Members of the NUJ who support the aims of the young global
climate strikers, who will demand an end to the age of fossil fuels at
demonstrations on Friday 20 September, are being encouraged to take part
in action co-ordinated by trade unionists.
A year ago, Greta Thunberg sparked the climate strike phenomenon with
her first solo protest. The cause has now been taken up by millions of
young people across the globe.
While many journalists will be at the forefront of reporting the
action taken by schoolchildren, others who support their aims can show
their support at lunchtime gatherings, assemblies before or after work
and at special meetings.
The international trade union movement strongly supports the Paris Agreement which aims to respond to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The TUC’s paper, A just transition to a greener, fairer economy, says it is crucial that workers play a role in supporting a green industrial strategy and the best way to do this is to work with unions. It said: “Our statement calls for companies and organisations moving towards a lower carbon model to put in place transition agreements – agreed with unions – that cover issues such as numbers of workers employed, pay, job security, skills and equal opportunities.”
The union’s national executive council (NEC) passed the following motion in July:
This NEC notes: 1) Reports that school pupils organising the next school students’ strike over climate change on 20 September want trade unionists to join them wherever possible – a request made concrete at the Campaign Against Climate Change meeting in central London on 20 June. 2) That one of the two motions that the lecturers’ UCU union is sending to this year’s TUC Congress is calling on the TUC to back the call for a 30-minute general stoppage on 20 September in order to back the school students’ strike.
This NEC believes: 1) The school students’ strikes, along with the activities of Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace and other organisations, have helped raise the whole issue of climate change to the top of the agenda. 2) That trade unionists should make every effort to become part of the movement calling on governments, business industry and society as a whole to do much more to prevent climate catastrophe.
This NEC resolves to: 1) Call on the membership who support the strategy to support the 20 September school students’ strike by taking the most effective activity, preferably alongside those taken by other local trade unionists. This could include actions from lunchtime gatherings, assemblies before or after work and special meetings.
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.
We’re facing a crisis at the heart of our media system – in other
words with the dominant players across our media environment – on many
different levels: of funding, of ethics, of representation and of
legitimacy. The crisis is related, in particular, to the increasingly
unequal distribution of resources in our media landscape. This is a
landscape characterised by the domination of attention, audiences and
agendas by a relatively small number of very powerful companies – both
online and offline – all of whom have close associations with the
highest levels of our political system. I don’t for a moment think that
these organisations work together as some kind of cohesive unit – indeed
I have written extensively on the contradictions of media power
and the fact that audiences and media organisations are not always in
tune with each other and that what we call ‘the media’ refers to a
variety of different cultures, routines and institutions – but
nevertheless I do think that they share some systemic features that I
want to outline.
under a third of the UK population trust the media as a wholeThere are many elements of the media crisis but I want to focus on just three. The first concerns a problem with trust. Now
classical liberal theory tells us that our independent media ought to
be crucial instruments for holding powerful bodies to account and for
representing the views and experiences of ordinary people. They are,
after all, supposed to be ‘the fourth estate’. Yet our trust in them remains low. The most recent Edelman Trust Report
shows that under a third of the UK population trust the media as a
whole. What’s interesting is that top earners trust the media far more
than the poorest – 54% to 26% – presumably because the wealthy perceive
that the media represents their interests more adequately than do the
poorest.
It gets worse though: only 22 percent of the UK population
trusts journalists to tell the truth in contrast to the 90 percent who
trust doctors to tell the truth. This means that we have far more
confidence in the ability of surgeons to operate on journalists than we
do in journalists to report on doctors – which may tell you something
about recent coverage of the junior doctors’ strike.
Some people will tell you that this is as it should be: if
journalists are liked, then it means that they’re not asking the tough
questions which ought to make them unpopular. But this seems to me to be
the opposite of what’s happening. To the extent that we don’t trust our
news media, it’s because we feel they are far too intertwined
with the power they are supposed to be reporting on – that for every
Leveson Inquiry, there are far more opportunities for Rupert Murdoch to
pop into 10 Downing Street (as he did 10 times
in the last year) or to pop next door to speak to the chancellor George
Osborne just before the BBC licence fee deal (as he did twice);
and that for every MPs’ expenses scandal, there are far more occasions
when our news media amplify, or at least fail to challenge, a
comfortable consensus around, for example, the legitimacy of airstrikes
or Jeremy Corbyn’s alleged inadequacies or the need for austerity. To a
degree that ought to be a matter of public concern, the media are
institutions with and of power.
The second element of the crisis concerns the rapid growth of
commercial media at the expense of public media. In other words the
embedding of a market logic in communications and the weakening of both
public institutions and public accountability – the consequences of
which I have written about recently in openDemocracy.
The third feature of the crisis in media concerns the ‘evisceration’
of the meaning of key policy objectives by neoliberal actors. We can
see this in particular in relation to debates concerning media pluralism
and press freedom. Pluralism is the concept that’s used in Europe to
denote the fact that we need to have a sufficient number of outlets that
support a range of diverse voices. This is supposed to be a
foundational principle that does two things: first, to provide citizens
with a full range of information and, second, to break up undue
concentrations of power. But recent policy debates have been dominated
by a commitment to secure pluralism that sees it not in terms of the
fair distribution of media power but as overwhelmingly related to the
promotion of consumer choice: of maybe making the menu a little longer
but not really looking at what is on the menu itself.
There is a similar evisceration of the meaning of press freedom
whereby the ability of journalists to hold power to account through
independent investigation and to secure their citizens’ right to know
has been squeezed by a new determination to associate such liberties
with the rights of corporations to speak as they wish. In the UK, there has for the last few years been a fierce – and thus far highly effective – backlash
against government proposals for a new Royal Charter on press
self-regulation led by newspaper proprietors claiming that they and
their titles are the only guarantors of press freedom. This is
despite the fact that it was their activities – the industrial scale
phone hacking, the privileged access of proprietors to politicians, and
the press’ refusal to tolerate a fully independent audit of its
activities – that have so massively lowered the credibility of many news
organisations in the public’s eyes.
how do we restore public trust,
curb the power of unaccountable groups to dominate media spaces and
introduce more robust policy principles?So, what do we do about
these problems: how do we restore public trust, curb the power of
unaccountable groups to dominate media spaces and introduce more robust
policy principles? Well this is where media reform comes in as we need
to do three things: to be the media, know the media and change the
media.
The first dimension of media reform acknowledges that if publics
cannot rely on the most powerful existing instruments of media to
adequately represent their lives as they are lived and to hold power to
account, and if we have online environments which are all too often
replicating the monopoly structures and commercial orientations of the
analogue systems which they were supposed to have replaced, then we need
to do something different: to make our own media, to tell our own
stories and to highlight our own voices. This relates to the theory and
practice of alternative media which draws on participatory accounts of
democracy to produce media that better engage with and reflect
the diversity of the population. Alternative news outlets, for example,
aim to produce content that goes beyond what they see as the false
objectivity of mainstream news while community media tend to avoid
sensationalist and commercial formats with voices and methods that seek
to be more democratic and to talk in the language and register of their
audiences.
The second response to the problems we face is to better understand
the content, practices and structures of established media structures.
This, of course, is at the heart of the field of media studies – a
discipline that has long been dismissed as a ‘Mickey Mouse’
subject filled with ‘sub-Marxist gobbledegook.’ By encouraging critical
readings of popular texts and institutions, media academics aim to
grasp the complex dynamics of these hugely important structures except
that we are then accused of glorifying the trivial, the temporary and
the talentless.
But we’re also told the opposite: that we – media academics – are
glorifying something much worse. Social services in one London borough
recently produced a leaflet
aimed at combating signs of radicalisation arguing that “showing a
mistrust of mainstream media reports” could be evidence that children
are being groomed by extremists. The only radicalisation strategy that
interests me in my work is one that relates to cultivating the ability
of students to think independently and critically and not to take for
granted the symbolic mechanisms that attempt to render certain stories
natural and familiar: for example that men are natural ‘experts’
given their systematic over-representation in appearances on broadcast
news or that benefits claimants are ‘scroungers’ as we have seen in a
whole slew of ‘poverty porn’ programmes.
Yet, as valuable as alternative media and critical knowledge surely
are, I would nevertheless claim that they are insufficient without a
strategy for radical change. Why? Firstly, there is a risk in equating
‘being’ the media with ‘freeing’ the media. In particular, the emphasis
on alternative communication networks and horizontal forms of
organisation has led to a failure to confront in any meaningful sense
those concentrations of media power with huge symbolic influence and
institutional resilience. Todd Wolfson’s fantastic study
of what he describes as the ‘Cyber Left’ – networks of individuals
involved in Indymedia Centres and the Occupy movement – is particularly
instructive here. While welcoming their energy and their contribution to
cycles of protest, he argues that the ‘Cyber Left’ were ultimately
unsuccessful due to a number of shortcomings including a failure to
consider capitalism at the systemic level, a tendency to prioritise
technology over social relationships; an underlying resistance to all
forms of hierarchy and leadership that weakened their capacity for
effective action; and finally a failure to involve and mobilise all
individuals irrespective of their backgrounds and networks.
Second, even the most sophisticated understanding of the cultural,
political, economic or philosophical dynamics of media institutions and
practices doesn’t provide any kind of guaranteed challenge to the
existing order of things unless it is complemented by and feeds into a
wider political strategy of active opposition. We need therefore
creativity, knowledge and activism if we are to produce different and more accountable forms of representation through our media.
For that reason, together with colleagues from the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, I helped found the Media Reform Coalition
following the phone hacking crisis in 2011. Since then, and in
conjunction with a variety of other groups, we have been campaigning
against abuses of media power and for changes to media ownership rules
both to check the power of the largest groups and to give marginalised
voices better representation and funding.
More than ever, we need to adopt fresh policy frames and new
strategies that are more concerned with principles like equality, social
justice and above all a redistribution of media. That doesn’t mean we
need to junk everything in our regulatory toolkit but we do need to ask
tough questions about what will work in an era of concentrated private
and state power. To what extent does industry self-regulation that
depends on large organisations monitoring their own behaviour adequately
protect the public interest? To what extent can ministerial or
parliamentary oversight be relied upon when political and media elites
are increasingly intertwined? To what extent can competition law protect
public services in such a heavily commercialised political and
policymaking environment?
The key debate is about how we get reform and what kind of reform we want. Joe Karaganis helpfully distinguishes between two ‘geographies of activism’
in relation to media reform. On the one hand, you have a more civil and
polite ‘consumer-rights-based model of policy advocacy’ encapsulated in
mainstream media reform strategies and underpinned by ‘liberal’
political values. This would include an emphasis on producing
parliamentary submissions, on quiet lobbying, on appealing to the best
interests of policymakers and ministers. On the other hand, you have
more militant demands for communicative justice that emerge from
movements that are particularly concerned with questions of
accountability, representation and voice in the media.
For many social movement activists, the first type of liberal media
reform – which you might describe as ‘reform from above’ – is seen as
potentially counter-productive in that activists are likely to be
incorporated into official channels and persuaded to tailor their
demands to meet the values and demands of vested interests. For seasoned
media campaigners who focus exclusively on parliament, however,
cross-party approaches and pragmatic demands are the only likely
guarantees of success when faced with very difficult circumstances. For
them, ‘reform from below’ risks alienating the very people who they
argue have the power to bring about change.
How do you address this tension between so- called ‘modest’ reform
demands and a more deep-rooted programme of transformation, a tension
that lies at the heart of many demands for change?
This is a structural and not
an individual problem – this is a problem to do with sustained
inequalities that are endemic to capitalismIt isn’t a matter of
just finding the right individuals or changing the minds of a top civil
servant. Flaws in media content and governance aren’t due to the
failures of individual journalists, programme-makers and politicians but
are a reflection of the highly unequal environments in which media
content is produced, distributed and consumed. This is a structural and
not an individual problem – this is a problem to do with sustained
inequalities that are endemic to capitalism. This means that we need to
create sufficient pressure such that those individuals who do have the
power to make the change will find it difficult to ignore our demands.
There is, after all, a world of difference between a campaign which
confines itself to parliamentary spaces and calls on a handful of the
‘great and the good’ to plead its case and one which seeks to mobilise
greater numbers of people using all the resources at its disposal.
So if we are committed to efforts to transform media systems
by campaigning, for example, to diversify media ownership, to introduce
new forms of funding for marginalised content, to oppose surveillance,
and to press for more ethical forms of journalism, then we must think
beyond those policy measures currently on the agenda. Instead, we should
investigate the efficacy of measures
such as introducing levies on the profits of the largest digital
intermediaries and telecoms groups that can be allocated via independent
decision making bodies to new voices or to groups who have previously
been unable to secure adequate finance in the media marketplace. We
might want to impose public interest obligations on our largest media
organisations, such as independent editorial boards to curb the power of
proprietors, and to introduce conscience clauses to protect journalists
from unethical demands from their editors. Indeed, we might think about
how best to institute some sort of democracy in the selection of
editors and senior executives. We might also want to investigate ways to
deal with the corrupting influence of advertising on editorial content
as was demonstrated by Peter Oborne’s resignation as chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph in protest as the title’s lack of coverage of the HSBC banking scandal.
Media reform needs to be embedded in social movements. Media reform
activists should work with anti-austerity groups if we’re to address the
very narrow consensus in economic coverage; with minority communities
if we’re to seek better representation of all the voices in
this country; and with media unions if we’re to press for more
safeguards for journalists in the face of bullying editors. Joe
Karaganis is right to point out
that “systemic change requires a social movement capable of linking
policy agendas with grassroots activism”. This isn’t impossible. We have
seen vibrant movements for media democracy in recent years in places
like Mexico City, Istanbul and Athens
in recent years where publics have mobilised against corrupt officials
and unaccountable media moguls and called for meaningful reform of the
media. The struggle to change our media has to be seen as part of
broader campaigns for social justice.
This is an edited extract from Des Freedman’s inaugural lecture
at Goldsmiths, University of London on 19 January 2016. You can watch
the full lecture here.
