Left Libertarian Alliance

Georg Haslam (Blog Co-Editor & GPEW Representative)

I. Concentrated Media Power

In recent months, arguments for stricter regulation of the media have grown louder, offering an increasingly tempting alternative to the current, often hegemonic, state of the British Press. From allegations of racist and ableist reporting surrounding Professor Jason Arday’s death to rapidly decreasing plurality in media ownership, the pressure on policy-makers to break up media monopolies is high. Both present and potential Members of Parliament must consider regulatory methods that could fortify, or replace, the oversight currently provided. For political parties, this question is even more urgent. I am less interested in media sovereignty understood as national control than in media sovereignty understood as the dispersal of communicative power among citizens and communities. As the LLA’s Provisional Representative of the Green Party of England and Wales, I will focus specifically on what this means for green-aligned politics.

The Green Party has committed itself to championing decentralisation and challenging wealth and influence when concentrated against the ordinary working person. The media is no exception here. Media ownership therefore transcends beyond just a regulatory issue. How our media is owned and controlled raises questions of economic, informational, and democratic power. Current regulators, including Ofcom, may be able to challenge and suppress harmful behaviours within media organisations, though their efficacy at this has been called into question. Regardless, even with effective regulation, monopolised media ownership is not itself challenged. To regulate the consequences of concentrated media ownership without explicitly challenging this concentration itself risks legitimising precisely the systems of entrenched political and economic power that Green politics seeks to dismantle.

Recently, Zack Polanski pledged support for the Media Sovereignty Act Campaign. First drafted by Donnachadh McCarthy, Liz Pendleton, and Caspar Hughes, the Media Sovereignty Act proposes to reclaim control of the media from “the authoritarian billionaire elite”. Amongst these proposals are bans on foreign media ownership, the introduction of a media sovereignty levy targeting international social media companies, and the creation of a new independent statutory regulator. But, as a left libertarian, it is the section on ownership that interests me the most.

II. Freedom versus Power

“In a sovereign nation, it is essential for a thriving, healthy democracy that no individual, family, or organisation gains disproportionate political power through an excessive concentration of ownership of the UK’s corporate media.” (Section 2 – Ownership)

The view, as articulated by John Stuart Mill, that a free press is essential to secure against government tyranny and corruption is shared by most liberals and libertarians. Yet Mill’s free press provides a different framing than that suggested by the Media Sovereignty Campaign. In On Liberty, Mill’s primary concern is protection from the suppression of opinion – or, in modern parlance, freedom of speech. Indeed, many libertarians, especially those inclined towards the political right, object to press regulation on this basis. From this perspective, the principal threat against press freedom is the coercive power of the state, and, as such, press regulation by any means threatens to replace private media control with illegitimate control run by the state. A Nozickian account, for example, places emphasis on the right of media owners to control their property, so long as it is legitimately acquired, whilst a Friedmanite defence highlights the capacity of competing private media organisations to provide a plurality of information sources.

This libertarian tradition is in sharp contrast with the Media Sovereignty Act, which demands regulation in response to the threat posed by concentrated media power. Beyond sole focus on freedom from state control, the campaign conceptualises press freedom as requiring the dispersal of media ownership so that no individual or organisation can accumulate disproportionate political influence.

My libertarian inclination dictates that state control over the media is impermissible. Yet, the concentrated system of media ownership undermines the capacity for the average individual to express themselves, restricting their ability to utilise the very freedoms that the libertarian tradition has sought so fervently to retain. Freedom of speech does not itself imply that any person has an unalienable right to be given a platform, nor that every view must be equally platformed. However, a healthy democratic society requires the construction of a communicative environment in which no individual or group can exercise disproportionate control over how public opinion is formed. Where ownership is highly concentrated, formally equal rights to speak can coexist with substantial inequalities in the capacity of different interests to shape public discourse. This suggests, therefore, that substantive media freedom must go beyond merely allocating legal permission to expression.

One libertarian thinker who extends the concept of democracy beyond merely formal political participation, and thus is useful in this conceptualisation, is Murray Bookchin. Bookchin’s understanding of direct democracy, through his politics of libertarian municipalism, requires that individuals have the capacity to impactfully participate in democracy day to day, instead of limiting democratic practices to periodic elections. The media operates as a wielder of political power. Why then should the media, understood as the fourth estate of democracy, not be organised around the same principles?

Applying Murray Bookchin’s participatory democracy to the media as an institution necessitates that a formally free press is not sufficiently free, whilst the means of public communication are limited to the hands of a small elite. The media is not a neutral forum in which individuals only express pre-existing beliefs. It actively determines the cultural landscape through which the consumer’s identity and their understanding of the world around them is shaped. Douglas Kellner’s analysis of media culture demonstrates how the media sources an individual encounters are central to forming their value systems and their conception of social reality. Thus a tightly concentrated form of media ownership constricts which identities and social realities are legitimised. In practice, this allows a small number of actors to gain disproportionate influence over social narratives.

III. Decentralising Democracy

This helps us understand why the Green Party is concerned with media sovereignty. Democratic participation requires individuals to be able to shape the society in which they live and understand the factors that influence that society. The concentration of media ownership therefore provides a barrier to such participation through limiting the range of voices available that are empowered to influence public discourse. The Green emphasis on decentralised participatory democracy must thus be applied to the media itself. Political power cannot effectively be decentralised whilst the forum through which people understand this power remains concentrated in the hands of a small number of owners. Promoting greater diversity of media ownership thus attempts to create the conditions for a more participatory and democratically accountable public sphere.

So, if state control is off the table, what is the solution?

As a left libertarian, and a generally left-wing Hegelian-inclined person, I hold that the apparent contradiction between media freedom and preventing concentrated ownership structures may be dialectically reconciled. Whilst unrestricted private ownership produces concentrated power and its associated democratic harms, state control threatens independent expression and criticism against state institutions. Therefore neither extreme adequately realises press freedom. As such, I propose that cooperative ownership provides the possibility to mediate between these modalities, ensuring free expression without the associated risks of undemocratic organisations and practices. Readers of this blog will quickly discover quite how fervently I am committed to a view of cooperative British society. This fervency comes only from a strongly held belief that co-ops have wide-reaching benefits.

Cooperatives ensure collective ownership, democratic decision-making, the fair distribution of surplus, and the accountability of the institution to its members. Just as democracy is weakened when economic institutions remain hierarchical, so too is it weakened when media organisations remain concentrated and detached from the average community member.

So what exactly constitutes a media cooperative? When many people think of cooperatism, the first thing that comes to mind is a workers’ cooperative: where the institution of employment is owned democratically by the workers. In terms of the media, this means journalists, editors, and press photographers owning and controlling the company, freed from the direction of unelected CEOs and shareholders. Thus, cooperatives create institutional conditions that are more conducive to greater editorial independence than privately-owned outlets can provide. Journalists are more able to pursue underreported and localised stories that may be of little interest to stakeholders in traditional private companies, allowing them to build a community base and develop a distinct media identity. In the long-term, this may provide a consistent and committed readership, enabling the cooperative to remain economically viable.

Moreover, the cooperative model provides an advantage over state regulation and control, as the existence of a plurality of independent cooperatives ensures journalists still retain the freedom to move between different outputs based on their interests, without placing them under a centralised authority. The pluralistic nature of these organisations allows the journalists to choose outlets and stories based on their personal and political values, whilst readers can choose between competing sources. As such, cooperative ownership can sustain editorial independence while preserving plurality and choice within the wider media landscape.

IV. Multi-Stakeholder Cooperatives

Yet, cooperatism based solely on worker democracy risks merely replacing the current billionaires with a new form of concentrated journalistic power. Worker ownership is not sufficient alone to democratise access to the media landscape. Even when journalists gain control over the organisation of their outlet, readers may still remain passive consumers who are detached from direct engagement with the media. Journalistic outputs affect more than just those who produce them. Public debates and political identities are shaped by the press, and, as such, the organisation of the media has consequences that permeate far outside of editorial offices. Thus, I propose the creation of multi-stakeholder media cooperatives. Allowing both journalists and readers to participate in the organisation and decision-making of media institutions maintains the journalistic benefits of workers’ cooperatives, simultaneously counteracting reader passivity.

Readers are transformed from disinterested consumers of the media to active members, with voting rights and an equal voice in the governance of the institution. The purpose of this governance structure is not to require the cooperative to give every member a platform, but to ensure that the institution itself is accountable to a pluralistic community rather than to a concentrated proprietor. This does not require individual community members to exercise control over the editorial decisions concerning individual articles. But the integration of community-based governance of the cooperative gives the members formal stakes in the ethos of the organisation and its depiction of the community it serves. Democratic governance does not mean democratic editorial interference. Members could determine the cooperative’s broad governance, mission, and leadership whilst an independent editorial structure retains responsibility for individual journalistic decisions (indeed, these principles underpin this very publication). In turn, media outlets are encouraged to become more localised and more representative of their readers, whilst constructing a distinctive identity that is accountable to their audience. This allows individuals to gain greater participatory freedom by giving them a direct role in shaping the institutions that structure public life.

This links to a common intuition: the free press is constrained if ownership is concentrated and representation lacks plurality. Democratic deliberation requires that participants are exposed to a wide range of competing political perspectives, such that they can develop, promote, challenge, and revise their personal beliefs. Media freedom accordingly requires more than the absence of government interference. To be democratic, it must be sufficiently pluralistic. Cooperatism offers the means of achieving this pluralism by decentralising media ownership across a range of independent cooperatives. Rather than allowing a small number of proprietors, such as the Murdoch empire, and gatekeepers, such as Meta and Google, significant influence over which political positions are platformed, each cooperative is free to develop its own priorities. Particularly when cooperatives are rooted in local communities and groups underserved by traditional corporate media, they can disrupt existing political hegemony by empowering marginalised perspectives to enter and influence public discourse. Through this, cooperatives facilitate greater deliberative discussions by ensuring no singular voice possesses disproportionate control over the information available to the community. The democratisation of the media is not just a tool to further the freedom of the press but expands to promoting democracy more widely.

V. The Green Solution

The broader Green principle of community-based focus and democratic accountability is clear in the Party’s core values, which emphasise that “a healthy society is based on voluntary cooperation between empowered individuals in a democratic society”. For us left libertarians, this society must be cooperative in governance, participation, and communication alike. Cooperative ownership offers the Green Party a practical way to put their commitment to democracy and voluntarism into practice. Advocating for cooperatism, both in the media and elsewhere, provides a clear opportunity to demonstrate pragmatic steps to transform a message of hope into reality and creates much-needed distance from more statist groups on the left. Instead of merely criticising billionaire control, cooperatives present a positive alternative that gives individuals greater influence without relying on state intervention.

So, what should Green Party members do?

1. Explicitly advocate for cooperatives as a better alternative to state regulation and control.

2. Join, or found, a co-op!