A view from the Guardian

Posted by Helene Mulholland

Guardian journalist Helene Mulholland attended the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom conference on the BBC white paper on 1 April. Here are her thoughts on the event...

The white paper, published last month, was not as bad as everyone feared, no doubt due to the extensive lobbying from public service broadcasting campaigners and media unions which took place ahead of publication. That said, it would be wrong to say that these groups are remotely happy: they fear it signals creeping privatisation of the BBC. (Emily Bell looked at the evidence that the BBC is preparing for private funding after the next 10 year licence fee deal in ... MediaGuardian).

While on the surface the white paper appears to support public service broadcasting as delivered by the BBC, scratch the surface and many keen PSB watchers have reason to fear that the corporation's status as a free standing public service institution is under threat. Much like other parts of the public sector - education, health, the civil service - the white paper signals an era where increasing amounts of public money will be hived off to the private sphere, and few at the CPBF conference were prepared to take that idea lying down.

One of the most illuminating speakers of the day was media academic Tom O'Malley. who pointed out that the premise of the entire white paper has been built around the easy assumption that the BBC might use its unique vantage point to compete unfairly with others in the future.

Ok so it hasn't for the past eighty odd years, but that's no reason not to assume it won't in the future. This hypothetical has steered the entire document, most notably the decision to increase Ofcom's power over the BBC. It will be responsible for conducting market impact assessments to ensure the private sector is not disadvantaged in any way. In other words, the nature of existing BBC services and proposals for new ones will be pretty much in Ofcom's gift. Ofcom will even have to be consulted by the future BBC Trust about any codes of practice drawn up in areas where competition might arise. To paraphrase O'Malley, how's that for BBC independence?

And then there is this window of creative competition (WOCC) - a phrase which few on the CPBF platform, other than media minister James Purnell, could utter with a straight face.

The WOCC will see the level of BBC output put out to competitive tender double to 50%. For O'Malley, WOCC is to the BBC what PFI is to the health sector; diverting money out of public resources into private hands, and narrowing the BBC's creative scope by denuding the public broadcasting service of its skills base. Mr Purnell's insistence earlier in the day that the 25% of business open to both the BBC and its commercial rivals “really is one of competition" didn't really do it for the audience.

In fact, it's fair to say he lost them completely in his attempt to draw a word picture on how BBC resources could contribute to the wider broadcasting sphere. “We want the licence fee to act as venture capital for creative talent and nowhere is this clearer than in the BBC's investment in training and research and development", he told a baffled audience.

By the end of the day, John McDonnell, Labour backbench rebel MP and chair of the NUJ parliamentary group, was already proposing the setting up of a parliamentary group to lobby ministers against the privateering tendencies of the white paper. This would be in addition to a new campaign, launched last week , which plans to lobby against creeping privatisation into the public sector under Tony Blair, in which both McDonnell and NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear are also involved. But McDonnell thinks the threat to the sanctity of the BBC in the white paper is strong enough to warrant a parliamentary group all of it own.

 If ministers thought PSB campaigners would be grateful for a white paper that could always have been worse, it was a presumption too far on their part.