BBC director general Mark Thompson’s MacTaggart lecture last Friday at the Edinburgh International Television Festival was defensive and contained few surprises. But that’s understandable.
Last year James Murdoch took the same stage and spent much of his lecture bashing the BBC.
This year Mr Thompson called out Sky for its ”lack of investment in original content” and suggested that the satellite operator pay retransmission fees to other broadcasters. He rounded on critics of the BBC, claiming that it was more popular than ever.
“Systematic press attacks on broadcasters, and especially on the BBC, are nothing new… but the scale and intensity of the current assaults does feel different,” he said.
He’s spot on. It is different. This is why the BBC must change or risk a rising wall of criticism from all-comers, not just other media.
The changes taking place in the UK media are nothing short of a revolution. Meanwhile media owners and hacks look enviously at the BBC with its guaranteed income year-in-year-out.
Everyone must change, including the BBC: it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of by how much and when.
Herein lies one of the fundamental issue that Thompson failed to tackle on Friday. In a multi-channel environment why should consumers pay to negotiate a media paywall when they can access BBC content for free?
Pundits reckon that the BBC will survive the next license fee negotiation. There’s no doubt that the £146.50 fee per household represents extraordinary value, but the business model is an anachronism and leaves the BBC open to attack on all fronts.
Thompson is a moderniser, no doubt, and an incredibly savvy political operator. “Radical and rapid change inside the BBC is… essential,” he said.
The BBC is being trimmed, the pension scheme is under scrutiny and Mr Thompson has suggested that the corporation could forgo planned increases to the licence fee.
But ultimately this isn’t a fight that the BBC can win. Media and technology have evolved too far since the BBC was founded in 1927. And so Thompson puts up a good fight, but inevitably his response last Friday was defensive.
It would be a brave individual that led a discussion about a funding structure beyond the licence fee but maybe that is now inevitable. But for Thompson that’s a taboo he doesn’t seem to want to go near.
Related articles:
- Mark Thompson’s case for the BBC (guardian.co.uk)
- Murdoch and the BBC: They Both Lose (newser.com)
- Stephen Glover: Thompson’s attack is more than it seems (independent.co.uk)
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The Murdoch’s have done a classic, and I’m afraid you’ve taken the bait hook, line and sinker Stephen. Along with many but not all press.
Father and son, but particularly the son during last year’s MacTaggart, want to frame the debate in terms of what is good and what is not good for the consumer. Free markets reign. The stuff they carefully elect not to mention, the words they take great pains to avoid, betray more than the content they do present.
In short, the ‘consumer’ is not a synonym for the ‘citizen’.
If you replay all the arguments the self-interested Murdochs are levelling and replace ‘consumer’ with ‘citizen’, very little of it then makes sense. Why? Because we begin to look again at the BBC in precisely the light in which it was designed, in which it operates and with which I happily invest each and every year.
Most amazingly, given Britain’s global success stories these days are less commonplace than perhaps times past, is the energy this country focuses at killing off or doing down the few successes we do have.
@Philip Sheldrake Given the countless attacks on all fronts, the brave response for the BBC would be to start to debate about its future, rather than being constantly on the defensive. As you say lets celebrate the success. I’m almost certainly that support would be for the status quo, so let’s have the debate and shut up the critics. But its a taboo topic for anyone inside the corporation.