With reference to appropriate scholarship, discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the news service provided to the UK population by the free-market Sun newspaper and the public service BBC.

This essay is going to discuss what a free-market is, what a tabloid is, how the Sun newspaper operates, what is a public service, how the BBC operates and it will compare the advantages and disadvantages of the Sun and the BBC.
A free market is a market without economic invention and regulation by government except to enforce ownership and contacts. It is the opposite of a controlled market, where the government regulates how the means of production, goods, services and labor are used, priced, or distributed. When established, the press was organized as a ‘free market’ system, in a private ownership. The theory was that this would be best for democracy and society, a “Free marketplace of ideas”. Anyone can start a newspaper. The market empowers the consumer and fosters freedom. Nowadays, only a small part of the press is concerned with public affairs. 80% of the papers are tabloids, less than 20% of the content of the popular press is “public information”.
According to the dictionary a tabloid is a newspaper with pages about half the size of a standard (broadsheet) newspaper. However, in more recent years the word tabloid has become synonymous with words like gossip, scandal and ‘exclusive’. By circulation The Sun is the tenth biggest newspaper in any language in the world. The total daily readership is approximately 7,700,000 (ABC) which makes this newspaper the most successful British tabloid.
Tabloids need to be popular to survive - 80% of their income is from sales. They rarely contain serious or factual journalism: Sex, celebs and sport are deemed more newsworthy. Their focus is on sex, not news. This ‘populist’ agenda supports causes because they might be popular, even if it spreads prejudice such as sexism, racism, homophobia and xenophobia, it also supports competition for ‘scoops’ (hence invasions of privacy), exaggeration and lies. There is little or no commitment to facts and no separation of fact and opinion. An example for an article which spreads xenophobia is a story published on 4 July 2003 under the headline “Swan Bake”, which claimed that asylum seekers were slaughtering and eating swans.
Sun claims national interest-“The People’s Paper”. “Speaks to readers in a way different from serious political-economic language of broadsheets, in a popular ‘non-political’ way. Arguably all the more powerful for this. Offers narratives of life in a rhetoric of the everyday and common-sense of popular culture. Constructs a vision of community and nation.” (Conboy, 2002) Rupert Murdoch owns the Sun and he is using his newspaper to advertise his movies and books. This evidences the power of private interests in the free-market media.
Public service is a term usually used to mean services provided by government to its citizens, either directly or by financing private provision of services. The term is associated with a social consensus such as democratic elections, that certain services should be available to all, regardless of income. Even where public services are neither publicly provided nor publicly financed, for social and political reasons they are usually subject to regulation going beyond that applying to most economic sectors.
“The BBC is the largest broadcasting organization in the world. Its mission is to enrich people’s lives with programmes that inform, educate and entertain.” (BBC website)
The BBC is a government body which means it is funded by the license fee payers and as such it is legally obliged to be as impartial in its content as humanly possible. The key people who run the BBC are its chairman Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC Trust (this is operationally independent of BBC management and external bodies, and aims to act in the best interests of license fee payers) and Mark Thompson who is the chairman of the executive board. Unlike the free-market media which is regulated by its owners, the British Broadcast Corporation is regulated by Ofcom which mission statement is “Application of generally accepted standards to provide adequate protection from offensive and harmful material”. It regulates fairness and privacy, protection of people under 18, incitement to crime or disorder and responsibility of religious content.
Now let’s compare same story presented on one hand by the Sun and on the other hand by the BBC. Recently the media bombarded us with the story of Raoul Moat. In the Sun newspaper they were calling him things like “steroid freak”, “shotgun maniac”, “brooding”, “berserk” while in the BBC they referred to him simply “Mr. Moat”. The image forming, attention grabbing, almost slanderous words used by the Sun to describe Moat prove that the newspapers are biased while the BBC is as impartial as possible. Another example of bias in tabloids is that they are generally aligned with the political left while the British Broadcast Corporation is not officially supporting any political parties. From this follows that during the election times newspapers like the Sun, (for over 10 years associated with the Labour party but now supporting the Conservatives), can manipulate the media to exert influence on the voting public. A good example that illustrates this is the headline from 11 April 1992 “IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT” – Claiming credit for the Conservative victory. During the 2010 elections the Independent ran ads declaring that ‘Rupert Murdoch won’t decide this election-you will’. A big disadvantage of the free-market media is the fact that they dramatize their stories too much in order to increase profit, often focusing on gossip and celebrity while the real stories are forced to take a back seat. On occasions where political news does come to the fore, they are often heavily biased in an attempt at manipulating our opinion and trying to persuade us of their beliefs. While on the other hand the public service broadcasting is impartial and it represents the stories in a more general point of view focused on the information not on the scandal, on the news not the sex stories.
The biggest advantage of the free-market media is that they have the freedom of speech, they can say whatever they want, while the public service is obliged to follow the rules established by the government. However, this freedom of speech is often abused and one must wonder whether or not restrictions on the public service are in place to protect the true value of the media.

References
Conboy , M. 2002. The press and popular culture. London: Sage.
McChesney, R. W. 2000. The global media giants. In: R. Anderson and L.Strate Critical studies in media commercialism. Oxford :OUP. Pp59-70
McNair, B.2003. News and journalism in the UK. 4th ed. London: Routledge
The Sun- 11 April 1992
The Sun- 4 July 2003
Ofcom website
BBC website
Dictionary.com
Sun website