y an odd coincidence, both the news stories that have gripped the nation this past week have involved the BBC. Or, on second thoughts, perhaps it is not such a startling coincidence. Maybe there is something about the peculiar, ambiguous position that the corporation now occupies in our public life that makes its actions very likely to be the subject of endless contention and political controversy.

When it proposes live television debates between party leaders, disagreements about the format and timing of those broadcasts become a major diplomatic incident. When it behaves as any responsible employer would have to do and suspends a presenter who publicly abused and threatened a colleague, it is castigated as if its decision were bizarre and reprehensible.

BBC executives will, no doubt, be regarding all this as deeply unfair. So far as they are concerned, the corporation is simply trying to carry out the functions that are expected of it as a national broadcaster with the unique responsibilities that come with public subsidy. And there lies the problem. If the BBC is being traduced for trying to do what it believes it must do to fulfil its role, then maybe that is because its role is now deeply confused and irreconcilable with modern expectations.

The most obvious case in point is the farrago over the leaders’ television debates. Having once embraced the idea of these becoming a regular fixture of electoral life and indeed extolled them with much sanctimonious reference to accountability and public engagement with the democratic process, the major party leaders (both of them, I am quite sure) have clearly had second thoughts.

But there was the BBC with other media organisations tagging along presumably in good faith, carrying on with the original premise that the debates would go ahead. As is the way with major broadcasting plans – and this being an especially complicated project involving several participating media organisations – the dates and the arrangements had to be fixed well in advance. (This is a fact of television life which every political adviser would have understood.) You know what happened next – more or less. One way or another, the negotiations with Downing Street broke down. Everybody accused everybody else of behaving unreasonably. Finally, in apparent exasperation, the BBC appeared to threaten David Cameron with an “empty chair” if he refused to participate in a two-man debate, which seemed clearly ridiculous. But it was more than absurd: it was fatally presumptuous.

Who are you, cried the Conservatives – and a good many others too – to demand that the Prime Minister attend your debate at a time and place of your choosing? You are just a bunch of media guys. We are the government of this great country. You don’t have any business issuing ultimatums to us. Who elected you? And so on and on.

What the BBC might have said, if it hadn’t been under such alarming attack already, was: “But these aren’t ‘our’ debates. They are your debates: the ones you said you wanted.” And, it might have added, we are not just a bunch of grubby media guys. We are a national institution established by Royal Charter to fulfil a unique role in British society. In fact, that is the definition of our responsibility which you yourselves (as a parliament and a governing class) insist upon. Our relationship with the political life of the country is not that of a commercial company in pursuit of profit or market share. We act in a semi-official capacity as an appointed conduit between the population and its governing institutions. So when we organise political debates (the ones you said you wanted), we are not doing this in our own interest but in our capacity as public service broadcasters.

And if they had said that, it would have been a difficult argument to gainsay. The government – and Parliament – cannot have it both ways. Either the BBC occupies a unique place in the structure of national life with a public interest status that entitles it to be regarded differently from commercial companies. Or, it is just one more selfinterested media organisation which shouldn’t be regarded as anything other than a supplicant competing for access.

The trouble is that it is precisely this uncomfortable ambiguity that the BBC is determined to perpetuate. It is they who insist that they are more – oh, much, much more – than just a broadcasting company: a mere maker and seller of programmes in an open market that is becoming more and more crowded. True, they now peddle their wares on a global scale and engage in outright rivalry at home, but they transcend all this by virtue of the historical obligations which justify their funding arrangements.

This is, of course, the nub of it. To appreciate the anomalous nature of the BBC’s present situation in the modern media market, you would have to imagine a parallel world which hardly seems credible. Suppose in every town that was served by a branch of Sainsbury’s and Tesco and perhaps Aldi, along with the usual complement of independent greengrocers and such, there was also an enormous superstore, the Public Service Supermarket, which gave away all its products for free. It could afford to do this because it was subsidised by a fridge licence that was compulsorily levied on every household unless it could prove that it did not own a fridge (and proving a negative is extremely difficult).

Somehow its commercial competitors managed to survive by coming up with innovations that attracted customers who were prepared to pay – a delicatessen counter, or a shellfish bar. But then the Public Service Supermarket would match these innovations (for which read news websites, local radio, etc) and they would make their versions available free. (All of this extra activity serving, of course, as justification for increasing the fridge licence fee at regular intervals.) The BBC, under the guise of serving the whole population in every conceivable way, leaps on to every new platform that modern technology creates, and quite shamelessly plagiarises every popular programme format that its commercial rivals produce. Its huge subsidy, combined with its commercial income from global programme sales, allows it to dump endless amounts of free material into a market place that it distorts and dominates.

But that is not all. The BBC is not just in the programme-making, or the news-disseminating business. It is an actual player in the quasi-political social service sector. In what must be its most ambitious, worldconquering project yet, it announced last week a vast new enterprise to spread knowledge of computer coding and digital technology. In partnership with 50 global organisations, including Google, Microsoft and Samsung, it plans to give coding devices to every 11-yearold in the country. This initiative will coincide with a season of television programmes and online activities including a drama based on Grand Theft Auto and tie-ups with Doctor Who and Radio 1. Is it just me or is there something distinctly sinister about this? Do we really want every 11-year-old in the country to regard the BBC as an inextricable part of civic and educational life? What is more, the corporation will also create 5,000 digital traineeships in cooperation with the Department for Work and Pensions. As Lord Hall, the director-general, put it at the official launch presentation: “Only the BBC can bring partners together to attempt something this ambitious.”

I’ll say. This is certainly no bunch of ordinary media guys. It’s an arm of government which has the peculiar advantage of never having to submit itself for reelection. So this is where the BBC finds itself: being kicked around for its presumption and self-importance, even when it suspends someone whose behaviour was completely unacceptable, but refusing to relinquish the advantages that its anachronistic position confers. I find it hard to sympathise.