Does independence impact on the media?
Mostly the media is entirely independent so won't be affected by independence. There are two areas where there will be changes; regulation and broadcasting and those will need to be set up.
What is the issue with regulation?
There is no public regulation of the print media in the UK – it is self-regulating other than on legal issues (like defamation or contempt of court where Scotland already has its own laws). If a future Scottish government wanted to introduce statutory regulation that would be a matter for the Scottish Parliament at that time. But broadcast does need to be regulated for a number of reasons. At the most technical end, broadcasting uses part of the radio spectrum and that has to be controlled and allocated on behalf of the public. In addition, broadcasting does have statutory cuties to ensure fairness and balance. Just now both these functions are carried out by Ofcom which answers to the UK Government. Scotland will therefore have to set up an Ofcom equivalent to take over those functions and answer to the Scottish Parliament.
What needs to be done for broadcasting?
The regulation and 'spectrum allocation' aspects will be covered by the 'Scottish Ofcom'. But Scotland will want to maintain public service broadcasting and so at least one Scottish public television channel will need to be set up. This will probably be based on transferring a lot of the personnel and asses from BBC Scotland but there are many models for how it could work. Equally it really is a matter for political decision the nature of the channel – how much it wants to invest in drama, how much it wants to invest in news and so on. Suffice to say that currently Scotland does not have spend on Scottish programme-making proportionate to the amount of money collected by the TV license of Scottish viewers so there will be more Scottish content – but without the UK content there is a strong case for more public funding for Scottish public service broadcasting.
So what about the BBC?
The BBC has a commercial arm which licenses BBC programming outside the UK and Scotland will simply have to negotiate on what kind of broadcast content it wishes to buy from the UK. This could range from entire channels (maintaining all of BBC One's service for example) to picking and choosing which programmes it wishes to license for showing on a Scottish channel. Of course, a lot of the BBC's current affairs programming will no longer be directly relevant to Scotland as it will relate to politics and policy in London.
Will that give Scotland enough of an effective media?
At the moment investment in media in Scotland has been in decline for a long period and many newspapers have a fraction of the staff they did even ten years ago. This is a problem at the best of times but so much will be happening in the transition to independence that it is very important that the media has the capacity to scrutinise and report on this work. There is therefore a good case for at least interim public funding to make sure that the media is properly able to fulfil that function.