The Bishop of Leeds spoke in a debate on amendments to the Media Bill on 20th May 2024, during a discussion on sports broadcasting, raising the importance of audiences encountering content that challenges preconceptions and introduces new ideas:
The Lord Bishop of Leeds: My Lords, surely at a time when we want children to get away from the telly and actually do sports, it is right that they be confronted by sports that they may know nothing about. Was it not curling, whatever that is, which became very popular and captured the imagination? Most of us could not believe that there was a sport where you push something along in that way.
There is a serious point about how children and young people know what sports are there. It is a bit like the inscription by Orwell’s statue outside the BBC:
“If liberty means anything … it means the right”
to be confronted by opinions you do not like, or something like that. That must go for sports as well, but I really need to make a confession. I live in Headingley; I have never been. Cricket is one of those sports that I suppose some people like. I have never understood it, but I would rather go to curling.
The Bishop also raised a point of clarification on a group of amendments relating to the threshold for public service broadcasting prominence, questioning whether the word “significant” adequately replaces the word “appropriate” when neither are fully defined in the context of the bill, and suggesting that “substantive” might fit better:
Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury (LD): We discussed the use of the word “appropriate” during the first day in Committee, in the context of genres. The same arguments made then—lack of a proper definition—apply to prominence. Amendments 46 and 47 would provide greater clarity by replacing “appropriate” with “significant”. This was also recommended by the CMS Select Committee report on its pre-legislative scrutiny, which said:
“The current position, that PSBs are given ‘appropriate’ prominence … has determined that they have the top spots. However, this does not work in the advanced user interfaces of today and so we recommend that the threshold for PSB prominence should be raised to ‘significant’”.
Amendment 50 continues on this theme, and would ask Ofcom to ensure a strong degree of prominence for the PSBs when issuing its new code of practice. This is also in line with the CMS Select Committee’s pre-legislative scrutiny report. Amendment 51 adds to this by specifying that the new code should ensure that prominence applies to other functions currently available on digital and on-demand platforms, including search functions, recommendations and personalised functions—in other words, that algorithms owned by the streamers do not promote their own content at the expense of the PSBs and do not make the viewers’ choices for them. […]
The Lord Bishop of Leeds: My Lords, I endorse everything that the noble Baroness has said apart from the language point. Why is “significant” an improvement on “appropriate”, when neither of them are defined? “Significant” has to mean significant of something—we might think that it just means “a lot”, but it does not. It is as meaningless as “appropriate”, indefinable and cannot be quantified.
Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury: To my mind, “significant” is very different from “appropriate”, which is a wishy-washy, woolly term, whereas “significant” is a specific term.
The Lord Bishop of Leeds: My Lords, it is not. If we went around the room and asked, “Please quantify it, or tell us what it means”, I think we would—
Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yanrbury: What word would the right reverend Prelate use?
The Lord Bishop of Leeds: I have struggled with it, but “substantial” or “substantive” might get us somewhere, rather than something that does not actually mean anything. The General Synod of the Church of England has a similar problem; it put “collegiate” in some recent legislation when it meant “collegial”—it had nothing to do with colleges. I worry about putting things in legislation that cannot be defined.
The Church of England in Parliament 
You must be logged in to post a comment.