Tory policy puts public service broadcasting under threat

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Posted by Tom O'Malley

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Tom O'Malley is Emeritus Professor of Media Studies at Aberystwyth University and a member of the CPBF's National Council. This blog post was originally published as an article in the Morning Star on 13 September, 2015. It has been slightly edited.

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The BBC has had a busy summer. In July, the Minister responsible for broadcasting, John Whittingdale, launched a consultation on the future of the BBC... The BBC’s Director General, Tony Hall, has been making speeches laying out his vision of the Corporation’s future. What does all this mean for the future of the BBC and for public service broadcasting?

Marketising broadcasting

In 1985 the Tory government, anxious to commercialise the broadcast media, commissioned a report on the future of the BBC. Published in 1986, it proposed neo-liberal policies designed to undermine publicly service broadcasting.

It argued that broadcasting should be organised around the market, and paid for by subscription or pay-per-view. A licence fee funded BBC should continue only until the technology to support subscription was widely available. Commercial public service broadcasting (ITV) should be subject to more competition and its obligations to provide public service content cut back. More and more under-regulated, commercial competition, like Murdoch’s BskyB, should be encouraged.

Fast forward to the summer of 2015. ITV is now a shadow of what it was. Huge chunks of ITV and BBC production has been contracted out to ‘independent’ producers, many of which have become large, global operators. The industry is flooded with under regulated commercial media.

Scaling back the BBC

The BBC has survived, but has to behave more commercially. There have been high profile complaints from its rivals claiming that its popular programming and successful online services squeeze out commercial competitors. It is said to be too big, involved in too many activities and ought to be more ‘distinctive’; that is, it should ditch, or sell off, popular, commercially attractive, services like Radio 2 or its online services. Elements in the government are clearly sympathetic to all of this.

The Coalition forced the BBC to use licence fee income to fund the World Service and S4C; it will now be obliged to pay the licence fees of the over 75s. There has been a real term squeeze on its income, leading to major cuts, with more are to follow.

The government consultation document published by Whittingdale is full of loaded questions such as, ‘Is the BBC crowding out commercial competition and, if so, is this justified?’ or, ‘Where does the evidence suggest the BBC has a positive or negative wider impact on the market?’ By agreeing these questions need addressing, the government lends credence to the complaints of the BBC’s rivals.

The BBC’s response

The BBC’s response has been to concede ground. Hall has offered to open up all BBC production to private contractors. That is equivalent to opening up all NHS services opened to private tender.

It will undermine continuity of production, creativity, training and equal opportunities policies and lead to further job losses.

His offer to build ‘partnerships’ with media conglomerates to use the licence fee to fund, journalists who would ‘share’ news with these organisations is breath-taking in its subservience to its critics. This means using public money to subsidise the owners of local and regional papers, who have, arguably, spent the last decade sacking journalists in order to bolster their profits. It opens up the prospect of farming out more of the BBC’s news and current affairs to the private sector.

Genuine reforms

Of course the BBC’s coverage of ‘austerity’ and NHS privatisation has been seen as framed by the orthodoxy of the Westminster, neo-liberal political consensus. Of course there are criticisms of the way the BBC fails to provide a sufficiently robust critique of the impact of UK foreign policy on the turmoil in the Middle East.

But the BBC is far more accountable than Sky or Facebook or MSN or Google. It needs to be made more accountable, not less. The BBC provides, for a tiny amount of money relative to the cost of subscribing to companies like Sky, a massively rich and diverse fare. This has to be sustained, diversity increased and its presence on new platforms enhanced.

Its interpretation of ‘impartiality’ has to be changed to include a far wider range of critical perspectives on major issues. Its governance should be made more democratic. Control over content and policy needs to be devolved to nations and regions. Structures designed to allow the public and employees a greater say in its running devised.

Wider reforms

But we need a much wider rethink of communications policy. The CPBF, working with the Media Reform Coalition, has called for a raft of reforms.

These include new controls on media ownership by giving real power to regulators to tackle media concentration and impose public service obligations on large media groups. It means making the main commercial media regulator Ofcom a more representative and accountable body, charged with expanding public media.

It means a levy on big media corporations to pay for more diverse production. It means protecting freedom of communication and privacy for journalists and the public alike, limiting the power of the powerful to lobby ministers for policy favours, and implementing a system of standards regulation in the press compliant with the recommendations put forward by the Leveson report in 2011. We need to commit to policies like these to open up the media to more voices and more accountability

Have your say in the debate on the BBC. Help build a diverse, accountable and independent media. We need to act now!

You can get involved

o Contact the CPBF and ask for a copy of our response to consultation on the BBC. Email Barry White at freepress@cpbf.org.uk. Tel:077729 846 146
o Go to our website at cpbf.org.uk for information about our work
o Make sure your branch and union is affiliated to the CPBF. Ask for a speaker and copies of our journal Free Press.

DATELINE: 30 October, 2015

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