Even before the independent review panel, under Gavyn Davies, had issued its report on future BBC funding, the Murdoch newspapers had their predictable responses rolling off the presses. "A new poll tax," they proclaimed indignantly, as though they were gnarled veterans of the campaign against Margaret Thatcher's poll tax. The panel's expected recommendation - that those in receipt of digital television should pay a small supplement to the licence fee - would create a burden on pensioners and the poor, we were warned. It would deter people from buying digital sets (or set-top boxes) and thus hold back British development in an important area of new technology. It would give the BBC, a non-commercial public body, an unfair advantage over risk-taking entrepreneurs (ie, R Murdoch).
These arguments are laughable. An annual licence supplement of less than £24 is hardly likely to deter people who will have to spend perhaps £200 on hardware and installation and anything up to £30 a month for a decent package of commercial programmes. And the alternative - to finance the BBC's digital programmes out of an increase in the general licence fee - would be even more unfair to pensioners and the poor, since they would then be subsidising services that went, initially at least, largely to more affluent viewers. But the argument is not really about digital at all: it is about the future of the BBC in its present form and the determination of Rupert Murdoch and his acolytes to destroy it.
Mr Murdoch's propaganda machine has tried to put about the idea that the digital revolution, providing several hundred channels, will allow almost anybody to enter the market, produce programmes and find a niche. We should know this is nonsense because we have heard it before. Mr Murdoch said exactly the same in 1986 when he sacked his printers, moved his papers to Wapping and embraced new technology: a thousand papers would bloom, he implied, allowing vegetarian socialists as much of a chance as carnivorous Australian-American businessmen. Nothing of the sort has happened; only the Independent survives from the post-Wapping start-ups, and that only at a heavy loss to its owner. To produce a daily newspaper in a form that consumers will accept, you still need to make a heavy initial investment and support high fixed costs. The same applies to television, even in the digital age. But with this difference: whereas it costs significantly more to print and distribute papers for, say, 500,000 customers rather than 100,000 (though nothing like five times more), the costs of a similar expansion in television audience are zero. In the newspaper market, Mr Murdoch tried a dash to monopoly through price-cutting, but, in the end, the costs of producing more papers for less revenue defeated even him. In television, there are no such restraints: far from promising free competition, digital seems to create the classic conditions for market failure and monopoly.
We have a very clear idea of what a television service dominated by Mr Murdoch would be like. The BBC is variously criticised for snooty high-mindedness, dumbing down, subversion of traditional values, subservience to the establishment. Certainly it has sometimes seemed unsure of its role over the past two decades; but better a dumbed-down Birt than a wised-up Murdoch. The record may be tarnished, but the BBC's output of reliable news, high-quality documentary, good music, innovative drama and educational programmes is still hugely superior to anything done by Mr Murdoch, who has produced nothing memorable or original in his life except the Sun. His satellite channels give us only old films, sport and quiz shows. No sign there of a multi-channel service offering wide choice, with programmes specially produced for niche audiences of enthusiasts for Wagner or Renaissance art.
The BBC brand is as celebrated, worldwide, for its good quality (offset by stuffiness) as the Murdoch brand is deplored for its low quality (offset by populism). No wonder Mr Murdoch's papers denigrate what, in effect, is one of his main rivals. In the digital age we shall need the BBC more than ever. The only question is whether the licence fee is the best mechanism. It is, to be sure, a bad tax because it is indeed a poll tax and, therefore, regressive. But as a method of financing public broadcasting, it has held good for over 70 years; no other country, as the Davies panel found, has come up with a better alternative, and attempts to combine advertising and sponsorship revenue with public funding have often led, as in Canada, to a decline in audience share, as well as to lower quality. If Britishness is to have any meaning at all beyond the mystical, the BBC, like the NHS, must be regarded as an indelible part of our national ecology. We meddle with it at our peril.
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