Media
Why we should worry about the BBC
Published 25 October 2007
We need it and we need it to be good. But the latest cuts announced by Mark Thompson risk tipping the corporation into a downward spiral
My American friend Pete, who works in the oil industry, has lived in Britain for nearly 30 years. Ask him why he likes it here and he says: "Three letters: BBC." Pete believes not only that the BBC is good to watch and listen to, but that it has a strong, benign influence on British life, adding depth to public discussion and breadth to the culture. His native country, he says, would be a better place if it had something comparable.
You can see what he means if you imagine a Britain where the television news was supplied only by ITN and Sky. ITN and Sky may be fine today, but, spared the requirement to compete with a powerful public-service news broadcaster, and with only the advertisers and the stock market to answer to, they would inevitably tend towards the shallow or the partisan, or both.
Look at the newspaper market, which is in just that state: this is still the age of the Sun and the News of the World, and the only up-and-coming paper in the market appears to be Richard Desmond's Daily Star Sunday. Is that how you want your TV news?
Or look, by way of contrast, at online news. If you want to know what has just happened, if you want to find a straightforward news story, you will probably go to the BBC site; commercial news sites are forced to compete with that, and it is good for them and us.
This Pete Principle, to give it a name, is also evident in comedy, drama, music and many other areas, but few would deny that its role is most important in news. Which makes it depressing that this is the department upon which Mark Thompson's axe is poised to fall most heavily.
Depressing - and irritating. Thompson is supposed to be a director general with vision, a broadcaster who can see the shapes in the kaleidoscopic digital future and make plans accordingly, and yet this is the second time in just two and a half years that he has found it necessary to restructure the corporation at the expense of thousands of jobs.
And it is no use pleading that this is the government's fault, because the reason for the latest cuts is that Thompson's budgets for the years to 2012 had been founded on an assumption he should never have made: that he would be given the licence fee he wanted.
The BBC is not short of powerful enemies. Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre and their armies of scribes never tire of portraying the Pete Principle as elitist and the licence fee as a tax levied by middle-class liberals so they can make programmes to please each other. They can't win on the point of principle: as with the NHS, the benefits of the BBC are too obvious. But they can achieve their ends, just as they have succeeded in corroding confidence in the NHS, by making it about money.
Persuade people that the place is awash with cash and that no amount of public generosity will ever ensure value for money, and they will soon lose faith and accept those salami-slicing changes that lead, if not to a slow death, then into a long downward spiral from which escape is very difficult.
Again the newspaper world points the way. Proprietors see sales falling and cut journalism to balance the books; then when sales fall further (because the papers are offering less of what they are supposed to) they cut journalism again. And so on - look at the Express and the Independent.
Does that fate now await the BBC? If Thompson could cut 350 jobs from news without it showing he would certainly vindicate all those BBC types who moan about a surfeit of managers. But sacking suits is not the plan, and instead we are promised a nipping and tucking of the output of a kind that, supposedly, most people will not notice. Change at the BBC that people don't notice? No chance.
Thompson has a tough job, but it is one he wanted and, as the Pete Principle shows, it happens to be one of the most important in the country. So far his BBC is good; I hope he's not about to screw it up.
Credit where it's due
There has been no announcement from the Palace, but the last wisps of doubt in the press about the Wills and Kate reconciliation blew away when the couple started complaining about photographers again. So it seems a good moment to look back to the split of April and see who read it right.
You may remember that Fleet Street was in a tizz, and though every paper boasted well-placed (but always anonymous) sources, those sources seemed hopelessly muddled. Two papers, however, insisted that the pair had "opted for what those closest to them see as a break", that the Queen knew they might get back together, and that friends "cautioned against ruling out a reconciliation". Which papers? Why, the Express and the Sunday Express.
It would be churlish not to congratulate them, though I still think the range of theories on offer back then was so comprehensive that, mathematically, someone had to be right.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
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