So we have received official notice that Jeremy Hunt is now the Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport. Congratulations! (Chris Marsden notes Vince Cable / broadband here). It will definitely be interesting to see how media and communications policy and regulation — for so long dominated by Labour (and sometimes European) people and [...]
Like many of you I was fascinated with James Murdoch’s lecture last week. While I thought the Darwin / creationism tie-in was odd it was overall a useful summary of how dysfunctional UK media policy has become. But Murdoch did a better job of demolition than construction. He did not outline any actual policy reforms. [...]
Folks, I thought the MediaGuardian was going to bust an artery today. Wall to wall coverage of Digital Britain. They even had a live blog covering developments. A live blog! It’s official: Digital media policy is the new climate change. We rock.
More later when I’ve had time to read the entire report. But here are [...]
Lot’s of interesting items kicking about:
* Broadcasting impartiality rules are being cited as the reason why the BBC won’t air a Gaza aid appeal. (I’ve written many times that political / issue advertising restrictions and impartiality rules are bad for society).
* Which? is concerned that Ofcom might be allowing electronics retailers to mislead consumers with [...]
It’s official — Channel 4 is in recession:
No kind words for Ofcom today. The super-regulator is basically called out-of-date by the Times. Some nuggets:
Ofcom regularly commission reports that prove to its satisfaction, at least, that PSB is needed. Yesterday report goes one step farther than that. It states unequivocally that there needs to be more than one PSB provider, that plurality is [...]
The documents are here.
I’m too jet lagged to read much of it now! Just landed on the redeye from Atlanta. So far, this seem to be the main nugget:
We believe that the UK needs a new approach to sustaining delivery of public service content, which embraces the opportunities created by the digital revolution and recognises [...]
I thought Neil Midgley got it almost perfect* in the Telegraph:
It is time, then, to stop tinkering. ITV should be entirely deregulated, to give it a fighting chance of making a sustainable profit – and continuing to spend heavily on UK programmes. Under current economic conditions, there is probably little to be gained by privatising [...]
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