In today’s free-market Britain, the survival of the British Broadcasting Corporation seems increasingly precarious. That it survives at all is because Britons who own a television are obliged to pay a license fee. It’s an arrangement meant to guarantee the BBC’s autonomy and commitment to the public service ideal of balanced reporting but in an era of consumer choice and ever-diversifying media it has laid it wide open to attack.
Nowadays it often seems as if the BBC’s enemies are closing in for the kill. The news that the BBC is henceforth going to have to operate with a much-reduced budget will have delighted commercial media moguls like Rupert Murdoch. Reviling the BBC for being left wing, patronizing and wasteful, Murdoch’s newspapers have played a key part in undermining the corporation. It was especially gratifying to Murdoch when, three years ago, the Hutton Enquiry censured the BBC for broadcasting the claim by radio reporter Andrew Gilligan that the British government oversold the threat posed by Iraq, a claim disablingly based on a single unnamed source, the weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly, who, in the uproar caused by Gilligan’s report, apparently committed suicide. Murdoch’s journalists reveled in the crisis which Lord Hutton’s verdict precipitated at the BBC. It was a crisis that sapped the corporation’s morale and led to the abrupt departures of Director General Greg Dyke and Chairman Gavin Davies.
Recalling the episode in the Guardian last week, Paul Dacre, editor of the conservative British newspaper the Daily Mail, contrasted the BBC’s breaking of the Kelly story with the unqualified support for the Iraq war offered by Murdoch’s newspapers and their ruthless suppression of all questioning of the basis on which it was declared. As Dacre pointed out, the issue of the undisclosed legal justification of the war by Britain’s Attorney General Lord Goldsmith was all but ignored by the Times, while Murdoch’s tabloid, the Sun, went to great lengths to portray David Kelly as a figure who — in contrast to Prime Minister Tony Blair — lacked credibility. It is indeed worth underlining that but for the BBC the world might never have known anything about Kelly’s views.
Not that Paul Dacre was stepping forward to defend the corporation in its hour of need. His reference to the Kelly affair was in fact no more than an aside in what was otherwise as savage an attack on the BBC as any Murdoch himself ever published. It is Dacre’s contention that the BBC is an oversubsidised behemoth that is “distorting Britain’s media market, crushing journalistic pluralism and imposing a monoculture that is inimical to healthy democratic debate”. Others see the BBC as an essentially conservative institution endlessly loyal to the British monarchy, but in Dacre’s eyes it is a repository of “cultural Marxism”, the plaything of a metropolitan “subsidariat” who denigrate British traditions, spread anti-Americanism, scorn those who question Britain’s membership of the European Union and do their utmost to discredit capitalism and big business. Conversely, the BBC is sympathetic to Labour, European federalism, the state and state spending, mass immigration, minority rights, multiculturalism, alternative lifestyles and progressiveness in the education and justice systems. Arguing that the BBC is destroying the “healthy tension that ought to exist between the right and the left of the political spectrum”, Dacre fears a backlash against it in the shape of the authoritarian rabble-rousing that now dominates US broadcasting.
Many will agree that the corporation has overextended itself, but Dacre’s BBC is a phantom, the stuff of right-wing paranoia. Thanks to years of bullying by privatizing politicians, the formerly high-minded BBC, far from espousing any form of leftism, long ago submitted to the “discipline of the market”. Run in recent years by highly paid executives with backgrounds in commercial broadcasting, it has, despite its reliance on public money, increasingly operated as if it were a commercial organization. Much of its program-making is contracted out to private companies, and the prevailing tone of BBC television is these days anything but highbrow, with many hours of broadcasting time devoted to game shows and programs about cooking and property. Not least is its commercialized spirit exemplified by BBC2, a station originally associated with intellectualism but which now boasts Top Gear, a raucous celebration of motoring machismo, as one of its most heavily promoted shows. It is not that the BBC has given up on seriousness; it retains its current affairs flagship, Panorama, but a program that specialized in challenging in-depth reporting now runs for a mere half hour. The impression is that — like the BBC in general — it has been emasculated.
What is curious is that Dacre should be concentrating his fire on the BBC at a time when the racism row over Britain’s Channel 4 Celebrity Big Brother show — which has cast such an unflattering light on Blair’s Britain — is much in the news. But then, Channel 4 derives much of its funding from advertising. The truth is that the very existence of the BBC as a public service medium is anathema to the likes of Dacre and Murdoch, with their zeal for US-style free market economics and right-wing populism. If Dacre’s Guardian critique has any justification, it is in relation to the long-standing BBC2 late night current affairs program, Newsnight, and Radio 4’s early morning Today program, both of which, by virtue of gross caricature, could perhaps be made to fit the picture he draws.
Certainly their ethos is metropolitan and neither subscribes to the jingoistic agenda of the Daily Mail. Yet it is hard to see how either threatens British traditions — unless there is something subversive about their commitment to intelligent debate.
Dacre’s strictures are especially wide of the mark in relation to radio, a field where the BBC has kept up its high standards, furnishing an extraordinary variety of stimulating programs. Last week, as it happens, Radio 4 broadcast a program on the changing face of Saudi Arabia that, in its fair-mindedness and informativeness, embodied the old BBC virtues. Paul Dacre himself admits that he would pay the license fee just for the sake of Radio 4. Indeed, he confessed that he would “die in a ditch to defend the BBC as a great civilizing force”. Who would dream of saying anything of the kind about the Daily Mail or any aspect of Murdoch’s brash media empire? It is a measure of its enduring qualities that even a determined detractor of the BBC can write in such terms.
