This meeting/branch/conference/ believes that:
- our current media suffer from concentration of media ownership, lack of accountability, lack of independence from government and from commercial pressures and do not adequately represent a diverse range of people and views;
- a flourishing, diverse and accountable media is essential for a healthy, functioning democracy. Media plurality is not a luxury in the digital age but an essential feature of a media system in which vested interests should not be allowed to dominate;
- the levels of concentration revealed in the Media Reform Coalition’s 2019 Media Ownership report ‘Who Owns the UK media’ show we need action that will challenge blockbuster media and tech companies and the influence that flows from their dominance of infrastructure, content and distribution;
- we need independent media that are able to hold power to account and to serve their audiences and the public in general as opposed to shareholders, proprietors or politicians;
- we need a rebooted system of regulation that gets to grips with the complexities of media ownership in the twenty-first century; one that encompasses top-down measures to check the dominance of individual or corporate interests as well as bottom-up measures to support genuinely independent and not-for-profit media on the ground;
- we need a new system of regulation that addresses both the enduring (and in many ways intensifying) grip of legacy media on public debate as well as the control over news and information ‘flow’ wielded by tech giants.
This meeting/branch/conference resolves to:
- support the Media Reform Coalition’s ‘Media Manifesto 2019’ for a fair, free, accurate and representative media system that is capable of informing and nourishing the kind of inclusive public debate that is the lifeblood of functioning democracies;
- [if relevant] raise these proposed reforms at our party conference and to encourage our political representatives to push for their inclusion in our party’s policy making debates and in future election manifestos;
Please get in touch – info@mediareform.org.uk – to invite the Media Reform Coalition to speak at a future meeting if clarification on the policies is needed / for further information about media reform.
A PDF version is available here.