Podium: Don't just do something, stand there

From a speech given by the media tycoon at Oxford University as part of its `Builders of the Millennium' lecture series

THE MEDIA make mistakes. In part this is owing to the dilemma all of us in the field face. Our problem is whether or not it is right for us to tell the public that it is wrong to want what it wants, and for us to combine to use our power to show them only what we believe they ought to see.

These are tough issues with which all media owners constantly wrestle. Broadly, I think we must trust the judgement of our customers - and fear the power of the "off" button. In this age of ever-increasing choice, the power of viewer and reader will go on growing in ways we cannot imagine. And the power of consumers to reject what we offer will be greater than ever.

The public's judgement, as always, will be swift to punish the media that misjudge public taste or morals, including those foreign media that fail to understand the sensibilities of any host cultures.

The Internet, meanwhile, is empowering individuals. It threatens the middleman with extinction; it will threaten the entrenched and the elites. It's a new technology that will certainly engender more direct scrutiny by citizens of their governments, and by consumers of the companies that serve them.

Newspaper editors and televisionproducers will still be needed, but they will have to compete for attention against a host of newly arrived information-providers - all of them taking advantage of low-cost access to the public through the Internet.

There will be more information to distribute than can possibly make its way into print or be absorbed by even the most skilled web-browser, so there will be a need for editors to sort the relevant from the irrelevant.

But "middlemen" in the business of politics and news are not the only ones threatened by the empowerment of the individual. In the field of finance, the advantage institutional investors once had with their access to information is being eroded. And we are seeing perhaps the best paid of all the middlemen, the investment bankers, starting to face offerings made directly to potential investors by firms seeking to borrow money or raise equity capital at a fraction of the existing cost.

All of this adds up to one thing: the empowerment of the individual. The signs are everywhere. Traditionalists groan at the casual clothing increasingly prevalent in the workplace. Why? Because it is a symbol of their loss of control over the individual - one who is part of an increasingly educated, liberated and creative workforce.

And governments groan at their inability to control entrepreneurs who want to put their capital where they, not some minister, think it will be most productive. They worry that individuals will wrest so much power from governments as to make government less relevant.

These are foolhardy fears. For cultures and economies to flourish in the new millennium, governments must force themselves to open up to this changing world. The change that can enrich our futures, after all, is the product of the IQs of empowered and creative individuals.

Logic and experience teach us that, whatever its imperfections, it is the American economic and social model of democratic government and free markets, combined with a transparent legal system, that maximises individual creativity.

Continental Europe has not created a single, net new private-sector job in 20 years, and is bedevilled by double-digit unemployment figures. Indeed, projections are that even the economic recovery now taking hold in France and Germany, with their 15 per cent devaluation, will be insufficient to bring the unemployment rates in those countries to anything like the low rates in Britain and the United States.

I am of the view that governments will have to get out of the way of change. In short, they will have to know when to act and when to follow the advice of that much-derided US president, Ronald Reagan, who once advised a government colleague, "Don't just do something; stand there." Good advice for over-eager government bureaucrats and regulators tempted to interfere with creative builders, whoever they turn out to be.