Although our official blog deadline has passed, i’ve decided to carry on….
In just under a month, The Sun will be launching it’s own radio station on the Internet. Though the mind boggles at how the contents of Page 3 might be translated into an aural medium, the launch raises serious questions about who might, and should regulate such a high profile station, with former disgraced Talksport host John Gaunt at the helm.
This pair of tits will have to stick to twittering
In his Guardian blog Roy Greenslade asks whether a new system of regulation should be bought in to fill the Internet void for multimedia content from established press or broadcasting corporations. At present, online copies of newspapers are subject to PCC codes and broadcasters are regulated by Ofcom, but a separate online-only radio station does not fit into either of the regulatory frameworks and, at the moment, would not be subject to regulation.
Greenslade points out that the Sun’s popularity and its power of influence, (plus the fact that many elements of the newspaper, such as Sport and Dear Deirdre will feature in the online station) gives it a high power of public influence and that the public may see the station as purely an extension of the paper rather than a separate entity.
One solution to the problem of SunTalk, dubbed “the home of free speech” could be to have a single multimedia regulator. However, the task of unpicking all UK online radio stations, websites, web with audio and video content would be a mammoth one, and serve to impart complicated beuracracy on to web-based media.
The PCC have been criticised in the past for having no teeth, and perhaps, as more newspapers launch unrestricted multimedia content and sister content, it could be time to review the remit of the regulator, and reform it in a way that it can offer individual protection, without restricting the generation of content, in all its various forms.
Filed under: democracies
