Reviews
Geraint Talfan Davies is still waiting for a book that will set a new agenda for the media debate.
The Media in Wales
David M. Barlow, Philip Mitchell, Tom O’Malley
University of Wales Press
£15.99, Paperback, £40.00, Hardback
ISBN 0708318398
There is an old joke that goes like this: ‘D’you want a book for Christmas?’ – ‘No thanks, I’ve already got one.’ I’m reminded of it when I ponder that there is only one substantial book on broadcasting in Wales (a history by John Davies, commissioned by the BBC), one history of our etiolated press by Aled Jones, and two books on film – Dave Berry’s encyclopaedic account of Wales and Cinema and Steve Blandford’s compilation Wales on Screen. I discount my own small publication and Roland Lucas’s Voice of a Nation, as both were written while the BBC corporate hat was being worn. That aside, considering the amount of debate and turmoil that has been generated by media issues in Wales, this is a remarkably small haul. Now there is one more, and for that we should be grateful.
The Media in Wales: Voices of a Small Nation gives us a drier historical account than John Davies’s history of broadcasting, largely because this current work is almost wholly reliant on secondary sources, although it covers a much wider field – the press, radio, television, film and the internet. Its wide scope is one of the book’s virtues. For it does bring out the common feature that has affected all media in Wales – the shift from, as the authors describe it, the public service era to the market era. Whether or not that shift is the result of technological change and a technologically determinist approach to policy development, there is no doubt that it is a shift that makes it much more difficult for Wales to sustain any kind of control over its media landscape.
The authors remind us that that control has always been tenuous. The Western Mail, founded by the Marquis of Bute to support the Conservative cause, has been through the hands of The News of the World, the Kemsleys, Lord Thomson and now Trinity Mirror, who currently own twenty-seven titles circulating in Wales, including the only two daily morning newspapers. In television, a fifth of TWW’s shares were in the hands of The News of the World. Between 1997 and 2003 its successor, HTV – as a result of some injudicious spending and financial debilitation brought about by the 1990 franchise auction – passed through a succession of owners faster than a ball down a Welsh three-quarter line – United, Granada, Carlton and ITV plc.
For those of us who have been attached to the public service ethos and who are inclined to cry into our beer, this volume charts the familiar raft of reasons: ‘the centrality of entertainment’ in newspapers, the consolidation of ownership in newspapers and local radio, the light touch regulation that has seen public service obligations diminish in radio and ‘regional’ television, and the National Assembly’s difficulty in gaining purchase on these issues with Whitehall and Westminster.
In fact, the authors miss out on a few more recent reasons, presumably because of the timescale of book production. They have not been able to take account either of Ofcom’s recent policy declarations on public service broadcasting and the reduction in ITV’s public service obligations or Tessa Jowell’s decision to switch off analogue signals in Wales in 2009. It has also meant that they missed out on some more positive developments in terms of Michael Grade’s proposed changes to the governance of the BBC, Ofcom’s
targets for network television production outside London, the Assembly Government’s creative industries initiative, the extension of broadband across Wales, and BT’s decision to launch its 21st-century network in Cardiff and south-east Wales.
However, the book’s weakness is that, having charted the transition to the market era, it does not follow through on the consequences of that change. Like too much media analysis in Wales, it is preoccupied with institutions and with Welsh-language broadcasting rather than broadcasting in the round, and is content to lament change and bemoan ‘the vagaries of the market’. As someone who has done his share of lamentation, I now think it is time to break out of this constrained agenda.
In particular, the dominance of the Welsh language in the conventional narrative of Welsh cultural politics during the twentieth century, although understandable, has consigned some major issues to the periphery. For instance, if the Welsh media have been so weak, and if Wales is so vulnerable to the penetration of the English media, how has the Welsh identification of the non-Welsh speaking majority been sustained? The turnaround between 1979 and 1997 in the referenda on devolution coincided with the period of greatest growth in Wales-based television output in both languages, and in commercial radio listening.What is the relationship between these two facts? There have been no major academic studies of the content and impact of mass-media consumption in Wales other than the recent illuminating and worrying work on news content and consumption by Ian Hargreaves and James Thomas from Cardiff University’s Centre for Journalism Studies.
Similarly, debate about newspapers in Wales has concentrated on issues of ownership, thereby obscuring the more grievous issue of the decline in the investment in journalism. It is interesting that whenever The Guardian’s expert media pages deal with regional newspapers, it is in commercial rather than editorial terms. Poverty of journalism is our biggest problem in Wales, and it is interesting to note that the newspapers that some dream of emulating – The Guardian and The Irish Times – are both owned by trusts, and are therefore insulated to a great extent from market pressures.For this structural reason, the Welsh language newspaper project, Y Byd, may, paradoxically, find itself less pressured than the much-rumoured, and more conventionally funded, new English-language newspaper designed to challenge The Western Mail. Both will struggle to find the necessary professional journalistic skills. Above all else a quality newspaper needs investment in intelligence and talent. Some will see the answer in online journalism, with its much lower production costs. The authors’ pessimism about online journalism, and the trivial nature of much of it, is the most disheartening of all their conclusions, although it is surprising that they make no mention of Anthony Barnett’s opendemocracy.net, which has survived against all the odds. It is far too early to write off the potential this model may hold for Wales and its ‘voice’.
There is a danger that the authors’ scepticism about market forces may encourage us to fight battles that are already lost, rather than seeking out new ground. The notion of a Broadcasting Authority for Wales might have had some purchase in the world of four analogue channels, though even then it would have had to contend with the obstacles of one licence fee and the fact that, unlike Scotland, the BBC’s spend in Wales far exceeds the licence fee income raised here. But in a multi-channel world, soon morphing into converged television and internet technology, it seems quaint. The demand for a fifth channel for Wales (but on a more expansive pattern than BBC’s 2W) might still have some life in it, but even if it found the necessary bandwidth to be delivered universally in Wales, it would – like S4C – have to face the challenge in the next few years of video on demand.
During the early and mid-nineties the emergence of commercially viable new modes of delivery did not keep pace with the hype about the miracles of digital technology. That gap is now being closed and the next decade will undoubtedly deliver more radical change than the last; this will pose a bigger challenge to Welsh media in both languages than anything seen to date. We are still waiting for a book that sets a new agenda for the media debate in Wales and offers suggestions as to how to the Welsh voice might survive in a different
world.
Page(s) 70-72
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