Media Matters Stephen Glover
The hugely successful BBC website is under pressure from the Government and its commercial rivals to scale back. This is only right, says STEPHEN GLOVER
LIKE MILLIONS of people, I look at the BBC website every day. It is incredibly useful for checking facts and keeping up to date with the news. I’m sure I would visit it often even if I weren’t a journalist. It is a constantly updated online newspaper that draws on vast resources at home and abroad. On the whole, the website is trustworthy and accurate, though it reflects the BBC’S values, and you will not read many pieces critical of the European Union or applauding the Government’s economic policies.
In view of its popularity and unrivalled qualities, there would seem to be a strong case for protecting it. I imagine many licence fee payers would be aghast if it were scaled back. And yet that may be about to happen. Following representations from newspapers which believe the BBC website constitutes unfair competition, the Government, in the shape of Culture Secretary John Whittingdale, is putting pressure on the Corporation to make its online offering more visual – that is to say, more reliant on video – and less dependent on the written word. Despite all I have said about its virtues, I think this is a good idea.
When the BBC launched its website twenty years ago most publishers thought the future of newspapers lay in print, and were not too worried that our public service broadcaster was producing an online newspaper. Before very long, the BBC had one of the biggest news websites in the world, served by hundreds, if not thousands, of journalists, including a network of foreign correspondents far beyond the pocket of any Fleet Street publication. Newspapers, which by this time were inexorably shedding print sales, woke up to the reality that the foremost online player in their own backyard was none other than the BBC.
Their managements have been grumbling to governments for almost ten years about unfair competition, pointing out that whereas they have to scrabble and fight for online revenue, Auntie has no such worries because it is bankrolled by the licence fee payer. In 2011 Mark Thompson, then the BBC directorgeneral, promised that the website would be clipped back, but if any pruning has taken place it has been pretty negligible. Subsequent undertakings by executives to rein in the website have proved equally illusory. Surely the reason they are so reluctant to cut it back is that it gives the BBC enormous visibility both in Britain and internationally, and proclaims the range and depth of the Corporation’s news-gathering operation.
Admittedly it is difficult for newspapers to prove the BBC is stealing readers from them, but audience figures tell a story. According to an organisation called comscore, which measures these things, the BBC website has more than forty million so-called unique users in the United Kingdom every month. (There is obviously some duplication as the same person may access the website through different ‘platforms’, e.g. smartphones, tablets or laptops.) By comparison, two of this country’s most successful online newspapers, Mail Online and the Guardian, are credited by comscore with just over 27 million and 22 million unique users respectively in the UK. Internationally, each newspaper attracts a larger online audience than the BBC.
Many habitual users of the BBC website may well say the commercial imperatives of newspapers are not their concern. Some will add that what matters is that the website is excellent, and it would be an almost criminal act for the Government to conspire in its partial demise. It may seem a powerful argument but it is not a fair one. The BBC is a broadcaster enjoying a near monopoly in national radio and a dominant presence in television. Newspaper publishers cannot simply start a radio or a television station if they feel so inclined, though it is true Rupert Murdoch effectively got around the rules when he launched Sky television in 1990 because it was a satellite channel. Most newspapers are financially weak, and it can’t be right that the BBC, which has a guaranteed if slightly diminished income, should be allowed to compete with them on what is self-evidently not an even playing field.
The Corporation will doubtless cannily defend its position. In response to Mr Whittingdale’s suggestion that its website should focus on video, James Purnell, its director of strategy and digital, says: ‘It would be odd if [the BBC] were the only news organisation in the world not to do text online.’ Maybe, but how many of these organisations are publicly funded? None, or almost none. The BBC enjoys unique privileges, and those privileges entail certain responsibilities towards its commercial rivals.
Mr Whittingdale recently surprised Corporation bosses by saying they had not, in fact, obtained the cast-iron licence fee agreement for the next ten years that they thought they had. The Culture Secretary declared that any final settlement would not be reached until the new Royal Charter, due to come into force in 2017, has been hammered out. One condition will concern the future of the website. Squeal though they undoubtedly will, BBC executives are, I hope, finally going to be made to stick to their promise to scale it back.