Liberal Vision

A short conversation that says so much

My eye was drawn to the most bizarre exchange between Lord Patten, (BBC Trust chairman), and Maria Miller (Culture Secretary) today, that just makes you wonder what planet politicians (and the BBC Trust) are actually living on these days.

Miller is reported to have contacted Patten following George Entwistle’s less than impressive performance in front of MPs today. She said that full public trust in the BBC’s inquiries into the Savile affair was of “paramount importance“.

Er no. Finding out what actually happened; who knew; who covered it up; whether others were also abusing children in the BBC; & why the BBC decided not to broadcast what they knew… these questions and others are of  paramount importance. Not public trust in the BBC or its well crafted internal inquiries.

Pattern then effectively tells Miller to back off.

“I know that you will not want to give the impression that you are questioning the independence of the BBC.“

The sheer nerve of the guy … sorry Mr Patten, I don’t know where you’ve been these past few weeks since this story was broken (by ITV!) the BBC has done nothing but drag its feet, obfuscate and lie. You are in no position to start talking about “the independence of the BBC”. I certainly hope expect Miller to  question the Beebs independence on this matter. To allow them to run their own inquiry is an outrage. It  lost its right to run its own inquiry a long time ago.

I am not quite sure when the BBC and politicians will wake up to the level of public outrage felt by the public on this one. But this bizarre conversation between two of them suggests that it may well be a while yet.

Turn the BBC into a Cooperative

The television license is a tax in everything but name but advert-free, non-profit television should always be an option for consumers. Turning the BBC from a government-owned corporation into a consumer-owned cooperative would mean nothing about its current high quality content would change – just the unfair aspect of how it is funded.

As it is currently structured, the funding of the BBC creates a lot of losers. I love BBC programming but I rarely watch any BBC channels beyond BBC One and Two. I hardly ever watch sport and do not have access to BBC Three and Four. If you only use your TV to play video games and watch X-Factor on ITV, the license fee means you lose out entirely.

Many regard spending £145.50 year on television as frivolous spending they would never normally do unless made to do so – especially in an economic climate where a great deal of us are watching the pennies more closely. As a consumer I should only have to pay for the services I use. Likewise other people should not have to pay for television I enjoy and value if they don’t enjoy and value it themselves. That is unfair.

In many respects the BBC is broken. It is wasteful and has no incentive to cut back on that unnecessary spending. In recent years I believe that a lot of legitimate criticism of the BBC would have been avoided had the BBC taken more time to appreciate what their audience wanted. This would certainly have prevented instances where the BBC overstaffed events, such as Glastonbury and the Dale Farm Eviction.

Currently 20% of BBC funding comes from sources other than the license fee. Those sources could be expanded and this other revenue – coupled with efficiency savings – can take care of niche channels like BBC Parliament and other innovation and experimentation.

Were the BBC a cooperative, members would pay a yearly fee for the service in lieu of commercial advertising. Logistically speaking this may mean the small matter of having a BBC box in your living room. But rather than a flat license fee for everyone this would allow for a variety of membership options, ranging from cheap ‘Basic’ and ‘Student’ options to expensive options with more channels or packages specifically geared towards your interests.

Being a cooperative would mean the BBC would be owned by the individuals who choose to be members rather than being the jurisdiction of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The members would be democratically enabled thus; the BBC would be more accountable to its audience. I predict that this would result in the content of the BBC becoming much higher quality and the organisation itself becoming leaner and more efficient.

Turning the Beeb into a cooperative is a win-win situation. If you were given the opportunity to preserve something that you enjoy and value, whilst at the same time making it more fair, efficient, democratically accountable and – most importantly – more liberal – it would be silly not to do so.

Sign the e-petition here:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/28826

BBC: Bloated Broadcasting Corporation

With much wailing and gnashing of teeth the BBC announced today exactly how it intends to find the £670million a year savings by 2016/17. Everywhere it turns out. The earlier insistence from BBC  Trust to BBC management that salami slicing would not be in the interests of licence fee payers has, well, been ignored frankly. Faced with disgruntled viewers losing their favourite shows/sports/channels or disgruntled unions losing their members, Auntie has chosen to take on the unions.

The morning news rang with warnings that the nation was waiting to hear which of their favourite programmes would be cut. I was actually stuck in a  traffic jam wondering why the traffic bulletin was late – but I am sure there were millions, thousands, hundreds, several people who were waiting to see which programmes were for the chop.  Would the most popular drama (Downtown Abbey), or the most watched LE show (X Factor) or the BAFTA winning news programme (News At Ten) all disappear from our screens?… Oh no sorry they are all ITV programmes. Well we were certainly assured that some people were waiting to see if their favourite BBC shows were to escape the axe anyway.

I was amused to note that much of the analysis, on Radio Five at least, seemed to be on the cuts to the news budgets. Dire warnings (almost  exclusively from senior ex-staffers) that the BBC’s reputation as the best news broadcaster in the world may be in jeopardy – that quality would fall –  that journalism itself would suffer because of the cuts – came thick and fast.

Really? Did I not mention that it was the ITV’s News (on a shoe-string) At Ten that won this year’s Bafta for Best News Programme of the Year? OK I am being unfair – at the considerably more serious RTS Journalism Awards earlier in the year the Best News Programme award went to ..oh that went to ITV News At Ten too. Damn.. sorry – never mind…. I am certain that BBC won RTS Best News Channel of the Year… oh bugger Sky News won that (again – what is that 8 out of 10 times Sky has won it now?). Hmmm your were saying something about BBC news journalism?

OK OK I suppose we can forgive the BBC for somewhat overstating its own brilliance at news. And whilst we have established that it isn’t actually the best news provider – it is surely the most balanced. Hmmm… Not today it would seem. In the six hours of news I listened to Radio Five Live (and it did cover the BBC cuts quite a lot)  I didn’t actually hear one interviewee agree with any of the proposed cuts or suggest that the cuts to news could be accommodated without loss of quality if only they would get off their lazy backsides. Maybe I just missed them – and I am reliably informed that at least by the time we got to 2230 or so, at least some dissenting voices were allowed onto the airwaves.

(And I haven’t heard a word anywhere on how much of a dent it has made into the £65m it paid out last year to just 274 members of its ‘talent’).

Next up is the fun of the  “public consultation“. Now that is what I call entertainment –  With some 800 news jobs being axed (about 15% of its eye-watering 5000 total), General secretary of the NUJ Michelle Stanistreet has already said that

“.. If the BBC presses ahead with these changes, strike action across the corporation seems inevitable”.

Some good news for Rupert Murdoch at last!

PS: The BBC’s Director-General Mark Thompson will be a guest, taking calls about the cuts, on Victoria Derbyshire’s programme on Friday 7 October from 10am.

BBC on drugs?

I don’t know quite what the BBC was on yesterday – but the excitement of the past 48 hours clearly got to them.

Whilst covering the emergency debate in Parliament – the BBC also felt it necessary to show images of a jet taxi-ing at Luton… with the dramatic headline “RUPERT MURDOCH IS EXPECTED TO LEAVE COUNTRY” ….

Is that really news? Still it wasn’t quite as mad as the earlier incident – when BBC News channel cut off an interviewee in mid-sentence to “cut to (equally un-)dramatic pictures of ……..David Cameron getting into a car ! – on his way to Parliament…..

Let’s hope the summer recess will allow all those BBC journalists to go and lie down in a quiet dark place for a while. And let’s hope that BSKYB don’t pull the plug on Sky News anytime soon if this is the best the BBC can do.

Just what do we mean by ‘media plurality’?

LV has already posted on the quite unbelievable News of the World (1843-2011) closure. It goes without saying that I also found the paper’s phone hacking activities to be abhorrent and beneath contempt. I won’t mourn its passing.

Notwithstanding what has already been said here and elsewhere, I feel that most of the wall-to-wall coverage has been motivated as much out of moral revulsion over the latest allegations as just another opportunity to berate the evil omnipotent figure of Rupert Murdoch for what he is and what he stands for. To borrow a phrase from the Labour frontbench on the nature of government cuts, it’s ideologically driven.

Take for instance Lord Puttnam’s article yesterday in The Observer. The Labour peer believes that Murdoch has become too powerful to the extent our harming our democracy and should be prevented from creating a “licensed monopoly” through completion of the BSkyB deal. Is Murdoch’s empire really that much of a colossus compared to its rivals?

In one respect, it is. Puttnam draws attention to the disparity of income between Sky and the BBC: “In 1997, BSkyB had revenues of £1.72bn, or 63% of the then BBC licence fee income. In the most recent year for which accurate figures are available, Sky’s turnover was £5.9bn or 163% that of the BBC.”

It should be remembered that the total income of the BBC is of course much more than that raised by the license fee alone, standing at £4.79bn according to recent figures.

However, what Puttnam neglected to mention is that the BBC’s income is assured vis-à-vis the license fee (translation: a de-facto universal and inegalitarian tax) whereas Sky’s income is not (subscriptions will doubtless be affected by squeezes on household income or any future reduction in TV advertising by firms).

Please don’t read this as some Mailygraph style rant against the Beeb. Unlike Charles Moore who dedicated his weekly Spectator Diary column as a crusade against the BBC, this will be the last time I post about it. That’s a promise. I value a great deal of the BBC’s output but it is the element of compulsion I’m uneasy with: if you want a telly, you’ve got to pay your TV license or face prosecution. Conversely, nobody is compelled into buying a Sky subscription package.

Moreover, if one compares another set of figures relating to total news consumption, the BBC is dominant by a country mile – 39.3% compared to the 22% combined figure for News Corp and Sky.

So who’s the most powerful and influential now, eh? Is the BBC not a threat to plurality?

If Lord Puttnam is so concerned with licensed monopolies and plurality, why is he not calling for the break-up of the BBC? If he’s so concerned about the “Stasi activities” on behalf of the NOTW, then he should also attack Google (so far, he’s only whinged about them not paying tax). I find it hard to believe that News International have been afforded the same level of government contact as Google has had in recent times.

Or, is this just another case of a politician obsessing about Murdoch’s apparent supernatural powers of political puppetry, influencing the masses to vote accordingly? Labour still can’t be smarting from The Sun’s infamous 1992 front page (not to mention their most recent political defection away from their party), surely? Murdoch backs winners. It is that simple. The only party that hasn’t demeaned themselves by Murdoch derriére-licking has been the Liberal Democrats. Hello self-righteous moral highground, we’ve missed you!

For many like Lord Puttnam, ‘media plurality’ simply means the retention, if not extension, of the BBC monopoly coupled with the ostracism and marginalisation of any news medium that does not conform to their worldview.