The Broadcasting Services Act and the schedules and guidelines made under it, run to more than 300,000 words.
Yet nowhere in all those words is there a simple statement that a commercial television licence holder must run a news service relevant to its licence area.
We have wads and wads of worthless words.
It used not to be so. Before 1992, a local news service was mandatory.
Now under the woolly words of the present Act and its toothless self-regulation regime, it is possible for a licensee of a television station in the national capital to abandon its local news service and keep its licence. Its local content is reduced to local advertisements and a few community-service announcements. All else is a cipher from Sydney.
Ten Capital – whose licence is held by Melbourne-based Southern Cross Media – has dumped its local news. In short, the regulatory regime has failed us.
It is the latest example of competition for competition’s sake failing to provide.
It is an example of an equally bad trend – legislative overload.
We are getting screeds of legislation which are not achieving basic objectives. The taxation Acts get larger and ever more complex while avoidance flourishes. Elegantly drafted Acts of the 1960s and 1970s have been amended and added to in a way that attempts to cross every t and dot every i, but usually fails. Take any big-ticket piece of legislation – copyright, partnerships, trade practices, broadcasting, corporations – and the trend is the same. We have gone from elegantly stated simple principles which courts enforced with purposive strength to wads of detail which cannot hope to cover every individual circumstance and through which courts have permitted artful lawyers to drive – 300,000 words and no requirement to produce a local news service.
At present the Act says: “”Each commercial television broadcasting licence is also subject to the following conditions: (a) the licensee will provide a service that, when considered together with other broadcasting services available in the licence area of the licence (including another service operated by the licensee), contributes to the provision of an adequate and comprehensive range of broadcasting services in that licence area.”
It says also, “The Australian Broadcasting Authority must, by notice in writing: (a) determine standards that are to be observed by commercial television broadcasting licensees.”
And what do the standards state? – 500 words of unenforced stuff about distinguishing between fact and comment and correcting inaccurate material. When was the last time you saw a correction on TV?
It is a self-regulatory regime honoured in being ignored. There is no requirement for local news.
The ABA has launched an internal inquiry about the closure of regional news services – they will be closing a stable door.
You can see how the ABA has failed even allowing for the burden of a 300,000-word Act. The Act demands “”an adequate and comprehensive range of broadcasting services” and gives the ABA power to make standards. But the ABA fails to include in those standards the basic requirement of a news service relevant to the licence area. It gets worse. When Prime closed its local television news in June. The ABA sat on its hands. It was a signal that the ABA had no intention of allowing its botched homework to be tested nor any intention to redraft its standards or ask that Parliament to redraft the law so the ABA had a wide general authority to demand licensees provide services like local news. It is not too much to ask given that the licensees get exclusive access to a chunk of publicly owned broadcast spectrum.
After that hopeless lapse of looking after the public interest, and Prime saving itself the trouble and cost of a local news service without a skerrick of repercussion, small wonder Ten Capital thought it, too, would make the cost savings.
Ten argued that the cost of upgrading to digital was a cause of the closure. It is twaddle. The three commercial networks and their affiliates have been given large amounts of money to cover the digital transition. And that was richly undeserved money which no other industry gets. Did the vinyl record producers get government money when CDs came along? Do video stores get subsidies for the transition to DVDs? Other industries have to weather technological change on their own.
The television networks should not have it both ways. They get access to the public spectrum. They get large amounts of public money to cope with technological chance. It is about time the public got some return.
Prime Minister John Howard announced yesterday that he would consider changing media ownership laws. That is welcome. But he must get some public return. The major networks got heavy protection and large subsidies associated with digital television. The result has been an unnecessarily restrictive system that allows only three commercial streams of programming where technically digital offered the chance of 15 or more.
Let’s have one thing or the other. We should either end present licensing restrictions so newspapers and others can stream local news services into the many extra channels made available by digital technology, thus filling the gap that the oligopolistic existing television networks seem incapable of providing. Or if the regulations and restrictions continue, let us force the networks to prove a proper service. At present we are getting the worst of both worlds.
Far from closing down what little local news we have, digital technology would allow the existing spectrum to be split so each commercial network could provide a dedicated news and sport program stream in addition to existing entertainment and drama. That it does not is the result of both sides of politics putting their own skins and existing big broadcasters’ interests above the interests of the public.