One pregnant sentence in the Convergence Review says, “It is important to note that the current Australian Press Council regime where members can opt out or reduce funding is not an acceptable situation.”
When the review’s draft terms of reference were released in 2010, nobody expected proposals to regulate ‘fairness’ in newspapers would form a core part of the review’s final report.
And that sentence’s claim – that voluntary press regulation is unacceptable, and regulation is necessary – undercuts the review’s repeated assertions that its “underlying approach [is] in favour of deregulation”.
The Convergence Review’s final report was released on Monday. Its task was to develop a framework whereby all media communications is regulated equally, regardless of whether it is distributed by radio, television, or the internet.
So it’s disappointing that the review got caught up in the swirling currents of vitriol between Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers and the Gillard Government.
The Convergence Review has proposed a new, mandatory agency to regulate “standards” in news journalism and commentary. In this, it offers a watered-down version of the proposals made by Ray Finkelstein in the Independent Media Inquiry earlier this year.
But Finkelstein Lite is also Finkelstein Possible.
Unlike Finkelstein’s proposal, this new body would not be a statutory authority, but “industry-led”. It would be funded by a mixture of private and government money. It would be analogous to the Australian Press Council, but no newspaper or broadcaster would be able to quit the new agency if they didn’t like the way they were being regulated – by law, membership would be compulsory.
And unlike the Finkelstein report’s proposal, it wouldn’t have an absurdly large jurisdiction. It wouldn’t catch those websites that had just 41 hits a day, or those tiny street magazines, or those email newsletters. Just the really big guys – Fairfax, News Limited, Ten, Foxtel, etc.
Indeed, the Convergence Review is a very clever document.
It avoids being too clear about what “sanctions” the industry-led regulator would have in its tool kit. And it is ambiguous as to how the regulator would enforce its sanctions. A short sentence buried in the report’s appendix suggests that enforcement would be “contractual” rather than legislative. This odd distinction raises many more questions than it answers.
But nowhere is the cleverness of the Convergence Review clearer than in a diagram which visually represents the media outlets that would fall under the jurisdiction of another new regulator – the “super-regulator” – which is to replace the Australian Communications and Media Authority. (The diagram is on page 12, for those playing along.)
Media organisations will have to meet certain revenue and audience thresholds to qualify. Those thresholds just happen to include all major newspapers and broadcasters, and they just happen to exclude all online media.
The thresholds have been drawn to make sure that Telstra, Apple and Google just fall just below them, and smaller broadcasters like Macquarie Radio Network and Grant Broadcasters pop just above. How convenient.
To be fair, this is thankfully a long way from the expansive plans of an interim convergence report released in December, which would have included everything except “emerging services, start-up businesses and individuals”.
But it’s pretty clear why the thresholds have been drawn so precisely. First: nobody wants to wake up to the headline “Gillard government’s plan to regulate the internet”. Second, and more critically: the Convergence Review doesn’t seem to have quite figured how converged regulation could actually work.
By deliberately excluding even the biggest websites, all the Convergence Review does is kick the ball down the court, and hope the super-regulator will take responsibility later.
It’s a neat way to avoid seriously rethinking the justification for old, legacy media regulations. And, given the Convergence Review’s focus on political feasibility above all else, it helpfully avoids upsetting the status quo too much.
Take for instance the Australian content requirements currently imposed on broadcasters. Sure, it would be tough to ween the culture industry off those long-standing subsidies. But it will be even tougher to shoehorn those requirements into the online world.
The best the Convergence Review can do is offer future online media outlets that provide “professional television-like drama, documentary or children’s content” an option to be taxed to support a “converged content production fund”.
Right now this is all hypothetical, because the Convergence Review draws its thresholds just above Telstra, Apple, and Google. Good decision. Another unhappy headline would be “Gillard Government to introduce internet tax”. But that is the practical upshot of its proposals … just not yet.
For the Government, the Convergence Review has the advantage of being possible to implement. It’s Conroy-ready.
But like Finkelstein’s proposal, the Convergence Review recommends a substantial intrusion into the free press.
Yes, not every little blog will be wrapped up in its regulatory arms. But it would still impose a regulatory body on newspapers, with some unspecified coercive powers, overseeing what is printed.
Don’t be deceived by the claim that the standards body would “industry-led”: it would be a compulsory regulator administering compulsory regulation. There is a world of difference between that and the currently voluntary Australian Press Council.
The authors of the Convergence Review have gone to a lot of effort to make their report subtle, not-too-obvious, politically feasible, and to avoid obviously upsetting the status quo.
But that shouldn’t be any comfort for those of us who still value freedom of the press.