Internal interference in the sense of the leveraging of managerial power to pursue political or commercial ends is generally not an issue in broadcast newsrooms in the UK. The BBC’s public ownership means that these incentives do not exist within the organization, and the remaining public service broadcasters have news produced by a separate company (ITN). There have been no allegations of, or Ofcom investigations into, issues of internal influence in within the remaining domestic news provider, Sky News.
During the Leveson Inquiry of 2011-2012, newspaper editors, managers and proprietors were questioned extensively on the interplay of different interests in the newsmaking process. While Rupert Murdoch – owner of the publishers of the Times, Sunday Times and the Sun – did admit to an active interest in the editorial direction of the Sun (Leveson Inquiry, 2012a, p.108), other editors and managers testified to the Leveson Inquiry that their organizations fully respected the insulation of editorial processes from commercial or political influence. The Guardian Media Group, for example, cited the constitutional separation of editorial and commercial arms of their organization (Singer, 2011). The editor of The Times stated that “There have never been any commercial pressures placed upon me that would undermine in any way the ethical, professional or legal conduct of journalists” (Harding, 2011). Responses of this kind from senior staff may be expected; unfortunately, the voices of ordinary journalists below the rank of editor were not heard at the Inquiry.
Research conducted on business practices at commercial news organizations across a range of countries including the UK has found that the traditional norm of separation between the editorial and commercial arms is in decline, resulting in a “new norm… based on combining established editorial values with values such as collaboration, adaptation, and business thinking, and it is already playing an important role in legitimizing new practices that are based on frequent exchanges between editorial and the commercial teams” (Cornia, Sehl & Nielsen, 2020, 173). This ties in with interviews with representatives of local newspapers in the UK which found that some titles were strategically developing in-house relationships between editorial and advertising departments to cope with economic pressures (Jenkins & Nielsen, 2020).
Movements such as this have accompanied some high-profile scandals involving UK media, in particular the public resignation of veteran reporter Peter Oborne from the Telegraph in 2015 amid allegations that the newspaper management had consistently intervened in journalists’ reporting on alleged wrongdoing at a major advertising partner of the newspaper, the international bank HSBC, with senior editors refusing to publish certain critical stories about the bank (Oborne, 2015). The journalist’s account was backed up by an analysis of the Telegraph’s reporting on the HSBC scandal (Ramsay, 2015). Oborne claimed that this was one of several episodes where the newspaper had published unusually favourable coverage of advertising partners.
Less dramatic, but also indicative of a merging of editorial and commercial imperatives in the newsroom, is the growth of sponsored content in the digital editions of UK newspapers. Research has shown that online newspapers in the UK, along with their counterparts in the United States, were more likely to include sponsored content in their output (Conill, 2016, p.912). In a similar vein, the problem of “churnalism” – the substitution of original written news output for PR copy – has been a significant problem in British print journalism for over a decade (Lewis, Williams & Franklin, 2008).
