British television news channels should no longer be required to meet strict impartiality standards, according to one of the government’s own broadcasting advisers.
Lord Grade, the former BBC chairman who was this week appointed to a panel advising ministers on the future of public service broadcasting, said it was an “anomaly” that the UK still required news broadcasters to meet impartiality rules given the variety of opinion in other parts of the media.
“I don’t see why the Daily Mail shouldn’t have its own news channel with its point of view, or the Financial Times, or the Mirror, or the Sun, or anyone with a point of view,” he said. “It seems like an anomaly to me: do we still need licensed news providers? It’s a bit odd. That seems like a relic of a bygone patrician age.”
He told a conference organised by Freeview that there was still a place for some regulated news providers but that the direction of travel was clear: “We are moving inevitably toward relaxing the rules on impartiality.”
His comments come as two rival outlets race to launch more opinionated Fox News-style news channels in the UK, with the Andrew Neil-backed GB News competing with an unnamed effort from Rupert Murdoch’s News UK.
Lord Grade, who sits in the House of Lords as a Conservative peer, had a long career in British television including stints running Channel 4 and ITV. This week he joined a ten-strong panel appointed by the government to advise on the future of public service broadcasting, which also includes several former Tory party advisers and Facebook’s European boss alongside representatives of independent production companies.
At the moment the UK’s public service broadcasters – BBC, ITV, Channel 4, S4C and Channel 5 – have tough regulatory requirements to produce quotas on certain types of programmes in return for their prominent slots on television sets. However, the competitive advantage of prominent distribution on traditional television sets has been weakened in recent years by competition from the likes of Netflix and YouTube.
Grade that it was “not necessarily” the case that public service broadcasting needed to exist in its current form at all. Instead the emphasis should be on finding a way of producing a “supply of British programmes by British producers with a British audience in mind”.
He also said he could not see how Channel 4, which relies on traditional television advertising for the majority of its revenue, can survive in the long term, despite its recent financial bounceback: “I worry about it for the long term – it is a very challenged model. I think the pressure to privatise will be quite great and will go on and on.”
