Praxis Makes Perfect: Tom Mills
As the public consultation into C4 privatisation closes, I talked to the Media Reform Coalition chair and researcher about his work and the future of UK broadcasting.
The Praxis series is back! Summer break has been great, but now we have to get back to real-life stuff like learning and ‘doing things’.
This week, as the Tory government’s Channel 4 privatisation consultation closes, and the BBC top-brass reappointments continue on, I’m back with a topical interview about media power and ownership: Tom Mills, author of The BBC: The Myth of a Public Service and chair of the Media Reform Coalition, spoke to me about the strange public/private makeup of the UK media and what its future may hold after current shifts have settled.
(Interview lightly edited for brevity and clarity. Disclaimer: I write the Media Reform Coalition’s weekly blog.)
Introduce yourself however you wish!
I’m Tom Mills, a sociologist at Aston University and chair of the Media Reform Coalition. I’m interested in media power, but also in power more generally, and particularly ways in which power structures can be empirically researched. So my work covers media sociology and the sociology of elites.
Give a brief overview of your career.
I joined Aston as a lecturer in 2016. Before that I was a researcher at Bath University where I completed my PhD.
You're known as rather a BBC expert, and you've written the excellent The BBC: The Myth of a Public Service. When and why did the BBC become a focus for you?
Thanks! Well I suppose I became particularly interested in the sociology and political economy of the media in the early 2000s. Like a lot of other people my age the so called ‘War on Terror’ and the Iraq War in particular was a politicising experience, and it was very striking to me how ineffective media institutions were in terms of the role they claim to fulfil – holding power to account, or even just providing relevant context to events.
I felt the BBC, despite being by far the most important and influential outlets in the UK, wasn’t that well understood. The right had these wild ideas about left-wing bias. While on the left the BBC was either thought about in a very idealistic way, or it was just lumped in with other media organisations. So I wanted to offer an analysis that could explain its patterns of reporting in a systematic way. What I ended up focusing on in my PhD research was how the BBC approached economic issues. I did this research part-time, which took forever, and I focused on two periods: first the 1970s and then the 1990s up to the global financial crisis of 2008. I was interested in what seemed like a puzzle: why was an organisation that was publicly funded and independent of commercial interests so market orientated? How was it that the perspectives of business come to dominate BBC economics reporting?
When years later it came to publishing from my PhD I drew on the second half of my thesis, as well as other work I had done, along with existing research, of which there is a lot, to produce something like the original intention for my research. The book though ended up being fairly light on theory. I wanted to try and tell the story of the BBC in a way that explains what it is like today. The book is usually seen as a critique of the BBC, but it’s not really. It’s just an account of what the organisation is and why it does what it does.
You've talked about a vision needed for a 'public media'. Can you describe that vision, both in the context of a more public version of the BBC, and also a vision across the wider industry?
Yes. The concept ‘public’ can mean a lot of different things. Obviously the BBC is public in the sense that most of its income comes from a form of taxation rather than from market revenue, and there’s also the related sense of ‘public service’, as distinct from a commercial ethos or model. But there’s also a more substantive sense in which the concept is used, implying people meeting and conversing as equals. That’s the sense in which Habermas uses the concept, and which my friend Dan Hind does as well.
In its earlier period the BBC embodied something of that first sense of publicness in that it was independent of the capitalist market. However, it has never been independent of government. It’s basically a quasi-independent state body. The government control its funding, appoint directors and renew its charter. So when I say I would like the BBC to be a genuinely public institution, I mean that I would want it to be completely independent of government, and as independent from the state as a publicly funded body can be.
I’d also like it to become a much more responsive, devolved and democratic organisation, which brings us to that second understanding of what public can mean. The BBC certainly hasn’t facilitated exchange between equals. To be fair, broadcasting is just not a deliberative medium, technologically I mean, but the BBC hasn’t done anything very much to push beyond these limitations in the digital era. With a one way system of communication like broadcasting, its openness depends on what types of people are allowed to contribute. If you think of the sorts of people who participate in political debate on the BBC, or who drive the overall news agenda, it’s representative of a very narrow social strata. Mainly the political elite and others in and around Westminster, and to some extent business and finance as well. Culturally it’s still the Oxbridge educated upper middle classes who are best represented. So that would need to change.
To answer your second question, yes, I would want to see the whole system of media and communications to become more public and more democratic. I don’t think you can ever have a truly democratic society if culture and communications aren’t also democratised. The BBC is a good place to start politically and analytically though, because it is in some ways closer to the ideal than the commercial news organisations and platforms.
You've said before that the license fee isn't fit for purpose. What would a 'fit for purpose' funding model look like?
Clearly you can’t have a television licence supporting a modern media organisation, it’s completely anachronistic, and other countries have now moved away from this model. In terms of what replaces it, you need public funding, but you also need political independence. The other thing is, as the BBC’s right-wing critics never tire of pointing out, the licence fee is a flat tax. So that needs to be addressed. What I’ve called for with others at the Media Reform Coalition is a digital licence fee to replace the television licence. This is symbolic as much as anything else. It’s about making a public claim on our digital space. I don’t think the mechanism is so important though, provided those principles are met.
You've also discussed the need for digital media to be public. What changes would be made there, and how would this better protect us in terms of data privacy, for example?
I think the big political task here is to develop public alternatives to the digital platforms, as well as investing public money in a strategic way that will reshape our online environment. I’ve argued at the Media Reform Coalition with others for the BBC to become a digital platform, and for the establishment of a British Digital Corporation to develop technology, platforms, apps etc in the public interest – an idea that has been further developed by Dan Hind.
We need a massive intervention here. Data privacy is one thing, but there are much broader questions about how we relate to ourselves and each other on these commercial platforms. I don’t think anyone’s very happy with the status quo – apart from the billionaires of course - but unfortunately, there’s a complete lack of political ambition among politicians to do anything much apart from pressurising the platforms to moderate content and deplatform certain users. In the UK a more substantive solution was maybe more of a political prospect a couple of years back.
Do you think of yourself as an activist?
I don’t really, no. I think of myself as a researcher. I’m a socialist, and I’m very open about my politics, and I try to contribute politically through my work and my writing. So I hope what I do is useful to activists. But to me research is not activism. As Marx says, you can’t change the world just by describing it. You need to act on that knowledge by building movements and working through political structures. That’s a very different thing and it requires a whole different set of skills. I think I’m good at research, at least I hope I am. But at the end of the day it’s activists who are going to change things for the better and there are a lot of dedicated and skilled people who know a lot more than I do about how best to do this. I chip in as best I can, but I tend to defer to others to be honest.
Other than your writing and research work, how do you participate politically?
Usual sort of thing. I attend political meetings and marches, I sign petitions and open letters. I have campaigned for the Labour Party.
Were there any specific moments that politicised you?
I think I’ve always held broadly similar sort of political views since I was in my mid-teens, but 9/11 and the Iraq War, which I’ve already mentioned, were certainly significant for me in terms of creating a new kind of urgency.
What are some good examples of existing public media?
You can find good and bad aspects in any organisation. The BBC’s most influential news and current affairs output is generally very poor, but there is good work being done there at the margins. If you do local radio then the whole culture is completely different from the Today programme, for example. It’s just much more serious, independent and professional, and that’s because the government pays no attention to them basically. From the perspective of power they don’t really matter. Flipside of that is they have few resources and no agenda setting power. Outside of news and current affairs the BBC does some good drama, documentaries and so on, which for obvious reasons is what the BBC appeals to when making the case for itself. Sticking to the UK, early Channel 4 was also a major success story in terms of innovation and pluralism, and a number of the ITV franchises in that same period, which were commercial but operated within a strong public regulatory framework, arguably produced better cultural and journalistic work than the BBC.
I think the general rule in public media, and in commercial media as well, is that the more freedom journalists and programme makers have from commercial pressures and managerial hierarchies, and the more representative they are of society, the better the content will be. The amount of resources, the level of editorial and creative freedom, the makeup of the workforce, as well as the influence of the broader political cultures, will all have an impact on cultural production. The point about public media in the narrower sense is it prevents commercial pressures from influencing decision making. But that’s addressing just one problem. You have to go further than this and try and create the sorts of working conditions I’ve mentioned, which is what that more substantive vision of public media I already discussed is about. A combination of openness, autonomy and decentralised governance will likely produce better content. This is what has been eroded at the BBC since the 1990s, and at ITV, Channel 4 and the press as well, although all in different ways.
Do you think changes would be able to be made at the BBC (or anywhere else, for that matter) without a significant change in the UK's political leadership?
There will definitely be changes at the BBC under this Government. We’ve seen that already with the appointment of Richard Sharp as chair and Robbie Gibb as non-executive director. Elsewhere of course there is the plan to privatise Channel 4. But in terms of positive change, no there’s no prospect of that.
If you could boil it down to three changes that need to happen in the media industry, what would they be?
A BBC that is genuinely independent of governments and representative of and accountable to audiences; a well-resourced and independent media and communications regulator that operates solely in the public interest; and a system of programme commissioning that fosters new forms of ownership in the sector, rather than handing public money to media multinationals.
What do you think the government means when it says Channel 4 needs to 'stay competitive and sustainable'?
I don’t think it means anything very much. Obviously there are a number of very significant changes taking place in the sector at the moment, particularly the rapid growth of subscription-based streaming services and the ongoing changes in advertising. But the Government hasn’t explained why a privatised Channel 4 would operate more effectively in this environment. They’ve just decided they want to privatise Channel 4 and so are reaching for the usual clichés.
What could the effects of a privatised C4 be on the UK?
It would obviously depend on how the privatisation takes place, but the impact in the medium to long term would be more generic commercial content and less representative, alternative and innovative programmes. Channel 4 isn’t perfect, by any means. But it can definitely get worse and almost certainly would.
It would also likely be damaging for the smaller independent producers in the UK. Obviously the government wants to neutralise opposition to its proposals by arguing that this is about Channel 4 delivering on its public remit in the future. But privatisation would have to involve some changes to how programmes are commissioned or distributed, otherwise how would it make Channel 4 more ‘competitive’? The only other possibility is that privatisation could raise revenue. But Channel 4 has rejected the idea that private investment is needed, and as many commentators have noted, the existing public service mandates make it unattractive to investors. Anyway, if this were simply about attracting funding the obvious thing to do would be for the government to invest public money in Channel 4. But it won’t, because it’s not.
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