The BBC: in peril yet again
“If you find yourself afflicted by a sudden urge to destroy the BBC, I have the ideal remedy,” said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian: spend some time in the US. It shows what happens when there is no major news broadcaster that is objective, impartial, and insulated from commercial pressures. In the US, people of differing political views watch different networks, and get different facts: Fox News facts, or MSNBC facts. The result is a partisan “cacophony”, with “two sides shouting at each other”. The need to think about this has arisen because the BBC is “in peril” – yet again. Its director-general, Tony Hall, is stepping down. Boris Johnson’s government is openly hostile to the corporation, and has suggested that the licence fee has had its day. This week, 450 jobs were cut at BBC News. So it’s time to point out, once again, that “the country’s collective life would be undeniably impoverished without it”. The BBC brings the nation together, with its sports and royal wedding broadcasts, its news and landmark documentaries, its comedies and dramas, and crucial services such as local radio.
The problem, though, is that the BBC isn’t impartial, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. It has its own “impermeable, uniform right-on culture”, which “treats Greta Thunberg as Joan of Arc and the wider population as prejudiced idiots”. This failure to represent great swathes of Britain has actually helped to exacerbate splits in our society. Of this, Brexit – which the BBC clearly opposed – “is the final proof”. Yet anyone who wants to watch TV must pay a poll tax of £154.50 per year to the BBC, on pain of being dragged to the magistrates’ court. Moving to a subscription model is the BBC’s only hope, said Rod Liddle in The Spectator. If it had to fight for viewers, the BBC might suddenly “comprehend the need to understand its audience a little better”.
Moving to subscription would be the death of the BBC as we know it, said Camilla Cavendish in the FT. It would turn it into something like the US Public Broadcasting Service – “dignified, but with little reach”. Yet the BBC is facing some fundamental questions. Can a monopoly licence fee be justified when it is reaching fewer people, particularly young people, every day? If it is to continue in its current form, it must make more effort to represent a genuine range of opinion: not just Euroscepticism, but radical socialism too. And it needs to get leaner. “It currently runs five orchestras, and two 24-hour news operations.” In short, it should strive to look less as it is portrayed in the BBC’s own satire W1A: like a complacent metropolitan behemoth, entirely “removed from reality”.