Life did not exist

In The Order of Things Foucault makes the claim that until the eighteenth century ‘life did not exist’ (Foucault 1994: 128). The concept of life was not one concept among others but allowed for the construction of a new plane or ‘historical a priori’. If man had been, as Foucault notes, a political animal this was because his humanity was created through the social relations he established through speech and action. When ‘man’ becomes an epiphenomenon of life then his political being is no longer constitutive of who he is; rather his political being might now be explained by reference back to certain exigencies of life. Man speaks and works because he must live. All those seemingly radical movements of the twentieth century such as structuralism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, phenomenology and late Marxism are normalising reterritorialisations: man's being can now be explained and managed according to the exigencies of life from which he emerges. If Deleuze affirms Foucault's capacity for diagrams and relations he also distinguishes his own concept of desire from Foucault's concept of power. Foucault had argued that the late nineteenth-century discourses of life, labour and language could be transformed when literature no longer appeared as emerging from life. Literature would disclose a divergent, multiple and machinic logic no longer governed by a vital impulse (Deleuze 1988: 131). But, Deleuze argues, we can also discern these forces of the outside in transformed discourses of life.

Imagine yourself in the midst of some milieu, some process of continuous differenciation, characterised by rapidly changing events and personages, a sense of expectation – what if there is a glimpse, a shudder, a leap, something else? What if there emerges some evanescent darkness, some momentary shift invested with the misery of an onslaught of disturbing reverberations? Responding to this in confusion, perhaps you construct an Idea, a structure, a multiplicity, a system of multiple, nonlocalisable ideal connections which is then incarnated. It is incarnated in real (not ideal) relations and actual (physical) terms, each of which exists only in relation to each other, reciprocally determining each other. What is essential is the movement from ideal or virtual structure to actual incarnation, from the conditions of a problem to the terms of its solution, from differential elements and ideal connections to actual terms and diverse real relations constituting, at each moment, the actuality of time, the time of processes, of differenciation, of connections. So you slip into the construction of an Idea whose intensities produce appearances redolent of harsh wind, dark days, gloomy landscapes.

What solution does this Idea offer? It might allow you to encounter a physical Idea as the distribution of the shuddering disturbances and to go on with your life. After all, you are a busy person with a lot of responsibilities and important work to accomplish; people are listening to you, counting on you.

Opening by Abstract

My title gives right away the end toward which I am heading but which for lack of space will not be reaching in any satisfactory fashion: the cinema at once constitutes and performs or actualises a ‘fourth’ repetition. The ordinal designation is with reference to Deleuze, who as we know in Difference and Repetition distinguishes three modalities (‘habit’, ‘memory’, and a third ‘royal repetition’) whose articulated and simultaneous replay by a conceptual apparatus (or the text Difference and Repetition) is constitutive of Time itself, in all its complex, mutating and discontinuous dimensions (Deleuze 1994). The analysis that follows borrows from Deleuze with regard to two aspects of his concept of repetition: as a site of an (infinite) productivity that is implicated in its own future as undetermined and imprévisible; and in a more restricted sense, a schema of temporalising that brings time in relation with itself, makes it pass, or rather, makes time by making it pass. The hypothesis that guides the movement of passage in the text is that the cinematic apparatus (camera, projector and the archive) is a temporalising assemblage: a machine made not for representation but for making new temporal relations. A repetition therefore would be ‘fourth’ if it engendered a purely cinematic time: one that arrives (also in the sense of happens or takes place in time) for the first time with the cinema, and therefore necessarily intervenes both in history (the concept, the narrative and its time) and in the history of time.

THE COMPETING VALUES

The various rationales and objectives for regulatory intervention outlined in Chapter 2 may seem contradictory and inconsistent. They appear to start from different bases, pull in different directions, exhibit tension between each other and reach conflicting conclusions. In part, these contradictions are merely an accident of history, a reflection of the piecemeal way policy has responded to the historical development of different industries as opposed to ‘the product of rational differentiation between media within the framework of an integrated plan’ (Curran and Seaton 1997: 329). However, the very fact that no planned, medium- or long-term media policy or planning process has existed (Hitchens 1995a) appears to arise out of the failure to resolve inherent tensions and identify, if not a specific desirable destination, then at least a general direction in which to travel. The central thrust of this chapter is to seek to assist in attempts to identify a meaningful, overarching rationale for regulation of the media, to clarify - or replace - what has been the nearest thing as yet to serve as a guiding principle, the concept of ‘the public interest’.

Much regulatory activity, not only of the media, but also, for example, of the utilities, is justified by reference to a claim of the public interest. It might be expected that this basic justification would be clarified by reference to objectives that are deemed to further this concept.

Any book focused on as fast-moving a subject as media regulation inevitably risks being rapidly overtaken by events. Since the first edition of this work appeared in 1999, trends in technological development and convergence and media conglomeration have continued apace and have in particular continued to offer threats to traditional public service values in broadcasting. In an attempt to address such developments, regulatory regimes have been substantially reformed, at both the national and European levels.

This greatly revised and expanded second edition seeks to review the implications of such changes, but, in the spirit of the original work, focuses predominantly on broad underlying themes rather than fine detail. These themes have remained almost entirely unchanged and their relevance has remained as great as ever, or perhaps, in light of developments discussed, they may have acquired even greater significance. Certainly, it was interesting for us to note the extent to which the Puttnam Committee's scrutiny of the UK's Draft Communications Bill emphasised the relationship between media regulation and citizenship around which this book revolves.

Though retaining their original structure and thematic focus, Chapters 1 to 3 have been updated by both authors to reflect recent and ongoing developments. Chapter 4, though retaining coverage of the position prior to 2003 by way of important historical context, now has a substantial body of new material, written by Mike Feintuck, dealing with the position under the Communications Act of that year.

THE INCOMING TIDE

This book sets out to act as a guide for those wishing to view the landscape of media regulation and to offer suggested routes to desirable destinations. However, it is not easy to write a guidebook to an area when the incoming tide is in the process of changing the contours of the landscape, and perhaps even washing parts of it away. Observers are free to watch, with some combination of awe, excitement and trepidation, as waves of technological innovation and convergence, globalisation and cross-media conglomeration combine, and then appear to wash over, familiar landmarks on the media scene. The height and ferocity of the waves are clear from wherever the observer stands, but for those charged with regulating the media, watching is not an option, and instead they must intervene if the tidal forces are not simply to be allowed to take their course.

The first edition of this book, written seven years ago, concluded that the regulatory mechanisms then in place had failed to address the threat posed by the media revolution. The regulatory forms and practices applied had resulted in the trends of commercialism meeting with little resistance. In the mixed economy in which the media operated at the end of the twentieth century there was apparent a significant risk, if commercial trends were not addressed, that PSB and the values it represented would all too easily become marginalised. It was clear that the consequence of such a development would be the diminishment of citizenship.

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

Our view of the world is arguably influenced more by the media than our personal experience. We rely to a large extent on both the broadcast and printed media as communicators of politics, of culture and of ‘information’, and, as such, the media exercise great power in our lives.

Though both the ‘popular’ and ‘quality’ press continue to exert influence, increasingly the broadcast media of radio and especially television have come to the fore. As long ago as 1967, it could be seen that ‘television can be shown to stand out among mass media in its influence on our lives’ (Blumler and Madge 1967: 5) while thirty years later television was said to have become ‘the defining medium of the age’ (Herman and McChesney 1997: 2). While technological and commercial developments continue to change our viewing habits, there is little doubt that television viewing remains the central media experience across the globe. There is a real sense in which some combination of ‘reality TV’ and live news feeds has truly come to represent reality for many viewers. With this in mind, it is both inevitable and proper that the focus of a study of media regulation should be pre-eminently on television, though, as will become apparent, even television exists in an increasingly multimedia and cross-media environment.

INTRODUCTION

Previous chapters have considered values, objectives and some of the mechanisms utilised in regulating the media, and have noted the democratic requirement that power, whether public or private, should not be unlimited. They have not, however, in general focused on the limitations placed upon those who exercise regulatory power. In this chapter, the focus is shifted from predominantly structural regulation of media markets to focus on the activities of the media, and those who regulate them, from the perspective of accountability.

Liberal-democratic expectations such as freedom of expression and property rights may appear generally to have militated against strong regulation of the media in such a way as to override competing democratic claims for pluralism, diversity and equality of access to the media. That said, regulators have undoubtedly exercised, and no doubt in the future will continue to exercise, wide-ranging discretionary powers over the democratically significant media. The examples considered in Chapter 4 appear to suggest, however, that such powers are not always utilised in pursuit of clearly identified objectives.

In the previous edition of this book, criticisms were made of the existing arrangements for a number of regulatory bodies. The Communications Act 2003 hailed a major institutional change as a wide range of regulatory activities relating to the media were brought under the auspices of a new regulatory commission - Ofcom - which now largely exercises regulatory control over both the infrastructure of broadcasting and the content of broadcasts. In addition to Ofcom, there are a number of other bodies which still remain.

INTRODUCTION

Noted earlier has been a tendency for incremental and ad hoc reform of the regulatory regime applicable to the media. The advent of the Communications Act 2003, a massive and closely scrutinised piece of legislation, might seem to be a more radical overhaul of the UK's media regulation regime, and it certainly represents a significant landmark. However, though of great and obvious significance in terms of its reform of the institutional framework of regulation, in particular through the establishment of a new super-regulator, Ofcom, on closer inspection it might be thought that the new regulatory framework established by the Act has not adequately addressed the questions of principle, and in particular citizenship interests, highlighted in previous chapters. Indeed, the Act's emphasis on ‘light touch’ regulation might even be thought to serve to marginalise such interests still further.

In this chapter we offer a brief overview of the historical legal framework for regulation prior to the Act before going on to identify the key reforms and to consider their impact on power and accountability in the regulatory regime and some significant developments since. Our emphasis here will tend to be on regulatory design, the location of regulatory power and accountability in its exercise, while in the next chapter we will turn to consider the impact of the revised regulatory framework on certain aspects of the control of media outlets, of the media infrastructure and of broadcast and published media content. Our overall objective here is to consider whether the Communications Act 2003 in general represents any significant advance on what went before.

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter we seek to offer an analysis of the framework of media regulation in the UK which gives appropriate attention to the increasing significance of developments emanating from Europe. We have emphasised earlier the huge changes in media regulation and its context which have occurred since the appearance of the last edition of this book in 1999, and in that time there has been in particular a considerable expansion in the role of the EU, driven in the main by technological developments in the media sector. The same period has also seen a significant increase in the extent of self- and co-regulation in the media. These phenomena raise a range of important issues which have come increasingly into the spotlight over the last seven years, and demand much closer scrutiny than hitherto.

The role of the UK courts in the regulatory process, while still relatively weak, has also expanded in the media sphere over recent years. The impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), particularly in relation to the regulation of media content, has been significant. We have seen that the promulgation of Ofcom's ‘Content Code’, along with a number of other measures, have been impacted upon by the implementation of certain of the rights in the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law by the HRA.

THE MARKET AND PUBLIC SERVICE

Underlying the foregoing discussion has been a tension that will run through the rest of this work, namely the struggle within broadcasting between market and public service values. A failure to identify, acknowledge and address this tension is likely to undermine any attempts to regulate. The public service tradition in Western Europe has served to insulate the media partially from what are perceived as the worst excesses of market forces. Certainly, European (and especially British) television output as a whole has historically been generally compared favourably, in terms of diversity and quality, with the US equivalent which has developed in the absence of a strong PSB tradition. That the insulation from market forces in Europe has been only partial, however, is evidenced by the experience of Italy, where the rise to dominance in the 1980s of Berlusconi in commercial broadcasting occurred in a regulatory vacuum which allowed the marginalisation of the public service tradition, representing what Humphreys describes as ‘a case of market faits accomplis in the absence even of formal or symbolic regulation’ (Humphreys 1997). A similar, though less marked trend is perhaps also suggested by the arrival of the then Channel 5 in Britain in the 1990s (now known as Five), though the latter example must be viewed alongside the continued existence of four other channels which remained essentially within public service traditions.