Last week, the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom held a conference in central London about a threat to broadcasting that few people know about. Most of the participants were academics. Dorothy Byrne, the current affairs editor of Channel 4, came. There was no one from the BBC and no national press.

The aim of the conference was to alert the public to the government's white paper on the media, A New Future for Communications, which was announced in December by the Culture Secretary Chris Smith and the Trade Secretary Stephen Byers with these words: "Rules governing all British broadcasting and communications industries will be radically modernised to ensure that citizens, consumers and the media industry are to be winners in the new communications revolution." There was the need, they said, to give broadcasters "lighter touch regulation so that they have the freedom to operate effectively".

It was a brilliant new Labour policy statement. Almost all of it was the diametric opposite of the truth. Legislation rushed through parliament, probably in the autumn, will begin the conversion of British broadcasting to the ultra-commercial American model, which has long ceased to be a medium of free expression. The BBC will be forced into direct competition with huge commercial interests, "creating for the first time", say the ministers, "a level playing field for British broadcasting".

Stephen Barnett, professor of communications at the University of Westminster, puts it this way: "As night follows day, there would follow a systematic erosion of [the BBC's] popular base until it became [an] American-style unwatched public broadcaster. At that point, the licence fee, and therefore the BBC, dies. It's not difficult to level the playing field if you don't mind barren ground."

The public and MPs were given just two months - including the Christmas break - to consider and respond to the white paper. The government is clearly worried that informed criticism will expose "radically modernising" for what it is: an agenda for handing over the keys of public broadcasting to big business. The Financial Times, always a reliable source for new Labour's deals, recently referred to the government's "argument for no [media] regulation". That is the real agenda.

Tucked away in the business section of the Observer, Greg Palast pulled the strands together: from Blair's poodle-role in bombing Baghdad to obeying Washington's orders to promote the General Agreement on Trade and Services that will speed the privatising of the health service and education (apologist: Clare Short) and to "smash all EU trade controls, including restrictions on US films and television". With his Hayman Island boy assured of a second term in Downing Street, Rupert Murdoch must feel that his long campaign to "open up" television in Britain is approaching its triumphal end.

That is, unless broadcasters wake up. For too long, senior journalists, editors and producers have promoted, via a consensus of spurious assumptions, and language deemed "objective", the corporate state as an economic necessity. The privatising, or theft, of communal services - water, power, telecommunications, transport and now, by stealth, education and health services - has proceeded thanks in no small part to the media. The big lie of Margaret Thatcher's day, that we were all going to be shareholders, was never seriously challenged by those whose job is to keep the record straight. Legislation that will finally add public broadcasting to the list is the result of this long collaboration between corporatism and journalism. For example, the incessant hyping of technological advance as an empowering "freedom" has masked the takeover of much of cyberspace by multi-national corporations.

Read between its jargon, the white paper is a warning that for the first time since broadcasting began in Britain, legislation will take away a universal public service obligation, and commercialism will be unleashed, bringing standards crashing. It will be a drip-drip process. Limp words about support for public service broadcasting are there to distract those co-opted by new Labour.

All this will be overseen by an Office of Communications, or Ofcom, which will be entirely undemocratic and as supportive of "the consumer" as is the rail regulator. It will be responsible for everything from mobile phones to commercial television, and its main function will be to make broadcasting a commodity, to be bought and sold. The BBC will fall under the Competition Act and be forced into marriages of survival. Before giving his approval, the Secretary of State will judge new BBC services for their "market impact". Demanding this of a genuine public broadcaster is like feeding cattle with offal. Its very nature is denied and corrupted.

To the Blair government, the very notion of journalism as an enduring 300-year-old struggle for freedom from corporatism in all its guises is as boring as a bog-standard school. They are encouraged in this view by the silence of journalists with the authority to speak out. Or by those who speak out without mentioning the agenda of their new Labour friends. Where are the high-profile broadcasters and the newsreaders who assume a celebrity status, the OBEs and MBEs? Where are the fearless terriers of Newsnight and the Today programme? Surely they are not waiting until the BBC meets the same fate as public broadcasting in Italy, which was put on a "level playing field" with Silvio Berlusconi and reduced to a tragic joke.

The recommendations of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom are common sense. There should be a year-long public debate, up and down the country. The very notion of diversity of opinion coming under the Competition Act is obscene, and should be exposed and abandoned. As for Ofcom, there is nothing basically wrong with the present Independent Television Commission. All it needs is more accountable powers that strengthen its capacity to restore and protect public service television on ITV and Channel 4. (Chartered to be different and experimental, Channel 4's dumbing-down is television's unrecognised tragedy).

The white paper bursts with techno- nonsense about the digital revolution. This has nothing to do with good broadcasting. The population is not in awe of computers, which are no more than tools. Unlike in the United States, people in this country still support an eclectic range of quality television. What digital TV promises, under "radical modernising", is a choice of electronic shopping malls.

This white paper should be opposed by all journalists and broadcasters. It is about a seizure of power, and it is our job to warn the public. We might also begin to debate seriously how to break the monopoly of ideas that already exists, especially in the press. Remember the campaigns of Murdoch's Sunday Times against the BBC, the British film industry and anything else that got in the way of his voracious appetite.

Long before it converged with the Tories, the Labour Party used to publish thoughtful discussion papers on the media. Several referred to an imaginative, state-supported scheme in Sweden. This is a statute body that provides seed money for independent publications and other media that cannot survive by advertising alone. It works, and endures, in spite of the rise of Swedish Blairism. The public likes it and wants it left alone.

That is what we need here. We need a media that reflects the complexion and complexity of this society, that report human beings in terms other than stereotypes and their usefulness to the rapacity of western economic power. Some freedoms can be lost without anybody noticing until it is too late. This is one of them.

If you want to do something, contact the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, 8 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF. Phone 020 7278 4430, or e-mail:freepress@cpbf.org.uk

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