In Flat Earth News, Nick Davies (2009: 14-16) suggests that, contrary to much theorizing about the media, influence by proprietors and commercial interests such as advertisers is limited. He says that
‘[i]n thirty years in Fleet Street, [he] never came across a case of advertisers influencing an editorial line, directly or indirectly. Nor [could he] find any other journalist who has ever known it to happen’.
Nor do owners interfere with the editorial process of their publications ‘in quite the way that outsiders imagine….the new corporate owners interfere far less than their propagandist predecessors’, namely the famous press barons of an earlier era. For Davies, it is rather the ‘forces of commercialism which now provide the greatest object to truth-telling journalism’. In Flat Earth News, he provides a detailed analysis of how the changed conditions of journalistic production, under the pressures of commercialism, have diminished the integrity of news. However, writing in the Guardian, Roy Greenslade (2009), another experienced UK journalist (since 2003 professor of journalism at London’s City University), suggests that proprietorial intervention, though usually subtle, remains the rule. Greenslade notes ‘honourable exceptions’ such as the Independent newspaper during Tony O’Reilly’s eleven year ownership (until 2009)5, the Guardian newspaper, owned by the Scott Trust, and also the Daily Mail, whose owner, Lord Rothermere, Greenslade also deems to be a ‘hands-off’ proprietor. However, he concludes that generally ‘the publisher holds the whip hand’. Greenslade suggests that self-censorship and managerial control abounds.
The House of Lords Select Committee on Communications report (volume 1, 2000a: 33) noted that ‘[i]n all that evidence only one person was willing to admit openly to acting as a “traditional proprietor”: Rupert Murdoch’ (whose News International owned two of the UK’s leading quality papers The Times and the Sunday Times, as well as its leading popular tabloids the Sun and the Sunday News of the World). The committee’s minutes of a meeting in the US with Rupert Murdoch himself revealed:
‘Mr Murdoch did not disguise the fact that he is hands on both economically and editorially. He says that “the law” prevents him from instructing the editors of The Times and The Sunday Times….. [but] ….For The Sun and News of the World he explained that he is a “traditional proprietor”. He exercises editorial control on major issues—like which Party to back in a general election or policy on Europe. (House of Lords 2008a: 119-120).
When the committee asked former Sunday Times and (briefly) Times editor, Andrew Neil, whether Rupert Murdoch had honoured the legal requirement to desist from ‘instructing’ the editors of the Times and the Sunday Times, this having been a condition for their take-over in 1981, Andrew Neil’s response gets to the heart of the matter:
‘He does not instruct the quality newspaper editors of The Times and The Sunday Times, but that does not mean to say that he does not have influence and he does not let you know what he thinks…. I was never left in any doubt what he wanted’ (House of Lords 2008b: 338).
A couple of editors of leading quality national papers were very forthright about their independence. Simon Kellner, of the Independent and Independent on Sunday, stated:
‘With the Independent the clue is in the title. What you see in the paper is entirely as a result of our journalism. We do not have proprietorial interference and we do not have allegiance to any political party….The paper is the product of journalism, untainted by any sort of commercial influence or political influence’ (House of Lords 2008b: 117-118).
Alan Rusbridger, of The Guardian, could point to the undeniable fact that his independence was ‘guarded by the [Scott] Trust’ – there being no proprietor other than the trust created in 1936 precisely to safeguard the newspaper’s values of independent and liberal journalism (House of Lords 2008b: 39).
With regard to broadcast news, the committee concluded that the ‘presence of content regulation and impartiality rules limits the kind of influence an owner can have’ (House of Lords 2008a: 39). Aside from the impartiality requirement, for the commercial public service broadcasters issues of quantity, scheduling and (in ITV’s case) resources devoted to news are regulated by Ofcom, whilst in the BBC’s case, news output is monitored by the BBC Trust. As for the third force in UK broadcast news, Sky News, in his interview with the parliamentary committee Murdoch appeared to complain that rather than just the UK’s strict impartiality rules, it was more the journalistic standard set by the BBC in the UK’s broadcasting culture, that prevented him from transforming Sky News into something more like his US news channel Fox News operation, claiming that one of he reasons that Sky News ‘is not a proper alternative to the BBC is that no broadcaster or journalist in the UK knows any different’. He stated that the only reason that Sky News was not more like Fox news was that ‘nobody at Sky listens to me’ (House of Lords 2008a: 119). This is an argument that has frequently been made about the standard-setting role of the BBC with regard to other UK broadcasters. Andrew Marr, a leading UK political journalist with years of experience working for the BBC, observed: ‘In America, Fox News openly avows Rupert Murdoch’s politics: but its British cousin Sky News, constrained and influenced by British television culture, does not’ (Marr 2005: 306).
