Time to Get Real

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Last year saw the passing of the Communications Act, a measure which is likely to change the face of broadcasting in Britain quite as drastically, perhaps even more so, than the Broadcasting Act 1990. The enactment of this particular piece of legislation was the culmination of a lengthy process which kicked off in 1998 with the publication of the Green Paper Regulating Communications, which was followed in 2000 by the White Paper A New Future for Communications. The Draft Communications Bill was published in 2002; this was then subjected to pre-legislative scrutiny by a Joint Committee of the two Houses, chaired by David Puttnam, which published its report later in the year. As a result, the Bill was partially re-drafted; it was then presented to Parliament, which passed it in 2003. As someone who was involved, at that time as a media journalist, in the battles around the Broadcasting Bill in the late 1980s, I had an overwhelming sense of deja vu (or, rather, deja lu), when Regulating Communications appeared in 1998. Now, though, I was back in academia, but still equally concerned with matters of media policy and regulation, and keen to involve myself in the processes of consultation and lobbying which I knew lay ahead. However, over the next five years, it was not primarily as an academic that I found myself involved but, rather, as the Chair of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, and thus, in turn, as part of a loose alliance of NGOs and trade unions opposed to the Bill’s neo-liberal thrust. Fellow media academics were conspicuously thin on the ground, and of the tiny handful who poured enormous effort into trying to influence the Bill’s contents, the majority, in my view, did their most effective work under the auspices of bodies such as the Voice of the Listener and Viewer, the Campaign for Quality Television and the Third World and Environment Broadcasting Project. And now it’s consultation time yet again, with the run-up to BBC charter renewal and Ofcom consulting in all directions. Once more the