The UK has a mixed media landscape, with news organizations being funded by a mix of public money (the BBC) and traditional advertising, as well as subscription and membership models. Commercial newspapers deal with a wide range of advertisers across many industry sectors, though there is some evidence that coordinated lobbying from certain industries can have an effect on editorial positions. Broadcast news is largely insulated from commercial influence due to the contracting-out of news production by most commercial television and radio broadcasters, and the BBC is intended to be insulated from direct political pressure due to its incorporation by Royal Charter. However, consistent government pressure has been exerted on the BBC over the past decade.
As the incident involving the Telegraph and reporting on major advertising partners described in F5 above shows, internal and external influence on newsrooms can be combined under certain circumstances. While individual news organizations may have significant and lasting partnerships with advertisers, there is little evidence that commercial media depend on a small number of large advertisers. Conversely, the media data and analytics platform Mediatel compiles Neilsen data for advertising spend by platform, and found that the UK television, radio, national and regional press each attract hundreds of advertisers grouped across 13 sectors (Mediatel compiles the top 25 advertisers in each sector for each platform). For example, in December 2019 the most lucrative advertising sector for the UK national press was ‘Entertainment and Leisure’; the top 25 companies bought advertising space totaling £5.4 million. The largest single advertiser in this group accounted for just 14 per cent of the total (Mediatel, 2020).
Investigative reporting has uncovered some instances, however, of business lobbying infiltrating news content either through traditional paid advertising – often in the form of native advertising – the juxtaposition of industry advertising alongside relevant editorial content or the use of intermediary organisations such as affiliated think tanks to influence reporting on specific industries. Research has found evidence that fossil fuel and energy companies have been able to penetrate newspaper coverage of climate change using these techniques (Ramsay, 2015; Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, 2015).
News in the commercial broadcasting sector is insulated against direct influence by advertisers since broadcasters are obliges to outsource the production of news to a separate company. ITN produces news for ITV/Channel 3, Channel 4 and Channel 5, while Sky News Radio provides bulletins for the majority of commercial radio stations. In any case, Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code has detailed guidelines and restrictions on the inclusion of commercial content in programming (Ofcom, 2019d).
The BBC’s incorporation by Royal Charter is designed to protect the broadcaster from Parliamentary interference. In practice, however, moments of charter renewal (typically every ten years) often involve a degree of political pressure being exerted on the Corporation in the form of reductions in funding or changes to the BBC’s remit. This is not new, but the past decade has seen an increase in governments – led by a Conservative Party that has traditionally been comparatively hostile to the BBC – imposing constraints: in 2010 the government imposed a licence fee freeze for six years plus additional funding obligations (BBC, 2010). In 2015 – prior to a new round of Royal Charter renewal negotiations – the Conservative government announced that the BBC would have to bear the cost of providing free television licences for over-75s, a subsidy historically provided by the state (BBC, 2015) – though implementation of this has to date proved politically difficult. In 2020 a new Conservative government launched a public consultation of decriminalizing non-payment of the licence fee, potentially endangering BBC revenues further (BBC, 2020). The government’s continued interventions around licence fee renewal are seen to compromise the independence of the BBC (Moore, 2016) and the imposition of budgetary constraints on the BBC indirectly impacts upon the resources available to the Corporation’s news departments.
Pressure on broadcast news beyond the BBC has also increased to an extent. The public service broadcaster Channel 4 is also underpinned by legislation and run by the statutory corporation which is part of the UK government Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. During the December 2019 general election campaign, representatives of the Conservative Party (which would subsequently form the next government) accused the Channel of partisan bias due to its coverage of election debates and suggested that the broadcasting remit of Channel 4 could be reviewed after the election (Waterson, 2019). This was generally interpreted as an implicit threat to the channel on the basis of its news and current affairs coverage. Ofcom subsequently ruled that the offending programme was not in breach of the Broadcasting Code; no further action has been taken (Ofcom, 2019e).
