Communications Bill (Nov 2002) and its Effects on the Press.

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Simon Blakeley

1st Yr Media

Communications Bill (Nov 2002) and its Effects on the Press

In November 2002 the government unveiled an update to their Communications Bill which was to be met with mixed feelings by broadcasters and journalists alike. In this essay I will examine the extent to which it has affected print journalism and the press, by looking at the views of those who know what it will do, journalists and media proprietors themselves and the MP’s involved in composing the bill.

The main worry surrounding print journalists and the press is that the new regulator of communications brought in by the government, ‘Ofcom’, will be a stranglehold on the things that are actually allowed to be written and therefore totally dismissing the concept of a ‘free press’. Ofcom exists now to protect the interests of the consumers, according to the bill, but it is uncertain as to how far they will go to do this in terms of restricting what newspapers can say. The feeling is that, with Ofcom being a government regulatory body and therefore working closely with them, the government now has the freedom to control everything that goes out in newspapers to their favour, therefore making it impossible for any paper with an anti-Labour stance, or any paper that chooses to disagree with them in the future, to do so publicly through their own newspapers.

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The government, however, more notably Culture secretary Tessa Jowell who helped devise the bill, state that the regulatory body is only there in the case of newspapers to advise the Secretary of State in the event of any mergers, and would not have any control over the editorial content of what the newspapers publish. However one of the many clauses in the bill gives way to the fact that any future authoritarian Prime Minister could introduce censorship to newspapers should he/she wish, therefore editorial content could easily be controlled no matter what they choose to censor.

While the ...

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