The media’s watchdog role is only implicit in mission statements or what might be taken as such. Thus, the BBC specifies its mission as being ‘to enrich people’s lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain’.34 The 2007 Royal Charter states that the Corporation exists to serve the public interest and to promote its public purposes, which are: sustaining citizenship and civil society; promoting education and learning; stimulating creativity and cultural excellence; representing the UK, its nations, regions and communities; bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK; and helping to deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services and, in addition, taking a leading role in the switchover to digital television.35 Ultimately, it is a task of the BBC Trust to ensure fulfilment of these purposes.
The remits of the commercial public service broadcasters are statutory and detailed in broadcasting laws as well as posted on their websites. Thus, Channel Four’s special public service remit is laid out in the statement of programme policy, attached to its licence. It specifies that C4 should ‘foster the new and experimental in television… [and] encourage pluralism, provide a favoured place for the untried and encourage innovation in style content perspective and talent on and off screen’. Among C4’s promises is the aim to ‘reflect the diversity of Britain; culturally and geographically… [and] …reflect the energy of our multicultural society, by representing the voices of a new generation of programme makers from the ethnic minorities’.36
The Guardian Media Group (GMG) also has a clear mission statement, which reflects the public service values of the Manchester Guardian, a newspaper ‘created to support social reform in the early 19th century’. These values, ‘honesty, cleanness (now interpreted as integrity), courage, fairness, [and] a sense of duty to the reader and the community’ are promoted by the GMG’s owner, the Scott Trust, in the ‘business conduct and the editorial content of [its] newspapers, websites and other media’.37 Innovatively, the Guardian newspaper has gone a step further by launching a ‘sustainability vision’ with a commitment to ‘to play our part as a leading media organisation in creating a fair society that lives within the means of our planet’38.
All these mission statements reflect the particular journalistic orientation and principles that, by and large, the respective media organizations have respected. However, such public expressions of a detailed journalistic remit appear to be a comparative rarity for the commercial news media. Website home-pages and annual reports provide some guidance, featuring ethical commitments concerning corporate governance and social responsibility (e.g. working with the community, commitment to good working practices, etc.).39 However, such statements about the precise journalistic mission as can be found tend to be pithy. Thus, the Daily Mail and General Trust website announces that it is about ‘[e]mpowering people through information’40. The Independent newspaper proclaims that it is ‘free from party-political ties’ and ‘free from proprietorial influence’ directly beneath its title banner on its front page, which is certainly as bold a statement of its independent ethos as could be imagined. Beyond question, UK newspapers have distinct, established brands, which can embody a certain sense of mission. The Times, for instance, has traditionally seen itself – and been widely seen – as a ‘newspaper of record’, with the mission to be ‘objective above all’ (The Times editor Robert Thomson cited in House of Commons Select Committee on Communication 2008b: 49).
