LONDON, 20 September 2003 — The British Broadcasting Corporation, at odds with the government for saying Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office “sexed up” reasons for going to war in Iraq, yesterday faced a tough review of its charter.
But Tessa Jowell, secretary of culture, said there was “no subtext of threat” to the corporation, and said she was committed to “a strong BBC independent of government.”
The BBC is a public corporation financed by an annual license fee of 116 pounds (167 euros, 189 dollars) for each household with a color TV.
Jowell, who addressed the Royal Television Society’s biennial convention in Cambridge on Thursday, said that although the review would cover the license fee, the abolition of the charge was “somewhere between improbable and impossible.”
“We need to ask ourselves what we want and expect the BBC to deliver; what range and scale of services it should provide; how it should be positioned in relation to the market; how it should be funded and regulated; and whether it delivers good value for money,” Jowell said.
She said she wanted the charter review “to be characterized by vigorous and open debate about the kind of BBC we want for the future.”
The BBC’s current charter expires at the end of 2006.
The “Beeb,” as it is popularly known, is locked in a pitiless confrontation with the government over the report by one of its journalists, Andrew Gilligan, that the prime minister’s department had exaggerated intelligence estimates of Iraq’s weapons capacity in September 2002.
The information provided the basis for Britain joining the US-led war against Iraq.
