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).

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. To check more info about this navigate to Article Input. Also there you can find some vital topics like Effects of continuous hormonal infusions and more.