The Assembly report on what to do about the future of journalism in Wales is about to be completed – which was just the time for Prof Bob Franklin, of Cardiff University, to come to address AMs.
The language question is basically excluded from the committee’s purview – because it was a manifesto “commitment”. Therefore, to hear more about a reversal of the ditching of support for a Welsh-language daily you’ll have to wait for the next election.
But Prof Franklin got in some good points about the dumbing down which much of the Welsh-based daily media had been inflicting on us for about the last decade or so.
His weakness arose from the left-wing Guardian-style mindset he brought with him. True, in election coverage there has been a big drop is number of election stories run in 1987 compared with recent polls.
But is that because of newspapers’ commercial demands (maintaining sales); or because of “journalists’ default assumption that the election would prove boring to readers” ?
And surely those stories printed focus nowadays far more on national than local concerns because of the parties’ central control of the news-events from London; because of the pre-eminence afforded nice news-pictures for the regional evening news; and the abandonment of any hint of policy discussion, with local candidates never allowed to speak for themselves.
What could the Assembly do about the newspaper press in general ? Subsidies are given some consideration. They work and are acceptable in Scandanavia, France and Belgium. But, bearing in mind the claimed good profits earned by publishers such a Western Mail and Echo, their use would have to be carefully regulated.
Perhaps the French and Belgian offer to teenagers (“the largest group of newspaper refuseniks”) of a year’s subscription to their favourite daily (which resulted in striking improvements to newspaper-reading attitudes) could re copied.
But nothing about the London dailies in Wales. Beyond an on-line news agency – which is not much use if there’s no space available to print the stories provided because regional editions have long gone.
But – although unmentioned – one such newspaper does in fact exist. The south Wales edition of Metro does in fact on occasion change news pages regionally. And the day recently when they led one page with a story about the London underground must surely have been replaced in Wales with something Welsh.
If that didn’t happen and the replacement story was British or English, the paper was failing in its duty (is that because it is almost entirely run from London, and staff there might not have realised where Wales started or ended ?).
But tryng to influence the Metro is at least a starting point. And until the Assembly starts trying to make some difference, it won’t get anywhere, or know how far it could get.
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