The end of the road

Hello. Look, I'm really sorry if you've been enjoying this blog but I'm afraid I'm going to have to stop running it. It's purely a matter of time - blogs take up a lot of it, and I don't have a lot of it to spare. I've enjoyed writing this blog for the last few weeks, but other things have to take priority for me. Thank you for visiting and for reading. In a few days or weeks, I will convert this site into a static promotional site for my consultancy services in media regulation and policy - and if you ever want my opinion on a media regulation issue, you can always hire me.

Thanks again.

Daniel Owen

Sports A-list to be rewritten?

Are there some sporting events that are so central to our national identity and culture that they should always be broadcast for free (even if, by the very virtue of their popularity, they are commercially lucrative as a paid-for proposition)? That's the philosophy behind the 'A-list' - the list of sporting events that, by law, must be able to be broadcast on free-to-air TV channels. They include the FA Cup Final, the Wimbledon Finals and the Olympics. Though many would pay to watch these if they had to, the government view has always been that we shouldn't have to, and so we don't.

The Guardian reports that an independent review is to recommend changes to the list that will see, for example, the whole Wimbledon tournament included (not just the finals), along with Welsh rugby union internationals and The Ashes. Those sporting bodies who currently make a lot of money (mostly from Sky) from the competitive bidding for rights to these events are, predictably, unhappy. A final government decision is some time away and, as The Guardian points out, DCMS may struggle to get changes in place before the general election.

Better than a live rat, surely?

What is it with stories about ASA investigations? Can we seriously no longer wait for the adjudication to come out? Has advertising regulation gone mainstream and become newsworthy for more than just us geeks? I've seen the Costa Coffee story pop up in a few places (including outside the UK) and now this:

Today's Sunday Telegraph reports that an ad campaign being run by a group of major drug companies to discourage consumers from buying prescription drugs illegally online is being investigated by the ASA. (Newspapers love the phrase "is being investigated"; it sounds so dramatic and serious when all it means is that there have been complaints, which may end up proving groundless, but you don't know whether they are or not until you investigate them, so...)

As you can see if you watch the YouTube video pasted in the story (or if you've seen the ad on telly), it shows a man taking a dodgy pill which then causes him to cough up a dead rat. The voiceover explains that rat poison is sometimes found in dodgy pills. To my mind, this suggests that the man has had a live rat living in the back of his throat all this time, and the pill has done him the service of killing it for him, but perhaps I'm being a bit too literal. Two other reasons, entirely unconnected with regulation, why I feel the ad lacks impact. First, I like my public health information campaigns to be unsullied by the transparent commercial self-interest of the advertiser; second, because I think the dead rat actually looks quite cute. Or is that just me?

Anyway, the same ad attracted complaints when it was shown in cinemas before 15 and 18-rated films, and those complaints were not upheld. However, different rules and standards apply for ads that you pay to sit in a big dark room full of strangers to watch as opposed to those that apply for ads on the shiny magic box in the corner of your living room. If the ASA agrees with me and decides not to uphold it because, really, the rat is quite cute, then I wonder if the Telegraph will publish a follow-up story.

Adlington saga still splashing around

I'm beginning to have some sympathy with Rebecca Adlington's mother who reportedly complained that the BBC Trust's publication of their adjudication against Frankie Boyle's joke at Adlington's expense had given more publicity to Boyle and his joke than he ever had when he originally delivered it, 15 months ago. It's not that I think the BBC Trust should conduct its regulatory business in secret - that would be pointless. But I am conscious that I have read the words "back of a spoon" many, many times over the last couple of weeks.

And it goes on. The chair of the BBC Trust's editorial standards committee, Richard Tait, was on Radio 4's The Media Show discussing the adjudication, and this has prompted further reporting on it, such this article in The Daily Telegraph. Tait revealed that Boyle's jokes about Adlington were supposed to have been edited out but, for some reason, remained in the broadcast programme. Their inclusion was, therefore, a "mistake". This is clearly not reflected in the subsequent correspondence with complainants in which the programme's producer offers a robust and unapologetic defence of Boyle's jokes.

I'm ambivalent on this one. I agree with those who argue that it is not a regulator's job to decide what is, and isn't, funny. But that's not what the Trust was trying to do. They were trying to do their actual job, which is determine what is, and isn't, acceptable for broadcast on a national TV network. They will apply different standards to this than one might in determining whether or not something is acceptable in a stand-up comedy club; and different standards again for Mock the Week on BBC2 than for a different comedy show at a different time and on a different channel. These are the principles of 'context' that we are all familiar with.

At some point, however, there must come a subjective judgement as to where the line of acceptability sits. Tait's observation that a relatively large number of people - 75 - originally complained about Boyle's jokes is a red herring because I suspect the Trust would (and arguably, for the sake of consistency, should) have come to the same conclusion if only 2 people had complained. The Trust's judgement seem to have rested largely on the notion of whether or not Adlington was 'fair game'. Essentially, although she was a well-known celebrity, of sorts, due to her Olympic success, Adlington had not sought publicity nor done anything to invite abuse, or make such abuse warranted, such as for satirical value. However, this strikes me as being dangerously close to deciding whether or not something is funny, on which regulators are notoriously poor arbiters.

You might argue that an alternative approach is to empathise with Ms Adlington. How would you feel if you had suffered a deeply personal, unprovoked insult on national telly? This approach doesn't take us very far. Each of us would respond differently. (If you called me ugly on national TV, or boring on Twitter, I would be forced to agree but I would point out, in mitigation, that I do really good roast potatoes). And, as distressed as Ms Adlington might, undertsandably, be, she has not herself made a direct complaint about Boyle's jokes.

Whichever side of the line of acceptability Boyle's humour sits, it is close to it - this is a matter of fine judgement and balanced argument. It is not as clear cut as some, on either side, claim it to be. That, for better or worse, is why we have regulators in the first place.

Birt supports calls for Godless God slot

With the BBC Trust expected to decide next week whether it will ask the BBC to make the 'Thought for the Day' slot on Radio 4's Today programme open to non-religious commentators, former director general John (now Lord) Birt has weighed in, in favour of the atheists. Or, rather, he is reported by The Daily Telegraph as supporting a call for humanists to be included in TFTD. The semantics here may be important as Birt is quoted as describing the humanist movement as "a loose network of individuals broadly exercised by questions of the spirit, concerned to optimise the sum total of human happiness here on earth" which strikes me as a broader, and not quite co-terminous, description than would be applied to atheists.

As an atheist myself, I confess that I do not think the TFTD slot should be broadened out to include non-religious viewpoints, nor do I think there is a compelling legal or regulatory case for change. The entirety of the Today programme apart from TFTD, and virtually all of Radio 4's schedule - apart from a couple of hours on Sunday mornings - is secular, so I hardly think we atheists can seriously claim to be excluded from the station's output. Too many atheists are offended by the mere existence of religion, which they consider to be a wild and dangerous delusion. Religious programmes which, by design and necessity, exclude us, are too readily considered threatening when they are nothing of the sort. We need, in short, to relax.

I invariably find Thought for the Day profoundly irritating - and very rarely do I find it remotely profound. But that is because it is too often presented by people who sound like they may only have one thought per day, not because it is a religious slot. Sometimes I do learn something new about what other people believe, or how they perceive the world, that is of interest or value to me. On occasion, particularly when the speaker is from a non-Christian faith, I will also learn a little about another culture. What strikes me very clearly, however, is that the slot is not one for proselytising. Never have I heard a TFTD presenter claim that their faith was better than the others, or that having faith was better than not. Instead, TFTD presents an alternative viewpoint on the world whose very value is in its distinctiveness which, in turn, derives from its exclusive religious nature. I do not deny that atheists have just as strong a sense of morality as religious believers, nor that there is a vast amount of non-religious philosophy to draw on. But what sets religious thinking apart, in a way that makes TFTD interesting, is that atheists do not all share a common canon of writing and thought. A Rabbi on TFTD can reasonably be understood to be giving a Jewish perspective (or, at least, a perspective from whatever strand of Judaism they represent). An atheist can only give an individual viewpoint - which may or may not resemble my atheist viewpoint.

That alternative nature, that distinctiveness, is surely a core component of public service broadcasting. As annoying as I frequently find Thought for the Day, I think it represents a particular worldview that deserves a distinct and separate hearing, and I think it would be a shame for the BBC to lose that.

I haven't mentioned this in a while...

While you wait for the next exciting installment of this blog, may I gently remind you of the thrills and delights that await you in the Media Regulation LinkedIn group. As well as the chance to network with other anoraks people interested in media regulation, you can also join in, or even start, discussions about media regulation issues, big or small. Discussions in the group at the moment include the fate of the BBC Trust and the future of the Press Complaints Commission. Yummy.

And, of course, it you want to be informed whenever something new goes up on the blog, then you want to follow the Media Regulation Twitter feed.

We're so socially networked, sometimes it hurts.

PCC fine with 'snide' reference to Dale sexuality

Influential conservative blogger, Iain Dale, recently made a formal complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about a Daily Mail column that chose to describe Dale as "overtly gay" (Dale is openly gay) and said of his promotion in a Pink News interview of his bid to be a Parliamentary candidate that it was "charming how homosexuals rally like-minded chaps to their cause."

Dale blogged today that the PCC has not upheld his complaint. The full text of the adjudication is in his blog post. The Commission described the columnist's language as "mischievous" (echoes of Jan Moir here already), as well as "fusty" and "uncharitable", and said that the references were an attempt at humour that "may have been lost on some readers". However, the Commission felt that the language stopped short of being "pejorative and gratuitous" or "spiteful to the point of homophobia" or "an arbitrary attack on [Dale] on the basis of his sexuality."

Just as the homophobia and bigotry were in plain sight in Jan Moir's column on Stephen Gately, so the pejorative language and spiteful, abitrary homophobia are apparent to me in this Mail column. The PCC claims to have considered carefully the context of the column (its reputation for mischief at the expense of public figures) but it hasn't put the language of the column into any kind of real-world context. The only reason for referring to Dale's sexuality at all in this way is to be pejorative and spiteful, knowing that the column's readers will appreciate it. 'Overt' may, on its own, be a neutral adjective, but it is not used to mean the same as 'open' - it is used in this context to mean conspicuous, and distastefully so in the view of the columnist. It is clearly meant to be pejorative. Suggesting that gay people are "like-minded" reflects a vile prejudice about homosexuality that it is merely a state of mind, and it also insults gay people by suggesting that they are only capable of thinking alike. It is condescending, demeaning, belittling. The sole purpose of the piece is, in fact, an arbitrary attack on Dale on the basis of his sexuality.

Regulators can sometimes show a tendency to take homophobia less seriously than other forms of prejudice, such as racism (see, for example, the BBC Governors, as they then were, content for Chris Moyles to use the word 'gay' as synonymous with 'crap'). This is wrong - and a good exercise to determine if someone's language has crossed the line into homophobia is to replace it with similarly 'non-pejorative' racial terms and decide how comfortable you now are. Imagine if the Daily Mail described an African-Caribbean person not as black but as "conspicuously black"; if they had said of a black Tory blogger who had promoted their political candidacy in The Voice that it was "charming how blacks rally like-minded chaps to their cause." Would the PCC be so sanguine then? None of the individual words used is pejorative on its own, but put into the context of the wider piece and the pejorative sentiment is very clear.

The PCC adjudication has been written with great care. It clearly anticipates a hostile reaction because the reasoning for the adjudication is spelled out methodically and precisely. This is as it should be. It's a shame the reasoning is so flawed.