The BBC pays the price of doing too much
Saturday, 27 October 2007
Philip Stephens
Britain's public broadcaster has lately been in confessional mode - obliged to own up to playing tricks on its viewers and of attempting, by sleight of editing, to misrepresent, of all people, the Queen. Now the BBC management's response to a moderately tough financial settlement has sparked angry staff protests. Blank screens are threatened.
The storms will pass, a senior minister in Gordon Brown's government told me recently. In 10, even 15 years hence, this well-informed politician predicted, a publicly funded BBC will still be the essential fulcrum of Britain's broadcasting industry.
As an admirer of the corporation, as well as a frequent critic of its shortcomings, I rather hope he is right. For all its flaws, the BBC has been a vital antidote to the market failures or direct state intervention all too visible in the industry elsewhere in the world. At its best (try Radio 4 or the World Service), the BBC is peerless. Yet from a more disinterested perspective, I fear that the minister may be proved wrong.
Two or three years ago the BBC was awash with cash. In a moment of hubris I imagine he must now bitterly regret, Mark Thompson, the director general, talked of creating a global media behemoth to rival Google. Never mind that the BBC's founding purpose is to serve viewers and listeners in the UK who fund its operations through an obligatory licence fee. The corporation, in Mr Thompson's mind, would do everything everywhere.
Mr Brown, then keeper of the public purse at the Treasury, did not agree. Instead of the whopping inflation-adjusted increase in its resources the BBC had demanded, the then chancellor imposed a small cut in real terms. Mr Thompson's miscalculation left him with a £2bn ($4.1bn, €2.9bn) hole in the budget for the next six years. The result is the economy drive, including a net 1,800 loss in the corporation's 23,000-strong workforce, that has angered BBC staff.
It is foolish to pretend that Mr Thompson and his colleagues have an easy task in reshaping the BBC for the new broadcasting landscape. The onset of digital transmission and the emergence of new "platforms" (the internet, iPods, mobile phones) for information and entertainment have greatly intensified competition. In this fragmented world, the BBC can no longer rely on the inertia and deference of its audiences as a defence against burgeoning choice.
This in turn has intensified the enduring tension in the corporation's mission: how to combine high-quality output with domestic audiences sufficiently large to justify a universal licence fee. To be populist is to deny the BBC's Reithian mission, yet to be overly highbrow risks the desertion of its audiences.
On the other hand, even after the latest settlement the BBC's guaranteed £3.6bn a year income is scarcely trivial. Its commercial rivals can match neither the resources nor the financial certainty that comes with the licence fee - nor, even after recent mishaps, the kudos that comes with its brand. The BBC website, for example, is by common consent one of the very best.
Some of the proposed savings make obvious sense. The duplication, or triplication, of effort in the BBC's newsgathering is legendary. This is the organisation that sent more than 50 journalists and technicians to Portugal to report the disappearance of four-year-old Madeleine McCann - a bigger contingent, incidentally, than was deployed to cover the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war.
Beyond such rationalisation, however, the cuts fall most heavily on newsgathering and factual and current affairs programming - the very heart of its public service remit. The corporation's bloated bureaucracy will be spared. So, too, will digital channels that consume large amounts of money to serve small audiences with a depressing parade of human frailty. BBC3, a channel that boasts such uplifting fare as My Man-Boobs and Me or Baby-Faced Bodybuilder, costs the BBC, or rather licence-fee payers, some £100m a year.
Mr Thompson likewise refuses to retreat from his rhetoric by reining back the BBC's global ambitions. The result? The numbers can be made to add up only by salami-slicing budgets for some of the broadcaster's most distinctive programming. Along with an increasing diet of repeat transmissions, the likely outcome is that the best of the BBC's output will in future not be quite so good.
The opportunity to realign the BBC's mission and resources has been missed. The cost of trying to do everything everywhere has already been felt in a decline in the quality of BBC journalism. Precision and accuracy have made way for a "nearly right" reporting that forever chases the tabloid press; careful analysis for the modern obsession with on-screen, and on-air, celebrity; foreign stories for ones on crime.
Here lies the reason for my reluctant pessimism. Unrivalled, and objective, news, current affairs and documentary programmes are public broadcasting's raison d'être. Without them, the original drama, first-rate comedy and the rest are merely ornaments. Mr Thompson, sadly, seems to have decided otherwise.
Britain's public broadcaster has lately been in confessional mode - obliged to own up to playing tricks on its viewers and of attempting, by sleight of editing, to misrepresent, of all people, the Queen. Now the BBC management's response to a moderately tough financial settlement has sparked angry staff protests. Blank screens are threatened.
The storms will pass, a senior minister in Gordon Brown's government told me recently. In 10, even 15 years hence, this well-informed politician predicted, a publicly funded BBC will still be the essential fulcrum of Britain's broadcasting industry.
As an admirer of the corporation, as well as a frequent critic of its shortcomings, I rather hope he is right. For all its flaws, the BBC has been a vital antidote to the market failures or direct state intervention all too visible in the industry elsewhere in the world. At its best (try Radio 4 or the World Service), the BBC is peerless. Yet from a more disinterested perspective, I fear that the minister may be proved wrong.
Two or three years ago the BBC was awash with cash. In a moment of hubris I imagine he must now bitterly regret, Mark Thompson, the director general, talked of creating a global media behemoth to rival Google. Never mind that the BBC's founding purpose is to serve viewers and listeners in the UK who fund its operations through an obligatory licence fee. The corporation, in Mr Thompson's mind, would do everything everywhere.
Mr Brown, then keeper of the public purse at the Treasury, did not agree. Instead of the whopping inflation-adjusted increase in its resources the BBC had demanded, the then chancellor imposed a small cut in real terms. Mr Thompson's miscalculation left him with a £2bn ($4.1bn, €2.9bn) hole in the budget for the next six years. The result is the economy drive, including a net 1,800 loss in the corporation's 23,000-strong workforce, that has angered BBC staff.
It is foolish to pretend that Mr Thompson and his colleagues have an easy task in reshaping the BBC for the new broadcasting landscape. The onset of digital transmission and the emergence of new "platforms" (the internet, iPods, mobile phones) for information and entertainment have greatly intensified competition. In this fragmented world, the BBC can no longer rely on the inertia and deference of its audiences as a defence against burgeoning choice.
This in turn has intensified the enduring tension in the corporation's mission: how to combine high-quality output with domestic audiences sufficiently large to justify a universal licence fee. To be populist is to deny the BBC's Reithian mission, yet to be overly highbrow risks the desertion of its audiences.
On the other hand, even after the latest settlement the BBC's guaranteed £3.6bn a year income is scarcely trivial. Its commercial rivals can match neither the resources nor the financial certainty that comes with the licence fee - nor, even after recent mishaps, the kudos that comes with its brand. The BBC website, for example, is by common consent one of the very best.
Some of the proposed savings make obvious sense. The duplication, or triplication, of effort in the BBC's newsgathering is legendary. This is the organisation that sent more than 50 journalists and technicians to Portugal to report the disappearance of four-year-old Madeleine McCann - a bigger contingent, incidentally, than was deployed to cover the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war.
Beyond such rationalisation, however, the cuts fall most heavily on newsgathering and factual and current affairs programming - the very heart of its public service remit. The corporation's bloated bureaucracy will be spared. So, too, will digital channels that consume large amounts of money to serve small audiences with a depressing parade of human frailty. BBC3, a channel that boasts such uplifting fare as My Man-Boobs and Me or Baby-Faced Bodybuilder, costs the BBC, or rather licence-fee payers, some £100m a year.
Mr Thompson likewise refuses to retreat from his rhetoric by reining back the BBC's global ambitions. The result? The numbers can be made to add up only by salami-slicing budgets for some of the broadcaster's most distinctive programming. Along with an increasing diet of repeat transmissions, the likely outcome is that the best of the BBC's output will in future not be quite so good.
The opportunity to realign the BBC's mission and resources has been missed. The cost of trying to do everything everywhere has already been felt in a decline in the quality of BBC journalism. Precision and accuracy have made way for a "nearly right" reporting that forever chases the tabloid press; careful analysis for the modern obsession with on-screen, and on-air, celebrity; foreign stories for ones on crime.
Here lies the reason for my reluctant pessimism. Unrivalled, and objective, news, current affairs and documentary programmes are public broadcasting's raison d'être. Without them, the original drama, first-rate comedy and the rest are merely ornaments. Mr Thompson, sadly, seems to have decided otherwise.