One must admire the sheer, unblushing cheek of it. In an age when the average citizen has finally prised the remote control from the cold, dead fingers of the television schedules and wandered off into the wilds of YouTube, the British government has decided that what the public really needs is not freedom, not choice, not even decent broadband, but prominence. Prominence for the very broadcasters who have spent years assuring us that everything is fine, that the institutions are sound, and that any dissenting voice is either Russian, far-right, or both simultaneously. The consultation paper—elegantly titled Watch This Space, as though it were a jaunty invitation to a fireworks display rather than a quiet suffocation of the alternatives—proposes that YouTube and its unruly ilk should be compelled to give pride of place to the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and the rest of the familiar chorus line. Legacy media, they call it. One is tempted to call it something rather less polite.
The logic, if one can dignify it with the term, is impeccable in its circularity. People are getting their news from funny little channels run by individuals who own neither a suit nor a focus group. This cannot stand. Misinformation, that dread modern plague, is apparently running riot because algorithms—those mysterious, almost sentient forces—fail to direct the bewildered masses towards the soothing, authoritative tones of Clive Myrie or whoever happens to be reading the autocue this week. Never mind that the public service broadcasters have themselves been caught in more U-turns than a London taxi driver during rush hour. Never mind the scandals, the lavish payouts, the quiet admissions that perhaps the licence fee payer was not always told the full story on everything from climate to COVID to the precise location of certain parties in Downing Street. No: the solution, as ever, is more of the same, only louder and harder to avoid.
One pictures the scene in Whitehall. Earnest civil servants, their faces lit by the gentle glow of PowerPoint, fretting over the dangerous pluralism of the internet. “The people,” they murmur, “are choosing incorrectly.” It is the eternal complaint of the mandarin class: democracy would be so much easier if the electorate would simply shut up and listen to their betters. And so we arrive at this splendidly Orwellian notion of mandatory prominence. Not censorship, heavens no. Merely a gentle algorithmic nudge—more like a bureaucratic cattle prod—ensuring that the state-approved channels float to the top while the awkward squad sinks quietly beneath the waves of recommended videos. One almost expects the consultation document to include a helpful diagram: a pyramid with the BBC at the apex and, at the base, some poor chap in his bedroom recording a podcast between shifts at the warehouse.
The irony, of course, is exquisite. Alternative media exists precisely because so many grew weary of the legacy product. For years the main channels and newspapers operated as a sort of mutual protection society: government leaks to friendly journalists, journalists provide cover for government, repeat until public trust reaches absolute zero. Then along came the internet, that great leveller, and suddenly anyone with a laptop and an unwillingness to be condescended to could have their say. The result has been messy, noisy, frequently ridiculous—and, on balance, vastly preferable to the previous arrangement. It is the sort of development that used to be celebrated as “democratisation of the means of communication.” Now it is treated as a problem requiring urgent administrative correction.
Mr DeSanto’s original post captured the mood with commendable brevity: you cannot hate the government enough. One is inclined to agree, though hatred is perhaps too energetic an emotion for the occasion. Better to offer a dry, weary amusement, the sort PJ O'Rourke himself might have mustered while watching another batch of cultural apparatchiks tie themselves in rhetorical knots. For this is not really about misinformation. It is about control. It is about the deep, abiding horror felt by the governing classes whenever the proles start comparing notes without official supervision. During times of social unrest—those awkward moments when the public proves annoyingly unconvinced by the official narrative—the need for 'prominence' becomes especially pressing. One shudders to think what constitutes 'trusted news' in the eyes of the drafters of this document. Presumably anything that aligns neatly with the prevailing consensus in Islington and the senior common rooms.
The consultation closes on 31 August. One hopes a few brave souls will respond in the proper spirit: pointing out that if the public service broadcasters were half as indispensable as claimed, they would not require the heavy hand of the state to elbow their way to the front of the digital queue. Perhaps some enterprising alternative creator will produce a video essay on the subject, complete with clips of past broadcast howlers, set to the ironic strains of Land of Hope and Glory. It would, naturally, be buried deep in the recommendations, somewhere between makeup tutorials and conspiracy videos about lizards. That, after all, is the point.
There is something almost touching about the government’s faith in its own propaganda machinery. They genuinely seem to believe that if only the algorithms can be fixed, the punters will return, grateful and docile, to the familiar comforts of the evening news. It is the same touching delusion that once led the Soviet authorities to issue stern directives about the correct interpretation of tractor production figures. The internet, however, is not so easily managed. It is a hydra: cut off one head and another appears, usually with better production values and a sharper tongue. Forcing prominence on the old guard may succeed in irritating the independent sector for a while, but it will also confirm everything those independent voices have been saying about institutional arrogance and the quiet authoritarian streak that runs through modern British governance.
In the end, this consultation is less a policy proposal than a symptom. It reveals a political class that has lost the confidence to argue its case in the open marketplace of ideas and now seeks to rig the shop window. One can almost hear the sigh of relief in Whitehall: at last, a way to make the nasty online voices a little quieter without resorting to anything so crude as outright bans. Prominence, you see, sounds so very reasonable. Like giving the best seats in the theatre to the most important people. That the 'important people' have spent the last decade boring half the audience to tears is, of course, beside the point.
The rest of us will continue watching whatever we damn well please. And if the government finds that displeasing, perhaps it should ask itself why so many have turned elsewhere in the first place. The answer, one suspects, will not be found in another consultation paper. But it will make excellent material for the next wave of alternative content—precisely the sort that no amount of algorithmic prominence will ever quite manage to bury.