Political power and media go hand in hand

The white paper made it quite clear that power and Ofcom would go hand in hand: "It is important that Ofcom has sufficient powers to carry out its duties," it stressed. "It has to be able to take tough action when necessary and to ensure that regulated companies take the action which is required of them."46 And yet getting to grips with the types of power relations and degrees of regulation associated with Ofcom's arrival on the UK media scene is by no means a straightforward matter. Some, such as David Hesmondhalgh, have intimated that Ofcom's stance is in fact deregulatory, demonstrating a shift, if anything, towards self-regulation. Ofcom itself would doubtless concur: among its founding "Regulatory Principles" one finds its commitment to "operate with a bias against intervention" and, where intervention is required, to administer "the least intrusive regulatory mechanisms." 49 And certainly in particular areas, Ofcom can indeed be seen to be actively deregulating the market (for example, in releasing more spectrum and removing specific content obligations).

But it would be wrong to conclude that such individual deregulatory gestures amount to a loosening of the controls and powers ranged around the UK media. For one thing, most industry participants would argue that despite its purported "bias against intervention," Ofcom actually remains highly and consistently engaged and directive. Jonathan Thompson, until recently the Head of Strategy & Research at Channel 4, is broadly representative in his assertion that "Ofcom still feels like a very interventionist regulator." For another thing, interpreting the removal of specific regulatory ordinances as a sign of a moderation of power would, I argue, be to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the power relations in play here. This latter suggestion requires careful amplification. Often power is not just, or not even mainly, about handing down dictates and expecting and enforcing observance. Instead power inheres-as Mitchell would say (after Foucault), but here articulated in the words of Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller-in "the complex of mundane programmes, calculations, techniques, apparatuses, documents and procedures through which authorities seek to embody and give effect to governmental ambitions." Power is capillary, continuous, dispersed; in short, it is disciplinary.

The field of power in which Ofcom is implicated and itself operates consists, to my mind, precisely of such "programmes, calculations, techniques" and so on. Hence Thompson's revealing speculation that Ofcom feels interventionist "partly because they are reviewing absolutely everything," referring here to the multitude of market reviews and consultations that Ofcom continually initiates and to which industry participants are required to continually respond. Indeed, we would do well to note in this regard that the white paper's promise-"Ofcom will have a duty to keep markets or sectors under review"-has since escalated into the more overwhelming, and demonstrably more accurate, "Ofcom will research markets constantly." There is, I therefore want to suggest, an apparent incongruence between the rhetoric and reality of recent UK media regulatory reform. On the one hand we are confronted by terminology such as "least intrusive," "a bias against intervention," and all sorts of other free-market patois. But I have suggested, and will go on to demonstrate in more detail, that if we are prepared to conceptualize power in its disciplinary guise, then the government, through Ofcom, can actually be shown to have increased the level and intensity of regulation to which broadcasting industry participants are subject. At the same time, it is important to emphasise that in reality the incongruence I refer to here is only a superficial one. That this is the case is apparent when one reviews the key findings of the burgeoning literature on mutations in late-twentieth-century neoliberalism. To be sure, neoliberalism is typically associated with strident free-market policy and the removal of regulatory institutions. But neoliberalism has been shown to wear different faces at different times and in different places. So-called "roll-back" liberalism is certainly one such face (and perhaps the most immediately recognizable). Another, however, is what Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell have described in an influential essay as "roll-out neoliberalism." This, in short, often means more regulation. And it is within this neoliberal "tradition," I think, that we can better situate Ofcom. Peck and Tickell identify this tradition as comprising "the purposeful construction and consolidation of neoliberalized state forms, modes of governance, and regulatory relations."

The exaggerated disciplinary nature of the powers now exercised in the UK media sector is especially clear, to my mind, in Ofcom's twinned emphasis on expertise and "evidence-based" arguments, which sharply distinguishes it from the legacy regulators. For such an emphasis, as has been widely documented, is a typical feature of regimes of modern governmental power. Reviews, reports, appraisals and benchmarking studies: all are avowedly "evidence-based," and all are pivotal to powers of discipline; they are not "the outcome of a neutral recording function," but rather methods "to make the domain in question susceptible to evaluation, calculation and intervention." And the marshalling of "expertise" has become a basic prerequisite of, and handmaiden to, such methods. Not only does expert knowledge make government possible, but it depoliticizes it. "Experts," as Rose and Miller argue, "hold out the hope that problems of regulation can remove themselves from the disputed terrain of politics and relocate onto the tranquil yet seductive territory of truth." Since its very inception, Ofcom has made a central play of its reliance on these two shibboleths of expertise and data-based evidence. We can start with the latter, and, once again, Ofcom's "Regulatory Principles" are unequivocal, stating that Ofcom "will strive to ensure its interventions will be evidence-based, proportionate, consistent, accountable and transparent." The emphasis on "evidence" does indeed mark a distinct break from the past: Ofcom is, says Channel 4's Thompson, "definitely more wedded to using evidence and data than its predecessors." And its quantitative bent is apparent throughout the full succession of market reviews that Ofcom has launched and acted upon in the last five years.

Political power and media go hand in hand

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