'Broadcasting and Civil Society'

By Mark Thompson, BBC Director General,

Pontifical University of the Holy Cross , Tuesday 2 February 2010

 

 

What is public service broadcasting for?  That’s the question which often comes up when policy-makers and interested parties across Europe debate the future of broadcasting, though at least in Britain when we ask the public what they think the BBC is for, they seem to have a pretty clear idea.

 

Public service broadcasters like the BBC exist to deliver to them, and to audiences around the world, programmes and content of real quality and value.  Content that deepens understanding, changes attitudes, makes people encounter the world with new eyes and new ears.  Content – news, music, drama, documentary, religious programming – which would not be made and which they would never enjoy if the BBC and some of its sister broadcasters did not exist.

 

Sometimes our critics like to claim that the BBC and the other European public service broadcasters have forgotten this basic mission. 

 

There will of course always be arguments about our services – about the proper limits to entertainment, say, or to our ambitions in digital media.  But watch Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch’s A History of Christianity on BBC Four, or our Prix Europa winning drama Occupation which dealt with British soldiers struggling to come to terms with their experiences in Iraq, or listen to the BBC Proms, the biggest festival of classical music in the world, or look at the BBC’s international website, and I believe you’ll find the same conviction, the same excellence which has always characterised the BBC at its best. 

 

Other brave souls suggest – or at least used to suggest – that if public broadcasters like the BBC were not there, the market would simply step up and produce all this remarkable content instead.  Last night’s Richard Dimbleby Lecture on BBC ONE about assisted suicide, presumably, the Year of Science we’re currently broadcasting across TV and radio, or Newsround, our news programme for children. 

 

But look around you.  Look at commercial media across Europe and around the world.  Is it really possible in 2010 to believe that – with all its undoubted shortcomings – if you took a broadcaster like the BBC away, you would end up with anything other than a big black cultural hole?

 

But the BBC is more than just a machine for investing in and delivering good content and services.  It has a more fundamental mission as a guarantor and protector of public space – that public square which everyone can enter, no matter how wealthy or poor they are. 

 

Public space is different from commercial space and from the space controlled by the state.  There are no pay walls in public space, no barriers between the public and the news and information they need to form their own judgment about the great issues of the day, or between them and the educational and cultural resources which could enrich their and their families’ lives.  Whereas commercial media companies have to assign different values to different target groups ¾ favoring the affluent, say, or the young ¾ in public space, everyone is as important and valuable as everyone else. 

And public space is independent space.  There is no place in it for censorship or bias.  In public space, citizens have the right to receive news of every kind and to encounter and engage with the full range of opinion.  Government and state perspectives are there to be explored and scrutinised like everything else.  They do not enjoy special privileges or vetoes.

 

The battle for public service broadcasting

 

But the values of public space – and of public service broadcasters like the BBC – are under attack as never before, and from a number of different directions.

 

The BBC’s absolute duty to impartiality is now regularly disputed not just by those with a political axe to grind but by well-intentioned and serious-minded people who claim that there other imperatives so important that we should set impartiality aside.  Let me give you an example. 

 

A few months ago Question Time, a long-running programme on BBC TV in which the public are able to put questions to Britain’s politicians, invited Nick Griffin, the leader of the far right group the British National Party to take part.  It was the first time such an invitation had been extended to the BNP.  The vast majority of other political parties and of the public, regard the BNP’s policies, particularly about race and immigration, as both offensive and dangerous.  There was an angry debate in the media as well as street protests about our decision to invite them onto the programme. 

 

But we live in a democracy and, as a public service broadcaster, the BBC has a duty to reflect the full range of opinions in that democracy.  The BNP is a legal party which has won seats in some English local elections.  In last summer’s European elections, they won two seats and demonstrated a level of popular support which in the case of other minor parties would and has led to an occasional invitation to appear on Question Time.  We believe that it is not right for the BBC to favour some parties over others or to prevent the public from questioning and challenging parties across the whole political spectrum, even its fringes. 

 

A BBC that compromised its impartiality for any reason, even one that many people might think was worthy, would no longer be the BBC.  And interestingly, research suggests that a large majority of the British public agreed with our decision.

 

There’s also now a vigorous attempt in the press and elsewhere to suggest that strong comedy and satire are somehow unacceptable in the public space and are evidence that the BBC has lost its traditional values.  We haven’t. These critics sometimes forget that, while we do of course have a duty to reflect and respect the absolute boundaries of public taste, another of our duties is to stand up for creative freedom and ambition.  It’s what the public want from us.  It’s what we believe in. It’s what the BBC has always done.  

 

But the attacks are about much more than impartiality or the boundaries of taste.  And they’re not restricted to the UK or to the BBC.

 

Let’s look at some headlines:  ‘Just what is the licence-fee for anyway?’  ‘Abolish it.’  ‘Why not put a bomb under them.’  ‘How much public service intervention does the internet need?’  ‘We’ve had it with the licence-fee – join our campaign!’

 

These aren’t quotes from the British press.  They’re from Bild, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Flemish paper De Standaard, Il Giornale and Spiegel.  Nor are they about the BBC – they’re about ARD/ZDF, VRT and RAI.  I could just as easily have quoted some of the French press on France Télévision, or the Japanese press on NHK.

 

The assault on public service broadcasting is happening across the developed world.  Its causes are the immense pressure which digital is placing on traditional media business models and which makes many commercial broadcasters and newspaper groups look at the special status and funding of the public broadcasters with fresh envy and anger; and secondly and specifically, the impact of convergence. 

 

Once newspapers and broadcasters were in separate clearly defined markets, the first pretty free in most markets, the second typically heavily regulated and subject to significant public intervention. 

 

Now everyone is meeting everyone else on the web – and, whether in the UK or the rest of Europe or in the Far East, more or less the last thing most newspaper proprietors want to bump into on the web is a well-funded and creatively ambitious public broadcaster.

 

As a result, plenty of heat and plenty of headlines.  Also plenty of political activity.  In many developed countries, commercial media groups can exercise not just direct pressure through what they say on their front pages, leader columns, or what they choose to broadcast on their own or closely aligned television stations, but indirect pressure through friendly politicians.

 

In recent months, there has been acute pressure on the independence and the funding of the public service broadcasters in Spain, France and Italy.  A few months ago the President of RTVE, my friend Luis Fernandez, stood down amid questions about the Spanish broadcaster’s political independence, despite legislation three years ago which was supposed to guarantee it. 

 

Governments in both Spain and France claim to be moving closer to the BBC model by removing advertising from the PSBs and making them rely solely on public money.  In itself, the ending of dual-funding could be seen as a positive, but in practice it’s meant a large cut in the money available to them to invest in programmes and services.  In fact, cuts in public service budgets are happening across Europe, particularly in countries where licence-fee settlements are of short duration or, as in the case of Holland, where the licence-fee has been replaced by direct government funding. 

 

And there are governance changes too.  In France, for instance, there is now a new way of selecting the Director-General of France Télévision:  direct appointment by the President of the Republic.  So not quite the BBC model.

 

I do not need to expand here about the situation in Italy, where the links between political power and media influence have been widely debated and raise specific questions about RAI’s financial and editorial independence.

 

So:  across much of Europe, hostility from commercial media; from politicians, a squeeze on funding, threats, apparent collusion with commercial interests, broken promises and, in some cases, attempts at overt political influence on appointments and editorial decisions. 

 

Not just an economic argument then, about the scale and scope of public intervention in media, but in several of our closest neighbours in Europe, political attempts to curtail the independence and freedom of the public broadcasters.

Is Britain bound to go the same way?

 

Which brings us to another question:  is it inevitable that every country - and specifically the UK ¾ will go the same way?

 

It’s clear that some of the same factors are at work.  The language which some of the leaders of UK commercial media use to describe the BBC – ‘sinister’, ‘Orwellian’, ‘chilling’ were some of the epithets James Murdoch used in his lecture to the Edinburgh Television Festival this summer – the language has become more intemperate and extreme.  At least one of Mr Murdoch’s newspapers had taken to referring to the BBC not as an independent public broadcaster – which is what we are and always have been – but as a ‘state broadcaster’, implying that we are under the Government’s control.    

We are not – far from it!  Indeed relations between the present British Government and the BBC have became strained in recent times over the Government’s proposal to divert some of the licence fee – which historically has been awarded solely to the BBC – to other broadcasters.  The BBC resisted this proposal because, wherever it’s been tried in the world and whatever the good intentions that inspired it, the practical effect has been to weaken the independence of the public broadcaster and the quality of its output.  At the end of 2009, the Government announced that it was shelving the proposal at least for the present.   

 

The current governance arrangements for the BBC and the role of its governing body the BBC Trust have also come under political attack.  However, despite some talk last year of the BBC’s Charter being abrogated, the major parties have made it clear that, should they gain power in this year’s election in the UK, they would honour both the BBC’s independence and its current system of funding.

 

And indeed there are important grounds for believing that the UK will not go the same way as some other European countries.

 

First the British public still overwhelmingly support the idea of public service broadcasting and of a strong, confident BBC.  85% of them say they’d miss it if it wasn’t there.  At a time when public confidence in institutions is sinking – only 13% of the public say they trust British politicians – the BBC’s trust ratings remain strong, indeed have actually risen over the past five years.

 

But second, while British politicians are sometimes as enthusiastic as their continental counterparts to criticise the public broadcaster when they think we’ve got it wrong – and that, by the way, is not just their right but their duty – underlying political support for a strong, independent BBC also remains robust.  Let me quote one representative leading British politician:

 

‘You can come up with all the arguments in the world for how – theoretically – a different, more market-driven model could work better.  But frankly, I would rather stick with a structure that has produced good television and radio programmes, led by an institution – the BBC – that is still respected at home and abroad.’

 

That’s David Cameron, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, writing in the British newspaper The Sun last autumn.  No 10 has also made it clear in recent months that it believes that ‘the BBC has an essential role to play at the heart of public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom’ and emphasized that ‘it needs an adequate and reliable form of funding’. And that’s a view publicly shared by Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, indeed by nearly all the mainstream UK political parties.

Support for the BBC's independence and for its Charter

 

In addition to that broad political support, there is a specific tradition in the UK of politicians accepting and honouring the independence of the BBC and the other PSBs.

 

For the BBC, the main guarantee of independence and impartiality is the Royal Charter.  Each Charter is only granted after an exhaustive debate about the future of broadcasting but, once it is granted, it removes the BBC from direct political control for a decade.  It spells out the Corporation’s independence, not just in editorial matters but in the overall management of its own affairs. 

Parliament remains of course sovereign and therefore has the theoretical power to pass legislation to abrogate or override the Charter at any time.  In many other countries, there’s a tradition of changing the mandate of the public service broadcaster every time there’s an election – often the government also changes the Director-General and the rest of the senior management at the same time – but in Britain over more than 80 years that has never happened. 

 

It’s not that successive British governments has not had strong views about the BBC.  Rather that they’ve accepted they should wait until the point of Charter review to press home any changes they want to make.

 

And it’s a similar story with funding.  Unlike other European broadcasters like RAI who rely partly, or in some cases wholly, on advertising revenue, the BBC’s UK public TV, radio and digital services are funded entirely by a licence fee.  The level of that fee is set by the Government  but we have a tradition of multi-year funding settlements to prevent the BBC from facing an annual financial choke-point which could leave it vulnerable to political pressure. 

 

Just like the Charter, this arrangement does not leave the BBC free from financial accountability.  The BBC Trust, our governing body, is required to hold the BBC to account for the value for money it delivered on a continuous basis.  And, every five years or so, there is a set-piece public debate on the funding of the Corporation and a chance for the Government of the day to make a judgement-call about how large or small the licence-fee should be. 

 

What there isn’t is a constant insidious incentive for the BBC not to offend the Government about anything else for fear that it will lead to an immediate financial penalty.

 

Remember, this is what makes public service broadcasting different from other public services: one of our most important jobs is to analyse and scrutinise daily the policy and politics of our country. Without guaranteed independence, we cannot fulfil this mission and public trust in the impartiality and believability of our reporting will be undermined.

 

To date, all the UK’s major parties have accepted the need for these safeguards and protections.

Our side of the bargain

 

But none of this should be taken as an argument for the status quo.  The BBC’s independence is there not so that it can stand still, but so that it is better able to serve the public and, where necessary, better able to adapt and change.   

 

To justify its independence, the BBC must keep its side of the bargain.

 

Because what I and everyone at the BBC have to accept is that with the great privileges which the Charter and licence-fee confer, there are equally great responsibilities.  A responsibility to respond promptly and constructively to fair criticism.  A responsibility, wherever possible, to support rather than to hinder the rest of the public broadcasting system and the wider media and creative industries.  Above all, a responsibility to listen to the public and to deliver services which enrich and improve what I’ve called ‘public space’.

 

One of the core missions of the BBC Trust is to ensure that the BBC does all of these things, not only in the run-up to charter reviews and licence-fee settlements, but all the time.

 

And I believe that in the first three years of this Charter, you can see that working in action.  In the fact that proposals for new BBC services are automatically subject to independent market impact assessment, and in some cases are being turned down.  In our response to the public demand for greater openness ­– I believe that we have moved further down the road of disclosure than any other major British public body.  In our efforts to partner with the other UK public broadcasters and with other public institutions – museums, galleries, theatre companies, opera houses and so on – to help bring the best of what they do to a wider public.  In our determination to use the licence fee to support talent and creativity not just in our capital city but across the whole of the UK.

 

But that only tells one part of the story.  Although all of these topics and others, like editorial standards, are important and should be addressed in a timely and effective way, by far the biggest responsibility of the BBC is a positive one.  To deliver to the British public the best programmes and services that we can.  To turn the fine words of the theory of public service broadcasting into journalism, drama, documentary, arts and religious output, children’s programmes that live on in the memory and that open doors that otherwise would be shut.

 

We’ve just begun a new project called The History of the World in 100 Objects.  The heart of the project is a series of radio programmes in which the Director of the BritishMuseum, Neil MacGregor, takes a series of artefacts each of which shines a light of one aspect of human civilisation.  But this partnership with the BritishMuseum extends to hundreds of other museums across the UK, encouraging listeners of the programme wherever they live to go to see similar or related artefacts for themselves.  There’s a children’s series and a website which will be available to the public forever, and a commitment to broadcast the central programmes on the BBC World Service so that audiencs around the world can enjoy and learn from them.

This is our side of the bargain.

 

The future of public service broadcasting

 

But let’s now turn to the future of public service broadcasting both in the UK and around the world.  And let’s start by considering the future of what I’ve called ‘public space’.

 

The digital era should be the golden age of public space.  The means of both creating and disseminating content of every kind have been democratised.  The barriers to entry to the global conversation have collapsed and every day single citizens reach thousands of others with their ideas and opinions.  New categories of public content providers have emerged ¾ not-for-profit and typically driven by anonymous and unpaid public-spirited volunteers ¾ whether at community, national or international level.  Services like Wikipedia and Twitter broaden and enrich public knowledge and discourse in new ways which are still very close to the spirit of public service broadcasting.

But digital also threatens to disrupt traditional public space.  Fragmentation of audiences and consumption is weakening traditional media business models.  As a result, the ability of many players to invest in quality content, from international newsgathering to outstanding indigenous drama and comedy, is being compromised.  In broadcasting, the formal and informal contracts by which the public ‘purchased’ socially and culturally valuable content from commercial players in return for privileges like free or preferential access to spectrum are breaking down.  When a piece of valuable content is lost ¾ consider for instance the cancellation, by Britain’s main commercially-funded public service broadcaster ITV, of its outstanding and long-running arts documentary series, The South Bank Show ¾ the effects are multiple:  the audience loses a precious connection to the world of the arts; the UK television industry loses an important documentary platform; but at the same time, many artists and cultural institutions lose a significant pathway to the public.  Public space is diminished.

Nor is the global pluralising and democratising of opinion and argument as straightforward as it appears.  Whereas historically, at least in the developed world, the public could reasonably expect continuous access to a significant number of different well-funded sources of journalistic content, there is now a danger that the ‘middle’ of many forms of media disappears and that, above the vast and unruly world of the blogosphere, professional media power concentrates in fewer and fewer hands.  Individual plurality increases, but collective, effective plurality decreases with societies around the world left with fewer reliable sources of professionally-validated news and fewer platforms for talent to reach large audiences.  The risk of systematic bias and misinformation and, in some countries, of state control, actually grows.  Again, public space is threatened.

So how should the BBC and other public service broadcasters respond to these new challenges?  In a way, we have to walk a tightrope.  We have to focus more than ever on our mission and our values because, far from diminishing, market failure in quality content is actually growing, and we have to remain strong and confident.  But we mustn’t abuse our strength and special status so as to damage the prospects of commercial media finding a sustainable place for itself in this new world. 

 

Right now we’re engaged in a major review of strategy at the BBC, aimed at deciding what kind of the BBC can best serve audiences at home and around the world in this new decade.

 

The review will be both radical and open-minded and it’s already throwing up difficult choices.  Over the past twenty years, we’ve been able to use productivity gains ¾ enhanced during some of the period by a licence-fee which grew in real terms ¾ to opt for what you could call a ‘both-and’ strategy:  both maintaining, indeed sometimes being able to increase investment in existing linear services, and launching new digital ones.

 

The British public tell us that they continue to want a strong, confident BBC which delivers real value to every household in the country.  But in a period where not just the licence-fee, but the wider public finances and the revenues available to commercial media, are constrained, and after years of squeezing efficiencies out of the system, ‘both-and’ must and will give way to ‘either-or’.  And that means choices.

 

We’ll have conclusions from the review early in 2010.  Without preempting them, I can tell you something about the direction of travel.

 

The British public tell us that what they most expect from the BBC is quality - that is, a combination of creative ambition, excellence and originality.  Even more than at present, our new strategy will be first and foremost a quality strategy.

 

Expect to see a further shift of emphasis in favour of key priority areas:  the best journalism in the world, high quality programmes and services for children, content of every kind that builds knowledge and shares music and culture, a long-range commitment to outstanding British drama and comedy, national events that bring us together.

 

At a time when so many other broadcasters are struggling with programme budgets, the licence fee’s importance as an engine of creative investment in British talent is more important than ever.  Expect a commitment to spend a higher proportion of the licence-fee on original British content than we are able to today.

 

The archive will be a key focus:  not just the goal of liberating the BBC’s extraordinary existing archive but the question of what and how you should commission in a world in which content is no longer ephemeral, but persists and can give pleasure and value forever.

 

Partnership will be a central theme too ¾ partnership with other broadcasters, sharing technology and infrastructure to help them continue to support PSB in their own way, but also partnership with many other public bodies, working for instance to liberate their archives and make them available to the public.

 

And we’ll set clearer boundaries too and be much explicit up front about what the BBC will not do, what it will leave to the market.

 

Conclusion

 

The point of the strategy review is to set out a template for a more focused BBC, a BBC that delivers better quality of higher value.  It may point to a BBC which is smaller in some respects, but no less confident, a BBC which is even more capable of keeping that idea of public space alive and populated with wonderful things.

 

I also hope it will be a BBC which can command the support of this country’s politicians.  If independent public service broadcasting is to survive and thrive in Britain, it will because the British public and British politicians stood up to defend it, not uncritically, but with conviction and courage.

 

One reasons why the fate of the BBC is important is because, in addition to its domestic audience, it serves hundreds of millions of people around the world every week with many kinds of content, but above all with accurate, independent, impartial news.  In many countries, it is the only source of such news.  Last year, for instance, the BBC launched a Persian Television Service.  Today, we believe it already has ten million regular viewers for whom – this is what they tell us – it has become a life-line and a vital means of finding out what is happening in their own country and around the world.

 

But I believe that every country – whether wealthy or poor, developed or developing – deserves a strong and independent public broadcaster.  As I’ve tried to argue this afternoon, those who argued that public broadcasting was obsolete and that the market would provide have been proven wrong by events.  We need strong public broadcasters now more than ever.

 

The forces arrayed against public service broadcasting are more formidable than ever.  But I believe that, not just in Britain but across Europe and much of the rest of the world, the public themselves will come to realise how much they need it.  To support democracy.  To nurture culture.  To populate public space with enriching, educating, inspiring content. 

 

If the public will that end, then I believe that the political and economic means of realising it can and will be found.  Thank you.

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