Many years ago this country decided that adults should know the news. That is why the government, through the regulator Ofcom, requires television and radio to have news bulletins. Whether you listen to Heart FM, Classic FM or Absolute Country, you will get the news. Whether you like it or not. In fact you will get it quite often - Heart FM, for example, will have a couple of minutes of news every hour in the morning. That news has to reach Ofcom standards for objectivity and impartiality. There are also regulations on BBC radio - I appeared on Radio 1 Newsbeat once (great fun - you get one sentence to convey your message). The same is true for television. Whether you watch BBC1 or ITV, you will, sooner or later, bump into the news.
Of course, a listener can flick channels, mute the television or radio, or use the news slot to pop to the loo. But sooner or later they will hear some news, and know something of what is going on in the world. I think that is a good thing.
Today, however, young people do not listen to the radio or watch television like previous generations. The concept of linear media is alien in a world of Netflix, Youtube and TikTok. For the population as a whole, Ofcom report that social media outranks radio as a source of news, and is twice as important as newspapers. For those aged 17 and 18, Public First found that social media was the main source of news, with “word of mouth” - which could well be second hand social media - ranked second.
Social media news does not have to be fair or impartial. Indeed, if you click on one point of view, you are more likely to be given similar in future. Young people who feel that the world is set up in ways that discriminate or marginalise them are most likely to disappear down online rabbit holes, and so to see and be influenced by conspiracy theories that just aren’t true. Teenage girls are particularly prone - which may link to issues of girls' poorer mental health.
We should then, as a nation, require Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and so on to show news. It doesn’t have to be BBC news, but it does have to meet standards of impartiality.
This is simple for streaming services like Netflix and BBC iPlayer. For every hour that a person watches, they get a minute of news. It will occur at the start of the show, and it cannot be skipped.
For Facebook and similar, some of your feed would be impartial news. TikTok - which deserves credit for recently introducing a STEM feed tab - could hire the BBC or Global News (aka LBC) or both to make and upload TikToks, which the algorithm would ensure are widely seen. TikToks typically average around 18 seconds, which is enough to say about 35-40 words.
So here is my 38 word summary of the current BBC News lead story: “After Palestine’s Hamas announced a 60 day ceasefire, Israel’s leader Netanyahu said they would start negotiations to recover all hostages, and end the war in Gaza. He also said the Israeli attack on Gaza City would go ahead.” Is it nuanced? No. Does it convey the very basics? Yes.
30 words on the next story - “Sheffield’s Liberty Steel went bankrupt today. The government will now run the company, pay all workers’ wages and try to find a buyer. But 1500 people could be made redundant”
And 35 words on GCSE results “Today’s GCSE results were similar to usual: 7 in 10 16 year olds passed, with girls beating boys and London doing best. Resit candidates did much worse, and Spanish is now more popular than French”.
Run those three - and others - in rotation and people will know a bit more than now. That is a good thing. Let’s do it.
Yes! to this as a critical policy area. I think we underestimate the extent to which the management of our information spaces has been a critical part of maintaining a social contract; of course, it is because that management is being transformed by technology that it is being revealed. When Habermas wrote about the importance and nature of the public sphere in the 70s and 80s, it seemed like a very theoretical topic; but now we see it, I think, as foundational and practical. Our epistemic space is as much public infrastructure as our roads.
Now to specifics. My solution here would be to require a small percentage of screen space on every app - somewhere around 10% - to be filled by processes determined through democratic mechanisms ultimately overseen by the state. I think that the screen-tax is more effective in the current technology than the "time tax" that we had with linear media and that you propose extending.
How to fill that 10% screen space? A very rich set of possibilities to explore for policy wonks, it seems to me.