In Praise of the BBC

James Murdoch’s scathing attack on the BBC and the wider British broadcasting authorities has hit the press – most of which now appears to be owned by News Corporation –  the organisation which he represents in Europe and Asia as chairman and chief executive.  Speaking at the MacTaggart lecture at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, Murdoch laid into the BBC:

“Funded by a hypothecated tax, the BBC feels empowered to offer something for everyone, even in areas well served by the market.  The scope of its activities and ambitions is chilling.”

Power … ambition … chilling.   Surely the pot is calling the kettle black? 

Twenty years earlier, again at the MacTaggart lecture, his father Rupert was laying into the “anti commercial attitudes” of the British broadcasting establishment.  Now, the “state sponsored journalism” of the BBC, says James Murdoch in an uncharacteristically conspicuous display of thought leadership control, is “a threat to the plurality and independence of our news provision, which is so important for our democracy”.  Blimey!  Has he looked in the mirror lately?  Oh no, hang on, that’s one of the few newspapers he doesn’t own.

The Murdochs’ dominance of the global news agenda for megalomaniacal and avaricious motives has already gone too far, and you only need look as far as sport to realise it.

In the light of the England cricket team’s recent Ashes victory over Australia, it was a desperate shame that this moment could not have been witnessed live on terrestrial TV – as it had been in 2005.  In 2005, the viewing figures peaked at 7.4 million; in 2009, it was less than 2 million.  The reason: Sky bought up the rights.  The result: commercial interests held too much sway over the greater public good.

An Australian correspondent on BBC’s Radio 5 Live the morning after England’s triumph was flabbergasted that the Ashes were not being broadcast on terrestrial, free-to-air television.  In Australia (ironically, the nation of Rupert Murdoch’s birth) – the notion of having to pay to watch The Ashes simply would not be countenanced.  The correspondent’s view was that cricket was the nation’s sport – it belongs to the nation.  So, why would the nation want to give it away, to then have to pay to get it back?

On a personal level, Sky’s stronghold on live cricket coverage is extremely disappointing – my son is 10 and had really started to enjoy the cricket this summer.  However, his enthusiasm has been throttled by the fact that he is restricted to watching highlights or listening to BBC’s (excellent) Test Match Special coverage on the radio.  Children need immediate, visual and real-time connection to their sports heroes to most effectively foster the next generation of sports stars.  I fear that the ECB’s short term decision to take Sky TV’s lucre will inflict long-lasting damage on English cricket, and one which – commercially – will come to haunt Sky, because it won’t have a sufficiently large subscriber-base to market cricket as a premium service.

Perhaps 20-20 cricket will come to the rescue – a bite-sized, easily digestible form of the game, marketed at today’s time-short, easily-distracted sports fan.  Only time will tell, but it is interesting to note that the new form of the game has been conceived and moulded, first and foremost, to suit commercial broadcasting interests. 

And cricket doesn’t have a very happy track record when it comes to heavy-handed interventions by overtly commercial broadcasters.  Witness Kerry Packer in the 1970s and Allen Stanford’s more recent $20m ‘winner takes all’ cricketing fiasco.

Is top-flight domestic football a better sport now that commercial TV revenues transformed it from where it stood in the 1980s?  Some may argue that it’s a more polished product – that the skill levels are higher; the pace of the game is quicker; the pitches are better; the stadia are more comfortable.  For the most part, I’d agree with that.  But, the ‘product’ is still – all too often – a let down, as those poor souls who witnessed West Ham’s 0-0 draw against Blackburn on Saturday will testify.  And we can’t even argue that all-seater stadiums have eradicated football hooliganism, after last week’s sorry scenes at Upton Park. 

And is it right that players are traded for £80 million, and get paid in excess of £100k per week?  The bulk of this wealth has been generated by Sky’s subscriber and advertising models - ultimately paid for by the consumer.

In a sporting context, unregulated commercialism (and overtly commercially-minded broadcasting in particular) has distorted all sense of value – financial, social and moral. 

Talking of huge sums of money, the BBC’s annual licence fee revenue is £3.7 billion.  A staggering amount by any measure, even in these numerically-desensitised post-credit-crunch times.  But I don’t begrudge paying my £142.50 slice of it.  What I do refuse to countenance is then paying Sky a subscription fee on top of this, only to be hit by a triple whammy – frequent and lengthy commercial breaks throughout Sky’s broadcast output.  Surely Sky is having their cake and eating it by charging a subscription and interrupting their subscribers’ enjoyment of the service by plugging constant commercial interruptions!   If that’s what Sky’s commercial broadcasting premise entails, I’ll stick with the BBC thanks.

The quality and breadth of the BBC’s output are world class – from original TV content such as The Office, to award-winning radio output such as Five Live and Test Match Special, to its consistently high quality online and news coverage.  Even when they are obliged to cover their ‘all things to all people’ mandate and provide celebrity programmes, then more often than not they do it with more style and flair than their competitors (witness Strictly Come Dancing).

Granted, the BBC is far from perfect, and there are contradictions and anomalies a-plenty.  They pay Jonathan Ross too much money (a salary which would make most Premiership footballers feel hard done by); they advertise their own programmes across their network; they were guilty of more than their fair share of recent ‘voting scandals’; and, they didn’t even bother to bid for the live Test Match cricket rights (aware that they would not be able to compete with Sky’s commercial might).

But we need look no further than ITV to see a commercial network who manages to get terrestrial broadcasting so wrong.  It increasingly seems reliant on Reality TV and sensationalised news output, sandwiched in between advertisements, to stay afloat.  And that was before the floor dropped out of the market for advertising revenues.  The US provides us with an even more stark reminder that if commercial interests in broadcasting are allowed to ride roughshod over the quality of the programming, then the only loser is the viewer, their viewing entertainment peppered with all too regular commercial breaks.

The BBC is idiosyncratic, eccentric, traditional, some would even say trusted.  It embodies Britishness.  Not for nothing is it sometimes affectionately referred to as “Aunty”.   James Murdoch’s take is that it is more akin to “the Addams family of world media.”

But before we forget, 2005’s thrilling free-to-air Ashes coverage was brought to us by Channel 4.  It had very little to do with the BBC.  Proof, if it were needed, that commercial broadcasting and high quality, public interest broadcasting are not incompatible.   Channel 4 proved that you can enhance the product (all snick-o-meters and expert analysis), without making wholesale, commercially-driven changes to the underlying and fundamental format of the game (20-20 cricket).

Both the BBC and Channel 4 have demonstrated that the public is best served when the public isn’t hoodwinked into handing its prize possessions to Sky, only to then be restricted from seeing them again unless it pays a monthly fee to Sky for the privilege. 

And whose activities and ambitions are chilling, Mr Murdoch?