Last week the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) took another step towards ‘harmonised’ regulation in the contemporary digital media environment. Its position paper - ‘What Audiences Want: Audience Expectations for Content Safeguards’ - calls some broadcasters to account for inconsistent and inadequate safeguards applying to free-to-air programs, and says it is time to start thinking how these rules might apply beyond the broadcast environment.
A decade ago, the Convergence Review flagged the need to adapt regulation so that the same media content is not treated differently across the range of platforms on which it appears. Three years ago the ACCC recognised the need to address some of the imbalances in regulation applying to traditional media organisations and to digital platforms. And the former Coalition government responded by proposing that regulation be harmonised for the cross-platform environment.
ACMA’s new paper adds to this push for reform. Applying to professional content rather than user-generated content, and accompanied by research that shows the extent to which audiences have taken up online streaming services, ACMA points out that rules such as accuracy and impartiality in news and current affairs, as well as classification guidelines and other restrictions on ‘general content’, are applied by the networks to their broadcasting services, but not to the same content appearing on their catch-up (BVOD) services or their websites or to other services such as YouTube channels or live streaming. ACMA’s critique of this is based on the importance of community standards and audience expectations: ‘audiences now expect that existing broadcasting content safeguards should also apply to streaming content.’
More than this, the ACMA paper reveals how the codes of practice vary greatly from commercial TV to commercial radio and pay TV, as well as between these services and those of the public broadcasters and, in some respects, print and online news services. And it identifies some distinct shortcomings in current codes. These include the failure to regulate some practices evident from ACMA’s 2019 review of coverage of the Christchurch terror attack, as well as the current privacy protections applying to news and current affairs programs, which ACMA says might need extending to other types of content.
The paper does not propose specific new rules that should apply to broadcast or other content. Instead, it points to current and emerging issues, gaps or inadequacies in current regulation, and aspects of best practice that could be adopted as the codes are reviewed. And it highlights four principles of accountability that should be applied – transparency, participation, evaluation and complaints handling – noting further shortcomings in all these areas.
ACMA expects broadcasters who have not updated their codes of practice to begin – or in some cases, re-start – code reviews in the coming months, but it doesn’t say how this might be done for non-broadcast services that are beyond ACMA’s remit. That may well be an issue for the new government, but we might take some guidance from ACMA’s own observation: ‘In general, the more responsive an industry is to the changing needs and expectations of the community, the less likelihood of regulatory intervention’.
Derek Wilding
CMT Co-Director
This article features in our 8 July newsletter - a comparative look at Australia and Canada's approach to quotas for local content and the prominence issue for public broadcasters on streaming services, misinformation circulating about the PNG election & more. Click to read the full edition. If you want to receive this newsletter direct to your inbox, subscribe here.