Are Community Radio and Local TV Public Services?

Very shortly Local Digital TV will launch on Freeview. The forty or so services resulting from the first and second round of licenses should reach 50% or more UK households by 2016. Community Radio already broadcasts widely. The BBC are supporting the launch of Local TV with 25m - 20m for transmission and 5m to support news programming. Meanwhile the UK Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Committee has invited responses to its new inquiry: The Future of the BBC. Not least, they wish the license fee payers to address these two questions ... Is there a case for distributing funding for public service content more widely beyond the BBC? and What comparisons can be made with the provision of public service content in other countries? Here in Scotland, ahead of the Referendum we might add a third question ... Should local and community radio and TV be regulated more locally, in the nations and in the local/community transmission areas? By exploring that third question we can provide possible answers as well as demands to address those two questions the Committee has identified.

So with licence fee money underwriting the core local TV news service, should local TV become a local public service? STV who won the Edinburgh and Glasgow local digital terrestrial (Freeview) franchises but avoided any difficulties as to whether a commercial regional TV company should be gifted license fee money for anew service, by not applying for the BBCs fund worth almost 500k over three years. In turning this money down STV does not need to share its local news clips with the BBC. However the unintended or intended consequence of this that a genuinely independent local TV sector in Scotland is deprived of public funding and a partnership with the BBC as broadcaster? Building competition to deliver quality news is thwarted not encouraged. Ofcom should not have awarded the local TV licences to the regional TV operator, not least because the regional licences are being rolled forward without competition. Ofcom consolidates monopoly under the name of competition regardless of known and proven demands for an independent TV sector in Scotland. For its part, so far, the BBC has rejected the suggestion that the 500,000 support for local news should instead be distributed to support genuine local TV services operating in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The BBCs view is

that if the Glasgow-Edinburgh money is spent at all it should be divided among the local TV licensees/ Other than STV all of these so far are outside Scotland. Of course what the BBC is allocating is license fee money and this is received pro rata from all UK homes, with 8% or more from Scotland. So the alternative spending should be to encourage news by independent suppliers that can also be carried on BBC Scotlands services. Ofcoms decision to award the local TV licences to the regional commercial company and the BBCs decision not to think a little more carefully about how that public money might be spent in Scotland undermines independent local TV news speaking of alternative voices. In a round about way Im inviting those delegates today with an interest in small scale, community, social enterprise or local media to think about why local and community TV should be answerable to the BBCs London focus of view Ofcom in London should determine local news priorities in Scotland. A thirty year old argument remains, why arent those local areas seeking and receiving community scale radio or TV the site of regulation for those services.

If you were thinking a little further, why isnt local and community radio and TV a priority for devolved broadcasting for those on both sides of the Independence debate? A counter argument for localism in community and local TV media is that the persistent problem that hampered our ambitions has been cracked: by using the Internet for radio and TV. In fact, has the global transgovernmental solution to deliver geographical localism or support for communities of interest made irrelevant the national regulation and so made less necessary local regulation of broadcasting? We can ask whether community media needs the regulated radio waves to distribute but perhaps more interesting in terms of policy and the location of regulation is that the virtually non-existent regulation of the Internet makes a mockery of regulation of identical channels served by transmitter? The open communications model represented by the Internet seriously threatens the State regulation of communications. Radio was initially regulated because its first use as ship to shore communications had not only great naval and maritime but defence potential. Popular radio was regulated as a national public service, remained so in defence of commercial cherry-picking. It doesnt take much imagination to
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realise that land based transmitters had to be rolled out so that from the start radio (and later TV) was a local phenomena built up area by area to provide a national service. Digital Freeview continues to rely on the early analogue transmitter sites. While TV channels have grown all these channels are neither local, nor national (in the sense of Scottish in this case) but UK wide with sub-divisions dictated by the early analogue configurations rather than by nations. Wales is the exception where services costing 100m per year address welshness. Technically, satellite offers a far more efficient way of delivering the large UK or European scale of service. We find that government and regulation hang on to terrestrial frequencies that can be best used locally that is, near to each of the 1150 transmitters and relays required to deliver a national channel to almost all homes. The determination to retain the terrestrial frequencies for national use, for a myriad of largely unwatched channels, is a policy that can best be read as a determination to deprive local communities of a say over what they would like to see. Ofcom is required to ensure that frequencies are used effectively and efficiently, whereas Ofcoms has determined the exact opposite: that incumbent inefficient use of spectrum should be maintained in order to retain national regulation.
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These arguments have been made regularly since 1990. The case for local and nation based regulation has been made by the regulators themselves going back to the 1970s. Commentary of these papers can be found in submissions written originally for the Scottish Broadcasting Commission and later for the Calman Commission on Scottish Devolution. They are mort easily found in the Common Weal Library of the Jimmy Reid Foundation, http://scottishcommonweal.org/portfolio/devolvingbroadcasting-wireless-broadband-and-spectrum-allocation-making-a-casefor-devolution-and-subsidiarity/ The view held in these studies in Scotland is that frequency use can only assessed for effective use and efficiency if the signals produced are received and (in the case of TV) watched. If large swathes of signals are used to broadcast services with few viewers the system of regulation is also called into question for its effectiveness in upholding its responsibilities under the 2003v Communications Act. In an experimental broadcast in 1996 the Television Trust for Scotland distributed a live concert from Craigmillar High School in Edinburgh down the UKs ISDN network into Europe along mostly inferior analogue copper. The the signal was sent as a telecommunication (not a broadcast) from

Edinburgh to Berlin. In Berlin the Offener Kanal the citys open channel switched the signal across its cable network so that the concert reached 3 million homes. The quality was appalling but the impact was astounding. The Trust was demonstrated a freedom of communication available to those producing programmes within Berlin and also made elsewhere and Berlin. This was a freedom of expression outlawed for local or community TV in Edinburgh (or in any part of the UK). In another experiment the Radiocommunications Agency approved a transmission the Independent Television Commission refused. The impasse was settled fifteen minutes before transmission when the Secretary of State threatening imprisonment if we went ahead with transmission. In another example over 100 licences were sought by the Institute of Local Television to run local text-based TV services. The regulation of TV services that were mostly without pictures was more relaxed and did not require an Independent Television Commission license. These applications were withdrawn only on the promise from the Home Office to deliver local TV in the next Broadcasting Act. Twenty years later that promise remains grudgingly and poorly fulfilled. These and other interventions by the Edinburgh Television Trust and Institute of Local Television took place throughout the early 1990s mostly

in and for a pilot Edinburgh local channel. They sorely tested the regulations and teased the Government to come clean on the purpose of monopoly central regulation. This mixture of academic argument, ridicule drafting amendments for parliament led to the provisions for local TV in the 1996 Broadcasting Act and much later (after further and wider pressure) to the introduction of local digital TV licenses on Freeview. In a moment of frustration in the mid 1990s, the Home Office advised that undoubtedly local TV was both possible and wanted by the public but that once given there was a real fear in Government it could not be removed. There are echoes in of contemporary nervousness towards regulating the Internet after the event. In a broader sense, what we understand as freedom is that it can be lost only when held. A freedom not provided is unknown and therefore much more difficult to express and campaign for. In many northern European countries including Germany the responsibility for unlawful content in community broadcasting is focused upon the person making the programme and not on the service itself. In the UK the monopoly of central regulation and government can apply pressure and influence upon the communicator of the broadcaster to exert leverage and police the content in any programme.

In the UK the pressure is most effectively applied to the licensee to the broadcaster whereas those countries in Europe affected by post-war reconstruction followed the US model that favours freedom of expression for citizens in local media serving the local community. With Germanys Open Channels the producer or programme maker is held entirely liable for any legal offence. Moreover a portion of the television licence fee similar to the BBC funding - pays for these services introduced at the discretion of the local regions or Lande. That is nationally collected funds are devolved to local agencies who introduce services suited to the communities they serve. Here I am comparing those small and some would say inconsequential community based channels that exist in one country with an absence of such services and local regulation in the UK. By placing the responsibility for unlawful expression on the broadcaster in the UK the central licensing authority has a powerful break that can be applied to freedom and variety of expression. In the UK we might have turned the responsibility to stay within the law on the producer rather than the broadcaster with the introduction of new national commissioning-type broadcasters starting with Channel 4.

But there remains a reluctance bordering on hostility to introduce new forms of communication that have a different regulatory emphasis, that would encourage more radical and different editorial criteria. The present tight control guarantees the UK a middle-of-the-road, safety-first, same-ineach-place broadcasting service, where the BBC and ITV regional services cover much the same territory and cant dwell on stories to provide depth or insight. There is no incentive or capacity within the regulatory structure and scale of broadcasting to develop a more democratic, critical and localised networking alternative to the national view and its regional clone. Broadcasting is an iron fist in a velvet glove. The recent privatisation of the Post Office reminds me of an intervention I made in 1986 at the prospect of privatisation of services within the NHS. I devised a board-game that loosely represented an NHS Monopoly, offering those who wanted to retain the NHS as a nationalised service a fight against the predatory privateers. The Advertising Standards Agency that regulates TV advertising condemned the advertisement as being too political. They wouldnt allow the TV commercial to be aired. After much argument their decision boiled down to a view that the policies of the Government of the day were not

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themselves political privatisation was not a political policy because it was the policy of an elected Government but that retaining the status-quo or keeping the NHS in public hands was now a political step too far and it could not be supported however indirectly - with an advertisement on commercial TV. At times it is possible to step back and realise that we inhabit a world where what we see before us is a reflection and not the mirror. The mirror needs shattering once in a while before we realise that at every turn we make the mirror has been shadowing our actions. In the UK the regulation of telecommunications is excluded from prosecution for the dissemination of an unlawful utterance, say a racial slur or defamation. The offending phone conversation does not bring about the prosecution of BT or Virgin for conveying and disseminating such an offence. This distinction between broadcasting and telecoms reflected the historical case that the telephone was just a one-to-one media. But since the arrival of video conferencing and subsequently the Internet there has been a blurring of this distinction between one-to-one and one-to-many communication technologies. As a result regulation is looking daft more

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often. The separation of broadcasting from telecommunications has all but disappeared and the spread of radio and TV channels across the Internet, more and more onto mobile TV like devices and full-sized TVs too, has made the regulation of broadcasting appear arcane. Far from responding by loosening broadcasting Government and regulators have ramped p the argument that the Internet is to open and under-regulated. In Scotland we are poised for a referendum on Independence. And there are some vague noises in the wings from the unionist side to devolve more powers to Scotland should the vote on independence be No. Either way control and regulation of broadcasting and communications is on the agenda, though softly spoken. It is probably high time we thought beyond the tabloid-stirred fear that Independence or broadcast devolution would mean that the lights would go out on East Enders or Coronation Street. Of course they wont. The BBC and ITV are just as popular in Ireland as in the UK, and Ireland is a different country. How we might seek to define and separate different forms of communications and where we choose to place responsibility for different

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tiers is an interesting question that this community and local broadcasting sector deprived as it is of investment as a social and public enterprise. In the 1980s when the Institute of Local Television was established the real broadcasting issues going forward were not access to the means of production to make programmes but access to the means to broadcast or communicate those programmes. In 1987 I was running a Community Desktop Publishing Centre in Edinburgh and it was clear then that editing on computer would soon arrive for TV, although not as soon as I thought it was here by the end of the 1990s. My first book on this topic, Citizen Television, addressed how public service broadcasting might expand with the release of more analogue spectrum and the anticipation of digital channels. Should public service broadcasting look globally and offer increased access to programme choice across more national channels or possibly drill down to demonstrate its commitment to local difference and representation within the UK? By 1990 wed had seven decades in which the threat of war and the aftermath as cold war had slowly receded. The BBC no longer needed the

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pretence of national omnipotence or to practice a false-homogeneity of national unity. Research conducted by the regulators in 1989 contradicted the need for vastly greater TV choice and yet, under pressure from Government as Charter renewal drew near, the BBC mimicked the cable and satellite companies in offering greater nationally configured choice with more national channels. The alternative wed proposed in Citizen Television was for the BBC to devolve greater responsibility for broadcasting and communications to the lower tiers of governance, to the regions, nations, local areas and communities and to engage the viewer to take responsibility for overseeing the representation on television (and radio) of their nation, local area and community. In 1990 it was cable that offered the most straightforward route to deliver local and community channels on a city and borough scale. A quarter of a century later we have digital communications on cable, on mobile phones and the digital version of terrestrial TV. All of these can fully address the thwarted ambition to deliver localness with local responsibility. Whats missing is local regulation and central stimulus to be responsible.

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Local media authorisation should not be a civic or local authority responsibility just as broadcasting is or shouldnt be subject to central Government intervention. A parallel structure of locally elected independent bodies can represent those living in the same catchment as the community council or the local authority and canvas local views onb shaping the license applications every seven or so years. We achieved devolution in Wales and Scotland more than a decade ago the anachronism of a duopoly of UK broadcasting authority, Ofcom for commercial broadcasting and for the BBC for its own services remains, although Ofcoms powers now encompass some of the BBC interests. The definition of community or local should be rooted in the catchment of the service, not in a national template of what local or community should be, not in preset similar limits on what a service might provide etc. I argued in my submissions to Blair Jenkins Scottish Broadcasting Commission in 2007 and to the Calman Commission in 2008 that those in receipt of a signal should have some real authority over what they receive. As we move towards a vote on Scottish Independence we should be asking how whether the United Kingdom should be allowed a monopoly on the way we represent ourselves to each other collectively, locally and in the
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nations, applying pressures direct and indirect on what we can communicate locally, regionally and within the nations?

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