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Forgive me, but what would be the role of a broadcasting commission?

I think that he also said that they would not even pitch it now.

That is really interesting. Thank you.

I do not think that the Parliament as a whole is adequately debating issues such as AI, intellectual property law and the ways in which they are fundamentally reshaping our society. There is a whole sweep of aspects and we could spend hours on a separate inquiry into them. However, I want to try to put the matter into some context. What we loosely call artificial intelligence, which is not at all intelligent, is only one of a range of ways in which the media, including journalism but also broadcasting, is being disrupted and changed. They include the streaming platforms, the social media platforms and changes to the ways in which people consume what they may call news, some of which will actually be news and some of which will not.

I am curious about, in particular, the NUJ’s perspective on that. Although there is potential for new forms of proper journalism and good work including, for example, fact checking to combat disinformation, there are also real dangers that we, as citizens, will end up in a sea of disinformation, with some of us desperately looking for something reliable and many of us not knowing that there is anything reliable to reach for, and that journalists will find themselves in a period of even greater precarity, in terms of their working conditions, than they are at the moment.

You have mentioned the situation that many journalists are already facing. Is there not a danger that, unless we take a much more proactive approach to the regulation of broadcasting more generally—I am talking not just about the traditional broadcasters but about the proliferation of new technologies through which people are consuming content—journalism will become an even more precarious and insecure line of work at the very time when it is most needed?

There is a wider question about the implications for journalism with regard to the service that it performs, as well as the experience of being a journalist and the precarity involved, and about the change in the relationship between who produces what people think of as news and how it is consumed. If people think of social media influencers in the same way that they used to think of journalists whom they trusted, that fundamentally changes the nature of what is going to be produced and who is going to be producing it. If we do not regulate the broadcast media more generally in a way that has not been done to date and go beyond the traditional broadcasters, is there not a danger that we will see not just the challenges that we are currently facing with regard to disinformation and the lack of trust from viewers and listeners, but the lack of any kind of secure career path for journalists? Those problems are going to be compounded, so surely we need to look at regulating broadcasting in a more robust—and, I should say, multiplatform and 21st century—way.

Do I have time for a final question, convener?

I have already downloaded the classic-era “Doctor Who”, so I am safe there.

Do you think that that sort of thing can be defined in a way that restricts it to the BBC’s economic activity, instead of its content with regard to issues around, say, economic growth being affected?

I take the point about the regard in which the World Service and the BBC more generally are held. However, I think that we have to see its drama production, for example, in the context of the massive streaming platforms that are putting huge amounts of money into content that they know will have a global reach and a global audience, instead of necessarily telling national or local stories.

The BBC is still a massive news-gathering machine and yet, as with STV, it is not able to provide the local news content in which I think a lot of people would have the trust that you say has been damaged. Indeed, in its news content, the BBC is, in my view, not setting the agenda any more; instead, it is reacting to the context in which it sits, which is dominated by platforms that share openly racist, far-right and conspiracist content and by algorithms that push that stuff at people rather than any proper editorial content. In fact, the BBC ends up responding to that context to the extent that GB News pundits are being put on as though they were part of the legitimate commentariat, instead of the far-right cranks that they would have been dismissed as in previous decades.

The question that I am trying to get to is this: in looking at charter renewal, are we making a mistake in thinking that we can simply fix the BBC, without fixing the media landscape and taking a more responsible approach to media regulation more generally, including the streamers, the online platforms and the other places where people think that they are getting news content, when in fact they are getting whatever Elon Musk is deciding to push at them?

Thank you.