Governmental control of the media

"Experts who study overseas trade," the David Graham report announced, "have identified that the UK has a competitive advantage in Creative and Media Industries." The specific work cited by David Graham was an "Export Strategy Review" (unavailable publicly) written by the DTI in conjunction with the British Overseas Trade Board, which, based in turn on International Monetary Fund and United Nations data, estimated that at 3.04, the UK had a higher "Revealed Competitive Advantage" (RCA) in the Creative and Media Industries than in any other economic sector. What did this actually mean? Across all sectors, the data suggested, the UK had a 5.3 percent share of world exports; its world share in the Creative and Media Industries, meanwhile, was an impressive 16 percent, meaning that the UK was three times more competitive in this "sector" than across the economy in general. And while of course the Creative and Media Industries included television, David Graham and his team calculated that the UK's global share specifically of television export trade was "only" 9 percent (by volume).

In other words, the argument went, "judging by our success in other creative fields, the UK should have the capacity to be equally successful in television": in relative terms, television was materially underperforming. This argument carried a great deal of weight in government circles at that time, but it relied precisely on the process of enframing, labelling and "fixing"- the power of representation-that I described above. We can demonstrate this by asking the following question: why compare television's 9 percent share with the 16 percent share of the Creative and Media Industries, and not with the 5.3 percent share of the UK economy as a whole? For, if the comparison with 16 percent suggests underperformance, a comparison with 5.3 percent would clearly suggest an exceptionally strong performance. To justify the direct benchmarking only against other Creative and Media Industries (which range, we should remind ourselves, from software to fashion and from arts and antiques to architecture, and within which the UK's strongest individual export performance is in music), surely one should demonstrate first that the sources of relative competitive advantage, not to mention international trade dynamics, are closely comparable across all of these areas. But the David Graham report offers nothing of the kind (presumably because it would not be remotely possible to do so). Rather, the authoritative, homogenizing and final ascription "Creative and Media Industries" is deemed sufficient grounds for comparison. Enframing these industries-creating their autonomous being-not only gives them collective agency but makes them a singularly calculable entity.

From representation to power The second critical dimension of "enframing" flows directly on from this, and it is the one I develop at greater length here. The "representational map-ping" processes that Mitchell and Buck-Morss describe, and which the DCMS mapping project exemplifies, create a space that is not only measurable but controllable. And by "control," Mitchell means specifically the modern techniques of discipline-"continuous, meticulous and uniform" mechanisms that "infiltrate, re-order, and colonise"-that, for Foucault, constituted "the characteristic power of the modern state," an "entire politics . . . that Foucault characterizes as governmentality."36 Discipline and representation, emphasizes Mitchell, "are two aspects of the same novel strategies of power, linked by the notion of enframing." He goes on: "Disciplinary powers acquire their unprecedented hold . . . by methods of distributing or dividing that create an order or structure . . . that seems to precede and exist apart from the actual individuals or object ordered." Ordering up the creative industries, I argue, made them-in David Demeritt's words-"intelligible to and available for new forms of governmental calculation" and discipline. What forms has such governmental discipline taken in the UK's creative industries? It is, it seems to me, revealing and important that at the same time as it had the DCMS mapping these industries, the Government also had the DCMS (in combination with the DTI) working on devising a wholesale overhaul of regulation of the UK media and communications sectors. The proposals for this overhaul were developed in detail between 1998 and 2000, when they were presented to Parliament in the shape of the white paper "A New Future for Communications." The rest of this article explores the powers of regulation initiated by that overhaul. In addressing "the media," this regulatory overhaul covered what is, by some margin, the most heavily regulated and controlled area of the UK creative economy (which is partly what makes those changes so interesting).

As in many other countries, the government has always been closely implicated in the operation of the UK television and radio broadcasting industries-not least in view of the overwhelming historical importance of national public broadcasters such as the BBC. Two key points must therefore be made at this juncture. First, with the focus here strictly on the media, it is important to remember that the Creative Industries Mapping exercise did not lead to a commensurate revamp of governance in other "creative" sub-sectors. Second, while I describe the changes in media regulation as an intensification of powers, and do so in terms indebted (largely indirectly, and deliberately lightly) to Foucault, we should not imagine that power and regulation were "new" to this sector of the economy: regulation of UK broadcasting has always been extensive. Hence, what I describe here is very much a shift in regulation rather than an introduction of regulation. My argument, then, is that the Government's mapping of the creative industries, and of the media industries in particular, was fundamental to the institution of revised disciplinary powers under the auspices of the new regulator, Ofcom (Office of Communications), which assumed its duties in December 2003.43 Indeed, the white paper that set out the government's vision for Ofcom was quite explicit about this link. "The media and communications industries are growing 11 percent faster than the rest of the economy," it noted, drawing directly on the findings of the mapping project. Conjuring a discrete, independent economic body that was growing rapidly and (the fear was raised) possibly even uncontrollably, the argument continued: "It is vital that government has a clear policy framework for this rapidly developing sector, which will be so central to our economy, democratic life, culture, entertainment and education." The objective of the white paper, in other words, was to set out "how the UK should chart its way through this uncertain but exciting environment." "Charting" a way through "uncertainty": the language could not have been any clearer, and it bespoke a wider desire to both map and discipline a potentially undisciplined network of economic actors.45 This is not meant to suggest that there were no other reasons for the conception and establishment of Ofcom.

Anyone even remotely familiar with the UK media and communications industries would be able to pinpoint what was, perhaps, the main rationale: convergence. Prior to the formation of Ofcom, UK media and communications regulation was administered by five separate bodies (six if one includes the BBC Board of Governors): two for radio, one for television, one for both radio and television (the Broadcasting Standards Commission) and one for telecommunications. In a world of "converging" communications (where digital radio can be used to transmit data, telephone networks can be used to broadcast video, and so on), the argument went, a "converged" regulator made a lot more sense than the jumble of fragmented and often overlapping governance that characterized the legacy regulatory regime. That Ofcom was driven by convergence is self-evident. My argument, to be clear, is not that the impetus lay elsewhere, but that convergence alone was arguably not enough: it was a necessary but not sufficient argument. Convergence by itself may or may not have justified the time, effort and money expended on disbanding the five existing regulators and replacing them with a new one; what it was insufficient to warrant was the endowment, in and through Ofcom, of a raft of new and enhanced powers.

Ultimately, the government needed to show that the media and communications sector was not only converging but complex, large and growing, and thus in need of greater control. The white paper's appeal to the Creative Industries Mapping Document provided just such an argument.

Governmental control of the media

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