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http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl >> News and Comment >> Bradshaw takes the gloves off http://www.ex-bbc.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1259094371 Message started by Administrator on Nov 24^th, 2009, 8:27pm

Title: Bradshaw takes the gloves off
Post by Administrator on Nov 24^th, 2009, 8:27pm

From The Guardian.

On the eve of the bill determining Britain's digital future, Ben Bradshaw attacks the Tory leader's 'pact' with the Murdochs and defends the BBC, if not its Trust, from its 'circling enemies'. He speaks to James Robinson for The Guardian.

After years of debate, two weighty reports and endless agonising over BBC funding, the future of Channel 4 and how best to prop up ITV, the sense of anticlimax is palpable. Published on Friday, the digital economy bill includes proposals to crack down on illegal filesharing and to set up consortia to make regional news to be screened on ITV, ideas that emanate (mostly) from Ben Bradshaw's department. Channel 4 is barely mentioned, and there are no details at all about the future funding of the BBC.

It falls far short of the plans Lord Carter, the former broadcasting minister, set out a year or so ago and may not even become law. There were 15 other bills in Wednesday's Queen's speech, and this is hardly the most pressing of them for a government setting out its final legislative programme before next year's election.

Bradshaw, the man in charge of ensuring it reaches the statute books, defends the bill by saying that without it, "we won't have regional news on ITV in 12 months' time, we won't deliver universal broadband, at least a third of the country will be excluded from the digital age and we won't be able to do anything about illegal filesharing, which will decimate our creative sector".

Broadband tax

He points out that some measures – such as the controversial 50p tax on phone lines that will help to pay for a national high-speed broadband network – will be set out in the budget. Others include changes to the copyright laws that will make it easier for content creators to assert their ownership rights.

Just two days before these plans' publication, however, the smooth-talking culture secretary is far more exercised, and possibly better briefed, when talking about the BBC and the Murdochs than about the bill. That is hardly surprising, as James Murdoch's attack on the corporation in his MacTaggart lecture, which has since been echoed in many of the Conservative party's pronouncements on the BBC, has moved the debate over its future to the centre of the political stage.

At one point, Bradshaw takes off on a diatribe against what he sees as a pact between the Tories and News International: "We will not sell out the British people, or the British broadcasting landscape, to rapacious foreign media magnates."

Yet his support for the BBC could appear a bit rich given Bradshaw's own potshots at BBC management after he was handed the culture brief in June. Heard to complain about the "arrogance" of Mark Thompson and quick to condemn Today programme interviews with shadow ministers on Twitter, much of that antagonism appears to have subsided since the Sun backed David Cameron during the Labour party conference.

Perhaps the fact that Rupert Murdoch's most influential paper, now overseen by his son James, has ostentatiously abandoned New Labour has reminded the culture secretary who the real enemy is?

Murdoch-Tory deal

Echoing the views of the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, Bradshaw says of News International and the Tories: "There is no doubt there's a deal ... The Tories have basically subcontracted their media and broadcasting policy to News International. It's brazen." He fires off a list of Tory policies – including a commitment to TV news free from impartiality rules and Cameron's promise to rein in the media regulator, Ofcom – to demonstrate the extent of the collusion between the two, publicly denied by members of the shadow cabinet.

Has a deal really been hammered out over a dining table in north Oxfordshire, where News International executives and members of the Tory high command occasionally socialise at weekends? "It's more than one table," Bradshaw says. "I know people who have been at these discussions. The proof of the pudding is in the policy."

His own spat with the BBC was prompted by government plans to "top-slice" the licence fee, using some of the money earmarked to help meet the cost of digital switchover – around £130m – to replace regional news on ITV. "That's still our preferred option," Bradshaw says.

Sir Michael Lyons, the chairman of the BBC Trust, reacted furiously to the proposal, complaining that public support for the way the BBC is funded will ebb away if licence fee cash is handed to other organisations. Riled by his response, Bradshaw used his first major speech in September to lambast the trust, putting himself on what seemed to be a collision course with many BBC supporters.

"The BBC Trust very publicly and repeatedly rubbished our modest and reasonable proposals on funding the future of regional news on ITV," the culture secretary explains. "While at the same time, in the face of a daily onslaught from Rupert Murdoch, from News International and from the Conservatives, [the trust was] almost wholly silent. I think anyone in that position would be asking themselves: why aren't the BBC up in arms about the Tory's proposals to cut the licence fee halfway through a multi-year agreement, [which is] an absolutely unacceptable interference with the BBC's independence? Even Mrs Thatcher never contemplated doing that. Yet there was not so much as a squeak from the BBC Trust."

The trust and many industry observers would disagree with this reading but Bradshaw is unapologetic. "What I've ... done in this job, I've done as a critical friend of the BBC, as somebody who wants the BBC to survive through the next licence fee and charter renewal processes. Everything I've said or done has been to that end."

He hasn't changed his view on the trust. "They haven't done a very good job either in defending the BBC against its enemies, who are circling like mad at the moment, or in regulating the BBC," he adds.

Labour's opponents point out that both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown courted Murdoch assiduously, and Murdoch influenced many policy decisions, from Europe to cross-media ownership. Blair was even accused of intervening on Murdoch's behalf when he was planning a bid for Silvio Berlusconi's Italian TV company. "That's long before my time, long before I had to deal with broadcasting policy," says Bradshaw, but he denies that policy decisions, such as the recent recommendation that Ashes Test matches should be among sports that must be shown on terrestrial television, are now going against Murdoch (who owns Sky) because he has switched sides.

"The idea that somehow [the former executive director of the Football Association] David Davies's review is all about media politics is rubbish," Bradshaw says, before demonstrating it is anything but in the very next sentence. "It's about the fact that the public are deeply concerned about losing sporting events that they really value and lose to expensive pay-TV providers. It is an independent report and I'm astonished that the Tories have already said that they will reverse any decision to implement his recommendations. It's another blatant example of them surrendering their broadcasting policy to News International's commercial interests."

The BBC's director general may be heartened to hear that the culture secretary intends to come out fighting in defence of the Beeb. "What I am doing more, perhaps because of the perception in some quarters – not least among traditional friends of the BBC – that I have been critical of the BBC ... is to point out the real dangers of a Tory government. Like the NHS, the BBC reflects Labour values. We believe in the values of public service broadcasting. We believe in the importance of interventions in markets. We are not free market fanatics."

The Digital Britain bill, though modest, illustrates the dividing lines between the parties. Local news on ITV1, and action to ensure broadband reaches every part of the country, "are all areas where you need government intervention", argues Bradshaw. Curiously, the culture secretary conducts the entire interview without his shoes on. Clearly the gloves are also off.

By James Robinson

Source:-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/23/ben-bradshaw-digital-economy-bill