THE Save Big Dog/Throw Dead Cat strategy of flinging stories about the BBC’s licence fee at the Sunday newspapers seems of limited utility. There are parts of the media – notably The Sun, the Daily Mail, The Sunday Times and, to some extent, Sky News – that are very keen on stories that rubbish the corporation. Most people are more indifferent.
Whatever your opinion of the ownership or apparent political leanings of those outlets, at least they have good reason to oppose the Beeb. They are, after all, in direct competition with a corporation dozens of times bigger, which automatically receives a huge income from what is, in effect, a poll tax on the public.
Plenty disapprove of the BBC for other reasons. For decades now, probably the majority of people of a conservative (small c) disposition, quite a lot of whom for the most part like and would defend the BBC as a Great British Institution, think that it is largely run by people who are more “progressive” than they are, and economically more left-wing. The BBC is hardly alone, or even the principal target, for that body of opinion. They think the same of many other public organisations; something like the Foreign Office is probably top of their list of baddies.
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More recently, a similarly disapproving view of the BBC has been adopted by a section of the left (basically, Jeremy Corbyn fans) who think that it’s a fascist outfit – but then again, for them, everyone to the right of Jeremy is an obvious fascist – and mouthpiece of the establishment. Some nationalists fall into this camp, too. Poor Laura Kuenssberg seems a particular target of their odium, for some reason.
Bizarrely, precisely because of those opposed critical views of the Beeb, you sometimes get attacks on the corporation based on the fact that it tries to be balanced. They might come from right, left or centre, and are usually like that irritating quotation (the source of which is unclear) which says that if two people disagree about whether it’s raining, a journalist’s job is to look out of the window.
Without denigrating the importance of fact-checking, or the brazen levels of deceit in some current politics, that’s a moronically simplistic view, and usually flat wrong.
It’s impossible for any view to be absolutely objective. If you wanted my stab at it, though, I would say that the BBC’s news reporting tries extremely hard to be neutral, but from a position informed by the natural tendencies of those who produce it; largely white, middle-class, formed by London or at least metropolitan opinion, secular, university educated and very slightly left-of-centre. It’s also self-conscious, and when thinking about whether it’s objective enough, probably tries to overcompensate for those qualities.
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I don’t really think news is the BBC’s problem, though. Channel 4, also a state-owned public service broadcaster, has a much more obviously partisan main news programme, though it’s produced for them by the privately-owned (partly by the Daily Mail) ITN, whose news bulletins for the various ITV franchises don’t, on the whole, exhibit the same kinds of prejudices and priorities.
The BBC’s bias, where there is any, seems if anything to be slightly more explicit in its other programming – drama, comedy, non-news factual output, and so on. But that slant isn’t confined to them; it’s more or less universal in all broadcast media.
In any case, the BBC’s critics are almost certainly vastly outnumbered by the people who like it, and it’s impossible to argue that it hasn’t produced a huge legacy of first-rate work, whether in journalism, or entertainment and other spheres. But even those who aren’t critical of the BBC’s work now, in a media landscape utterly transformed over the past couple of decades, have to deal with whether the corporation’s set-up and funding model, devised in the days before television, let alone internet and video streaming, can be sustained or defended.
The argument that it’s good value (“43 pence a day!”) is a double-edged one. If it’s true, it suggests the BBC wouldn’t have much trouble attracting customers on the subscription model, in the way that Sky, Netflix, Disney and Amazon do. The BBC’s journalism, even if you think it’s very good and relatively impartial, isn’t unique.
You may distrust the ownership of other channels, or of mainstream newspapers, but there are plenty of outfits, such as Reuters, ITN, Associated Press and AFP, which provide a similar service, without making it a legal requirement for you to pay them to do so, even if you never consume their product.
The same is even more true of the other parts of the BBC’s output. On recent form, you would be more likely to find quality drama elsewhere; there are more and better documentaries on most satellite channels, and endless podcasts more interesting than Radio 4’s programmes.
The BBC’s television stations, and most of its radio ones, have commercial equivalents similar in quality and either free-to-air (with advertising) or on a subscription comparable in price to the licence fee. The sole clear exceptions, I think, are Radio 3, and its funding of orchestras and classical music, and the World Service which, until recently, wasn’t funded by the licence fee, but by a direct grant from the Foreign Office (which still gives it much of its income – £94 million last year).
The question, in the world of modern media, isn’t really whether you approve of the BBC, or think it provides a huge amount of first-rate stuff for a very minimal cost. It’s why anyone, particularly a generation that watches very little live broadcasting, and is quite used to the notion of paying a subscription fee – but for services such as Spotify or Netflix that they choose to use – should be made to pay for the BBC, its numerous channels, its websites, and its 22,000 employees, even if they never use any of its products.
I think it’s quite likely that, whatever the government and parts of the press may think, that most people don’t have any particular hostility towards the Beeb, and that the majority rate at least some of its output very highly. But it seems equally likely that few people who don’t derive their income from it would go to the stake to defend a funding model that looks absolutely outdated, and is quite obviously unfair.
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