Voices on the edge

Feb 20 2008 by Our Correspondent, Western Mail

In our latest extract from the new book by former BBC Wales controller and Arts Council for Wales chairman Geraint Talfan Davies, he focuses on how we make ourselves heard as a nation

Wales has always had to fight for a voice. In broadcasting engineers have been unduly influential. Wales struggled to win a radio station technically separated from the west of England throughout the 1920s and ’30s, to the endless irritation of the peppery Scottish visionary and founder of the BBC, Lord Reith. The same pattern emerged again in television.

London newspapers outsell the two Welsh morning papers by more than six to one. Yet these British papers contain no consistent coverage of the devolved administrations (other than in Scottish editions), or much else from either country. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, London newspapers gradually withdrew all their full-time correspondents, leaving their editors devoid of any regular local intelligence.

Wales is now dropping off the mental map of editors, just as the island of Anglesey does not appear on the maps of careless graphic artists. It is rarely possible for Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish readers of London newspapers today to benchmark the performance of their own country or locality, a health trust or a school, against English data.

Does any of this matter? After all, such issues surface elsewhere in this jostling island. Yes, it does matter. In the last ten years – since the devolution referendum of 1997 – complaints about shortcomings in the media dispensation in Wales have begun to focus on the consequences for our new Welsh democracy.

The worsening situation was never more evident than during the 2007 election and its unprecedented aftermath. There was almost no coverage of the Welsh election campaign in the London newspapers. Coverage of the result was little better. On Saturday, May 5, the first morning that newspapers could report the result, The Sun, the largest selling morning newspaper in Wales, carried just thirteen words on the Welsh election – “Labour lost control of the Welsh Assembly as its devolution policy fell flat”. This trenchant piece of political analysis was buried in a story about the results of the Scottish Parliament elections under the headline “Jocks sock it to Gord”.

Wales is becoming invisible not only to the English and the Scots but also to ourselves.

These issues go beyond newspapers. In the last decade, while some newspaper owners in Britain spent £6.8bn on buying regional newspapers, a similar process of consolidation in ITV eventually saw Granada and Carlton merge in 2004 at a cost of £2.6bn. The merger consolidated ownership throughout England and Wales into one ITV company.

At the same time the regulators, first the Independent Television Commission then Ofcom, had, rather too helpfully in my view, lightened the public service load by substantially reducing regional programming obligations in England, with a lesser reduction in the other nations. The regional impact of these changes evoked scarcely any comment by media commentators, blessed as the developments were by the magic word “inevitable”.

The new superabundance of frequencies or bandwidth has led to a severe challenge to the very concept of public service broadcasting. The free market is on the front foot, loading the burden of proof onto public service providers. The citizen is fighting a rearguard action against the consumer. In the face of these inexorable pressures, how will the local voice – and the Welsh voice in particular – be sustained?

Wales needs to be more purposeful in seeking effective answers to this question. There is a need to equip ourselves rather better to participate in the debate. Rather than bewailing our powerlessness, we should seek to increase our influence.

A start might be made by writing the word “media” into the title of the Welsh culture minister and his department. Paradoxically, the fact that broadcasting is not a devolved function, gives the Assembly the freedom to roam well beyond broadcasting in exercising its “oversight” role. It would also be a reminder that the totality of media regulation need not necessarily reside in one place. It is already spread between international agencies, and between European and UK legislation. There is no shortage of distinct Welsh issues in this field.

Welsh topography creates a significantly different set of problems for transmission than is faced in England. In terrestrial television Wales, with 5% of the population, has required 25% of the UK’s transmitters. As we move to digital switchover in 2009 some viewers, particularly in rural areas will find that many Welsh transmitters will carry fewer multiplexes than English transmitters, thus delivering fewer programme channels.

In radio transmission, Wales has been a second-class country from the very start, and that is likely to persist in digital radio. Now there is talk of switching off the FM network across the UK, a policy that would be completely inappropriate in Wales in the foreseeable future.

Commercial radio in Wales has grown without any coherent strategy to guide it. Every licence is a fresh lottery. There is no commercial speech-based service to challenge the BBC. Paradoxically, this has increased the BBC’s overwhelming dominance of radio in Wales. The ecology of local radio is also more fragile than in most regions of England, making the relationship with community radio more sensitive.

The BBC and S4C will come more squarely into the firing line. Completion of digital switchover with the consequent total separation of S4C and Channel Four programming, will expose the costs and benefits of S4C as never before. The size and make-up of its audience, its relationship with the BBC and even its very existence will be scrutinised. The development of red button ancillary services and video on demand – either through the BBC iPlayer, Sky’s Sky+ technology or the broadband BT Vision service will fundamentally alter assumptions about the delivery of Welsh-language as well as English-language television.

If the ultimate test is “what is best for the Welsh language” the current institutional arrangements may survive, but they should not necessarily be a given. This will not be an easy path to negotiate, not least because of the amount of emotional capital that the Welsh speaking community has invested in one channel. But plurality and the fact that S4C is Wales’ only autonomous media institution will be important cards for it to play.

These figures also provide another context in which to view the importance of the Welsh contribution to UK networks, and the need to build economically on BBC Wales’ spectacular success with Doctor Who, but also, in the process, to tackle the issue of cultural representation of the nations of the UK on all public service channels, and not only those of the BBC.

The BBC will have its own battles to fight. The poor 2007 licence fee settlement coming on the back of the short but rashly high-spending Dyke era will create internal pressures in which regional services and their development will, if old BBC patterns are maintained, have to be defended.

More fundamentally, lumbering the BBC with the task of paying for the final stages of digital switchover will attract a degree of odium to the corporation just at the point, around 2011, when it will be having to defend itself against a more serious assault on the licence fee than anything seen hitherto. At that point the corporation will face a pincer movement between commercial interests intent on undermining the licence fee and other public service broadcasters determined to share its proceeds.

The ramifications of any of this for regional or local services are not difficult to judge even at this distance. If “contestability” for the licence fee came to pass it would represent an earthquake for the BBC, and BBC services in Wales would not escape its impact.

These arguments can, very easily, sound like a wish to return to some vanished golden age. That is not my intention. There is a more positive agenda on which Wales should concentrate and make common cause with other parts of Britain. It would embrace such things as spectrum trading, technological developments such as video on demand and Ofcom’s own pet concept of a future Public Service Publisher and, underlying it all, the potential of online journalism. These are areas where we in Wales need to develop our expertise in order to assert influence.

In attempting this, the angle of approach is all important. For decades media policy as it relates to Wales has been a process of amending British policy, with great difficulty and varying degrees of reluctance, to meet Welsh needs. Wales usually ends up as the final square on the Rubik cube that will not fit. It is surely time that we approached it from the other end in order to devise a media policy that is specifically designed for Welsh circumstances and only then to address what adjustments may be unavoidable to take account of the wider context, including the possibility of legislative change.

Such a policy would have to have considered the needs of a young democracy. It would embrace public, community and commercial services, and take print and online media into account, even where Ofcom may not have powers to intervene. It would bend engineering to the citizen rather than the other way round. Most importantly, it would need Ofcom’s assurance that it would not let go of the bird in the hand, before it has netted the two in the bush.

This is an edited extract from At Arm’s Length, by Geraint Talfan Davies, published by Seren at £12.99

Tomorrow: The fifth and final extract from the book. Geraint Talfan Davies’ verdict on devolution.