Regulation and the new media
LAST weekend my 7-year-old daughter and I got out to our favourite Kapiti Coast whitebait possie.
Few things are as rewarding as taking your kids whitebaiting; standing in a river, with an eye on the mouth as the tide pulses along, pushing the matchstick-sized inunga upstream and hopefully into your net.
My grandfather told stories of catching so many whitebait in Canterbury rivers that his family used leftover bait to fertilise their garden.
We were less lucky but we ended up with two cups: enough to make two good-sized patties – a great way to start the season.
It’s old news that the whitebait fishery is under threat, a combination of overfishing, dairying and a lack of cover for laying eggs. Fishermen have talked about introducing selfregulation, but they’ve never come close to agreeing on what would be acceptable.
In the absence of agreement, there is now serious talk about central regulation, with calls from scientists for it to become a protected species and discussion around DOC preventing the commercial sale of whitebait.
This pattern of lack of consensus and inaction leading to external regulation is also happening in the media world. Ten months ago the Law Commission delivered, The News Media meets New Media, an issues paper on subjects as diverse as how to define media through to online speech harms.
The final piece around speech harms was bundled up with cyber bullying, with instructions to sort it out quickly, with the Law Commission expediting this with final recommendations a month ago.
Now the commission is going back to the main part of its issues paper – how best to regulate the news media in a digital age – with the intention of delivering recommendations to Justice Minister Judith Collins by the end of the year.
The key question is whether the Broadcasting Standards Authority and/or the Press Council should have a fresh mandate to cover new media, or whether it’s time to replace both of them with something new.
The Law Commission’s original paper proposed a new regulator for all news media, independent of government and the industry. Its reasoning was based on two phenomena – media convergence and the flaccid nature of format-focused regulators.
Once upon a time men were men, and newspapers were newspapers. They were printed on paper, delivered in trucks, read today and used to wrap spuds tomorrow.
Today newspaper companies produce content (including video, audio and user content) 24 hours a day, they distribute via websites, mobile phones, social media, electronic direct mail and a declining number of newspapers.
So having a news regulator that focuses on just broadcasters or print publishers looks pretty laughable.
The commission will likely do two things. First, it will consider if there have been any incidents or developments that might alter its original recommendations. Second, it will sift through the 71 submissions to see if that produces any convincing reasons to change its mind.
The first part will involve looking at both the British Leveson inquiry and the Australian Finkelstein inquiry. Though each is different, the two inquiries have a lot in common. Both found current regulation was not comprehensive enough in a digital age, and in the case of Finkelstein recommended replacing the Australian Press Council with a new News Media Council which will apply across all forms of media.
When it comes to reviewing the huge number of submissions, what’s clear is no two media organisations can agree on what’s needed. The Newspaper Publishers Association recommends sticking with the Press Council, but changing its name to the Media Council and allowing it to adjudicate on all media, online and offline, but just on a reactive basis.
APN seems to sit on the fence a little, recommending an enhanced Press Council model, with either a parallel or integrated Broadcasting Standards Authority (but with expanded terms to cover web and digital versions of broadcasts).
Meanwhile, the broadcasters have advocated a voluntary Online Media Standards Authority to enable them to selfregulate their online only news and current affairs reporting. When it comes to material that is both online and broadcast, it’s a bit more vague.
Fairfax Media has taken a more ecumenical approach, noting that a single regulator for digital, print, radio and TV is both inevitable and beneficial; but is less keen on it being a Government-funded regulator, something it describes as an anathema to most journalists.
There had been talk a while ago about some sort of grand alliance, but right now that’s seeming pretty unlikely based on reports of recent lobbying by paid TV which seem intent on delaying the inevitable.
If the key participants can’t agree, it’s likely the Law Commission will do it for them and push ahead its original recommendations for a new format-agnostic media regulator.
And in the lead-up to an election, it’s potentially a votewinner too. Probably more so than trying to regulate whitebaiting.
Mike “MOD” O’Donnell is a professional director and recreational whitebaiter. He’s considering moving from a Temuka scoop net to a Southland socknet. Disclosure of interest: MOD is head of operations for Trade Me, which is 51 per cent owned by Fairfax Media.