of as many various audiences as practicable.
The previous remit of the networks defined as public-service broadcasters (PSBs) — the BBC channels, Channels 3, 4, and 5, and the Welsh-language TV channel S4C — was to offer a variety of high-quality and diverse programming which included “education, sport, science, religion and other beliefs, social issues, and matters of international significance or interest”.
The Media Act replaces this with a less specific obligation to offer “a sufficient quantity of audiovisual content that reflects the lives and concerns of various communities and cultural interests and traditions” within the UK.
The absence of a reference to religion within the laws has caused disquiet since a draft Bill was first published last 12 months (News, 14 April 2023). Concerns have also been raised that it gives broadcasters more freedom to maneuver programmes to digital formats where the audiences might be smaller (Comment, 19 January).
After the Bill was approved by the Commons on Thursday of last week, Dr Tony Stoller, who chairs the Sandford St Martin Trust, said that, while the modernisation of broadcasting laws was welcome, the brand new remit was “too vague to be enforceable, and fails to point what a ‘sufficient’ quantity is”.
He also asked, “how, without targets, quotas, or clear obligations around genres, the Government proposes the standard and quantity of PSB provision might be assessed?”
Dr Stoller continued: “The Sandford St Martin Trust has long argued that to disregard religion is to depart a gaping hole at the center of public-service broadcasting. For this reason, it is crucial that the Government ensures that the sustainability of this essential genre is at the center of the technique of modernising broadcasting laws and the long run of Public Service Broadcasting.”
In a joint interview with the Church Times last month, the Head of Religion and Ethics for BBC Audio, Tim Pemberton, and his counterpart for television, Daisy Scalchi, addressed a few of these concerns, saying that the BBC would still be accountable to Ofcom, which requires the BBC to broadcast about 200 hours a 12 months of non secular content on TV, and 500 hours on radio (News, 3 May).
During the Bill’s Committee Stage earlier last week, the Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, spoke in support of including quotas within the Bill to make sure that a set percentage of broadcast output by PSBs needed to be produced outside London.
“Our country is considered one of diversity,” Dr Hartley told peers. “As public-service broadcasters are owned by the entire of the UK public, it can be crucial that they really reflect the general public they serve in all their regional diversity.”
Ensuring support for the creative sector outside London “requires intentionality”, Dr Hartley said. “New and smaller production corporations cannot grow without regular and sustained employment. Implementing quotas would make sure that these businesses receive regular income in the long run, allowing them to grow while nurturing local talent and skills.”
Dr Hartley argued that requiring PSBs to provide 50 per cent of their programmes outside London, and 16 per cent outside England, in proportion to every UK nation’s relative population, would spread opportunity across the country’s regions. “The different regions and nations throughout the UK are wealthy in creative skills, and we’re all left poorer if we proceed to neglect them.”
After discussion, nonetheless, Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie, who had proposed the amendment containing the odds, withdrew it, on the premise that the Government had offered further discussions on regional programme-making with Ofcom.
Late in the controversy, the Bishop of Leeds, the Rt Revd Nick Baines, spoke on an amendment to the laws tabled by Lady Grey-Thompson, which proposed that “significant” prominence relatively than “appropriate” prominence be given to PSBs, to make sure that streaming services are usually not in a position to promote their very own content on the expense of the PSBs.
Bishop Baines said that he supported the argument, but not the purpose of language. He asked: “Why is ‘significant’ an improvement on ‘appropriate’, when neither of them are defined? ‘Significant’ has to mean significant of something — we would think that it just means ‘rather a lot’, but it surely doesn’t. It is as meaningless as ‘appropriate’: indefinable and can’t be quantified.”
He admitted that it was difficult to seek out an appropriate alternative. “I actually have struggled with it, but ‘substantial’ or ‘substantive’ might get us somewhere, relatively than something that doesn’t actually mean anything,” he said.
The amendment was not moved. The Bill was sent to the Commons with approved amendments. The Commons agreed to those changes, and the Bill received Royal Assent on 24 May.
