Media

Richard Eyre, mediaweek.co.uk, 30 June 2009, 10:55am

Digital Britain is first joined-up policy for the digital age

Stephen Carter's Digital Britain report was immediately dismissed by one newspaper as "more of a sketch than a blueprint". There is certainly more work to do, but criticising the baby for immaturity after a gestation of only nine months is irrational.

Richard Eyre is a media pluralist

To have curated such a widely inclusive discussion and emerged with a set of coherent proposals on each of 83 interleaved subject areas is remarkable.

The work does not body swerve the big ideas: shuffling spectrum to permit mobile data growth, committing to DAB, protecting copyrights and, most notably, the historic proposals to equip the UK with a broadband network capable of delivering moving pictures to every home and making a fixed share of the licence fee available outside the BBC.

Understandably, the BBC has rushed to protect its money. It's an argument it will lose, simply because it's not the BBC's money, but ours. The corporation's defence is not knee-jerk revenue protection, but the more philosophical notion that this step impugns the BBC's independence. Frankly, it's too abstract to carry public opinion.

Channel 4 should be pleased with a report that recommends its diversity and innovation be secured by merger and expanded beyond television.

Meanwhile, ITV and Five are granted the freedom to wind down their public service contribution to the bare minimum - original productions and news. Anything else they contribute to the sum total of public service will be an offshoot from doing their thing for their shareholders. Let's not hold our breath, although both would be daft to abandon reach in a rush down-market.

The headline legislative framework for media in the UK today is the 2003 Communications Act. This thinking was developed before social networks existed, when online culture was somewhere else and the convergence of media was merely a prediction.

Digital Britain will beget new legislation that, for the first time, comprehends the full media ecosystem. And Carter, the only member of the Government to have mastered the interrelating components of the UK's digital future, will leave.

This is a shame, as the discussion is far from over. The broad range of organisations affected by the report will continue arguing their own books, some of them desperately hoping the Tories can be persuaded to rewrite it. They'd be out of their minds to do so.

Digital Britain may be a sketch, but in it we can make out the features of the first joined-up media policy for the digital age.