Speeches by Hinds.

“I will pick up on that and ask this question to Theo specifically. Public service broadcasters are a given for this prominence regime. Your members, rightly, might find it unthinkable that the BBC and Channel 4 could be given prominence but not The Telegraph and The Guardian—I do not know if they are your members, but …”

“They may well, but the organisations that all three of you represent use content that has come from someone’s camera phone in a breaking news situation, and that is part of the report. There is a whole sector on the internet of people who do exactly that. They call themselves citizen journalists.”

“I think that is probably a given; we would expect the BBC, Channel 4 and ITN to be included. My question is: what do you expect to be included with them?”

“For what it is worth, I am very much in favour of this provision in the Green Paper. I think that it is a fundamental change that we need to make in the algorithmic serving up of content. But when you come up to reality, the difficulty is knowing exactly how you do it. Whether you or not agree with their definition, ha…”

“I do not want to try our Chair’s patience too much, but another thing in the Green Paper is the possibility that PSB and PSM providers might have some enhanced duty to promote media literacy. What would that look like in practice?”

“You would expect that to be included?”

“I am asking you. The Green Paper sets out something that says public service media is a yes, and I think it also says “potentially” a range of trusted news sources. That word “potentially” obviously does quite a lot of work, and the word “trusted” does a lot of work in that sentence. What would you expect to be include…”

“Let us just take it as read that it is hard. The Green Paper has only just come out, so it is not unreasonable to say, “We do not know yet.” In case there is a different answer to that, Martin or Magnus, is there anything you could do if you had that duty on media literacy?”

“I think 1695 was when we last had licensing of the press to define a “news source”, so it is a very difficult question. Magnus or Martin, can either of you take up the challenge of defining what should make the cut? To keep life a little simpler, let’s just talk about news for the moment, rather than content in general…”

“We had the Green Paper, “Watch this space”, last week, without a huge amount of fanfare, although it seems that it may be quite significant. On the technical stuff, and this 2034 or 2044 question about IPTV, what would be the pros and cons and commercial risks at either end of that scale?”

“To summarise, you want it to be as soon as possible—”

“I love the idea that there is a tranche of elderly people who have been waiting for voice control to use digital television—maybe it is true.”

“And 2034 is the earliest mooted date.”

“Sooner or later?”

“Sorry, my facial expression was not saying that I thought that was impossible. Most people are online, including old people.”

“Okay. Martin, do you agree with that?”

“On the pros and cons, can you mention more of the cons?”

“I am going to have another go, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage) did. A billion pounds over three years sounds like a lot of money. The simple mathematical question is, is that £1 billion over three years more or less than the amount for a comparable three-year period, starting just befo…”

“They may well, but the organisations that all three of you represent use content that has come from someone’s camera phone in a breaking news situation, and that is part of the report. There is a whole sector on the internet of people who do exactly that. They call themselves citizen journalists.”

“Do you not think that a line must be drawn? They are going to do it for the public service broadcasters—that is now a given—so the question is whether what we used to call the print media, and other news sources, are in or out alongside them. If they are out, that does not seem like a particularly fair competition for …”