There has been much talk of speech: whether it’s free or curtailed, who feels unheard and who really is. This, and an additional smattering of BBC scandals, has made 2024 a dark year for the media.
But let’s start with some positives. The ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, about a miscarriage of justice involving thousands of sub-postmasters, captured the public’s imagination. “Why didn’t we know about this sooner?” the cry went up. In fact, the series only exists due to 14 years of reporting by Computer Weekly, Private Eye, the BBC, the Yorkshire Post, the Times and the Daily Mail. More long-overdue justice: in October the government confirmed it had set aside £11.8bn to compensate victims of the infected blood scandal. This also heavily relied on journalists’ work, including that of the Sunday Times’s Caroline Wheeler, who has been telling the stories of victims for two decades.
In September victims of Mohammed al-Fayed were properly heard for the first time in a BBC documentary. Channel 4 Dispatches, the Sunday Times and the Observer were among those who had carried reports about sexual assault and rape by the late Harrods boss. Since the programme, 90 more women have come forward with allegations.
The heavy lifting of holding power to account is still being done by trained journalists backed by news outfits in a time when it has never been harder for either to make money. Which makes bleating about the “mainstream media” – from the far left, the extreme right and every moron in between – more depressing. On 1 December, X owner and supposed free-speech fanatic Elon Musk posted: “The legacy media is pure propaganda.” If X is a public square, it’s one in which the pubs have kicked everyone out and the fights are starting. In the past two years, UK X users dropped by four million to 22.2 million, while competitor Bluesky grew by millions of users worldwide in the week after the US election.
The right excels at blaring out hateful messages while playing the victim, yet some were held responsible. In January the actor Laurence Fox lost a High Court libel case for calling two people paedophiles on X. His attempt to counter-sue the complainants was thrown out. And in October, Tommy Robinson was jailed for 18 months for contempt of court for repeating libellous allegations he’d made about a teenager. Before Belmarsh, he’d spent the summer in Cyprus, stoking the riots that broke out after the terrible killing of three girls in Southport. More than 30 people were arrested for social media posts after the riots. Those deemed to have incited racial hatred went to court, leading to jail sentences for some.
It’s been a trying year for the BBC. MasterChef star Gregg Wallace began the advent season by putting down complaints about inappropriate comments spanning 19 years, insisting his behaviour was only being questioned by ‘‘middle-class women of a certain age” – a comment for which he later apologised. In fact, both men and women, younger and older, had spoken out against him. The subtext was clear: working-class men are being silenced by middle-class, middle-aged women.
Much of this could have been avoided if the BBC and its contracted production companies had acted more robustly when allegations emerged in 2012, 2017 and 2018. Once again the broadcaster stands accused of failing to tackle inappropriate behaviour. Also this year we had a report into bullying on Strictly Come Dancing, the resignation of the Match of the Day pundit Jermaine Jenas over inappropriate messages sent to female staff members, and the conviction of the broadcaster’s leading newsreader Huw Edwards for possession of indecent images of children. Still, the BBC battles to recoup from him the £200,000 it paid him between his arrest last November and his eventual resignation in April.
At least there will be some drop in the wage bill following this year’s decision by the only two earners above Edwards, Gary Lineker and Zoe Ball, to step down.
There was also much talk about who controls the nation’s most influential newspapers. Enormous attention was focused on who would buy the Spectator and the Telegraph after the government blocked a Saudi-backed bid for them.
The former hedge-funder Paul Marshall snapped up the Spectator for £100m, installing Michael Gove as editor – and Kemi Badenoch as Tory leader! Marshall has also bankrolled UnHerd and GB News, whose digital arm this year became Britain’s fastest-growing website.
At the other end of the political spectrum, the Guardian tried to sell the Observer despite fury from staff who agreed a 48-hour strike for 4 December. Six former editors and politicians including Neil Kinnock have opposed the sale, but owners Guardian Media Group remain keen to offload the title to digital start-up Tortoise.
Amid all that, newsrooms are grappling with how best to use artificial intelligence – and fighting to be paid for their content being gutted to train AI models. As the Politico publisher Mathias Döpfner said, “Artificial intelligence has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever was – or simply replace it.” Let’s hope it’s the former. Onward to 2025, when we may find out.
[See also: The unfiltered world of Gregg Wallace’s Instagram]
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