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This entertaining rant is by Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins:
The BBC will never cut its cloth to suit any cloak but big
When the corporation is crying out for a visionary regulator, along comes Tessa Jowell with a paper more yellow than white
Wednesday March 15, 2006
Every 10 years a British government lies down in Whitehall and begs the BBC to walk all over it. The corporation puts on its gold-plated, diamond-studded, billion-pound Doc Martens and stamps hard. Some hapless minister howls "Ooh, you are awful" and hands over the cash. Yesterday it was Tessa Jowell's turn.
This government reforms parliament on the back of an envelope. It nationalises railways, overrules courts and suspends habeas corpus when walking the dog. The one body it treats with constitutional reverence is the BBC. Years of consultation precede any reform. The corporation is like a pre-Reformation monastery - vast, glorious, well-networked and stupefyingly rich. It gets anything it wants from ministers on pain of excommunication from Question Time.
This is probably the best reason for keeping a BBC. There are precious few institutions to which government pays obeisance. We should treasure those we have. The question raised by yesterday's charter white paper is not whether Britain needs a BBC but whether it needs the present one. The white paper does not prove the case. It is not white but yellow. It proves only that Jowell is as frightened of broadcasters as she is of brewers and casino operators.
There are, of course, the customary charter wrist-slaps. The most substantive suggestion is that BBC regulation be separated from management into something called a trust. The BBC will eat the trust for lunch as it eats its governors for breakfast. As for the "competition champion", supposedly to level the playing field with the private sector, he is no more than a light afternoon tea.
This is all so pathetic it is a wonder the BBC has fought against it so long. There is to be no reform and no end to the BBC's monopoly grip on public broadcasting subsidy, just a worthy definition of its values. When asked to justify this monopoly as the digital age approaches, the best Jowell could suggest is that it will not happen again. That was said when the current charter was renewed by a terrified Major government in 1996.
Jowell appears to have asked the corporation what it would like and written it down. The BBC is asked to carry fewer makeover programmes and be more entertaining, less commercial, more accountable and somehow more popular. It should be more British, more ethnic, more educational, more regional and more creative. The BBC was told all this 10 years ago. Nothing changed except that market share fell and subsidy soared.
While most media organisations are cutting back frantically to compete with the internet, the BBC is demanding "inflation plus two and a half per cent" from the government to prop up its ratings. The claim is absurd. The licence fee already yields a stunning £3bn. The BBC recently said it could lose 3,700 staff with no loss of broadcast quality; so who hired these useless people? The BBC bureaucracy is the common agricultural policy of the air, filling silos with overheads to cushion its eventual collapse into one gigantic pension fund. Come the digital revolution in a few years, the Cotswolds will be settled entirely by wealthy BBC pensioners all listening to Classic FM.
The case was overwhelming for this white paper to offer a new public service broadcasting regime for the digital age. There is no longer any reason to deny commercial (or charitable) channels access to public funds for public service and minority broadcasting. BBC television is better than the other channels, but not so much as to justify a monopoly subsidy. BBC1 is seldom radically different from ITV. Product placement is bartered in competition with ITV. Executive and star salaries are inflated, while the corporation's routine "talent" is cut back and underpaid.
BBC radio mostly competes head to head with the commercial sector, as does BBC publishing and marketing. Radios 3 and 4 are entitled to regard themselves as unique cultural institutions, but even this cannot justify an exclusive claim on public funds, least of all funds laundered throughout a compulsory household poll tax. The BBC website is excellent, as it should be at its price. But why the government should finance it to undercut commercial sites is a mystery (the Guardian must declare an interest). The fact is that the BBC is a thundering great media monopoly. Justifying it requires more effort than the white paper has shown.
Though the new telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has shown itself to be as self-aggrandising as the BBC, there is an overwhelming argument for one regulator with one pot of subsidy standing between the Treasury and its beneficiaries. Most civilised Britons would want to see some "British broadcasting corporation", one devoted primarily to newsgathering, comment, education and the arts. It needs to be big enough, rich enough and constitutionally secure enough to offer an output and career structure that can stand up to government (and to Fleet Street critics). But it cannot stand alone.
The internet is now pluralising the media market and squeezing margins on all sides. A visionary public broadcasting regulator should be sponsoring a range of outlets across the marketplace. There is no sense in obscuring this vision by subsidising the BBC infatuation with big-time entertainment, sport and movie-making. If BBC executives want to play at Hollywood mogul or sports magnate, let them go into the private sectors. As for their argument that this is the only way to win ratings and justify a soaring licence fee, that argument is circular, and the white paper should have torn it to shreds. BBC ratings are falling, and Jowell should pledge a lower licence fee for a slimmer service. Instead she tells the BBC to be more popular yet less populist.
The white paper is just a repeat of 1996. The BBC will never cut its cloth to suit any cloak but sheer bigness. The government will not sweat over a restructuring of public service broadcasting when it has a stealth tax to finance the present monopolist. Since parts of the BBC are undeniably good, I am sure the whole extravaganza can keep rolling until it hits the digital wall. Then, like the unreformed monasteries, it will go with a bang.
How much better to have planned an orderly evolution to a public service broadcaster that could sit happily in the new age.
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