Writing a centenary history of the BBC, it was hard to avoid feeling like I was drafting up an obituary for the UK’s biggest public broadcaster.
ndeed, on the Sunday in January when I was busy signing off on the final proofs for my book, the UK culture secretary Nadine Dorries hinted that the end was nigh.
She announced on Twitter that the imminent review of the TV Licence would be the last one before the fee was abolished entirely. The backlash was immediate: her tweet seemed to spell the end for the BBC itself.
Fortunately I decided not to rewrite the last chapter of my book that afternoon. Dorries seems to have jumped the gun, and it looks like no decision has yet been made (or at least admitted to) about how to fund the BBC in future. Nevertheless, she did subsequently announce a funding freeze for the BBC, effectively a huge real-terms drop in revenue and the latest in a whole string of cuts. The Corporation’s management in turn signalled that this would put at risk many of the programmes and services that the BBC currently provides.
The drive to reform the BBC’s funding, and thus to fundamentally alter the basis on which the Corporation operates, has a number of motivations. The free-market, anti-state ideology of the Conservative Party is clearly important, as is opposition from some national and multinational media interests. The impact of the new global streaming platforms is also significant. The amount of time the average person spends consuming BBC content continues to decline. People might have watched more television during lockdown, but Netflix, Amazon’s Prime TV, TikTok, Disney+ and others clearly benefitted from this trend more than did the BBC.
Younger and BAME people are deserting the BBC with especial rapidity, even though it has a commitment in its royal charter to cater to the needs of diverse audiences. BBC listeners and viewers seem to be older, whiter, and more middle-class than ever before.
We are not approaching the point yet when a government might consider turning off terrestrial broadcasting services.
However, when we do reach the stage where all but a tiny minority have made the switch to online-only media consumption, the BBC will lose one more reason for its continued existence.
Another one of forces generating hostility towards the BBC is the sense that it is politically biased. Many supporters of the Scottish independence movement believe that the BBC is intrinsically against their cause.
Brexiteers felt the same, while Remainers became convinced that the BBC was encouraging the UK’s departure from the EU by failing to provide a suitable reality check on the claims of Leave supporters.
In Northern Ireland, unionists have recently marched carrying ‘Defund the Biased BBC’ placards. This seems ironic, given the Corporation’s historic role in promoting the Union, and its supposed opposition to Scottish nationalism. Yet it is a mark of just how ferociously many people dislike the BBC, or at least its political coverage.
There is nothing new about accusations of BBC political bias. When the BBC was first established, in 1922, the terms of its licence did not allow it to cover controversial issues. Early radio broadcasts carried very little news and did not engage overtly with political debates.
These restrictions were in part intended to protect newspapers from competition.
But they were also imposed because people at the time could not see how a publicly owned organisation that enjoyed a monopoly of all broadcasting in Britain (competition did not come until the creation of ITV in the 1950s) could navigate a course through the rocks and shallows of partisan political conflict.
As one minister argued in the 1920s, ‘If once you let broadcasting into politics, you will never be able to keep politics out of broadcasting.’ The BBC nevertheless pressed successfully to be allowed to cover controversial topics, and to become a voice of independent journalism and an arena for political debate.
But the minister was not wrong, and problems soon followed. In 1931, the Daily Mail accused the BBC of promoting socialism, communism, and the USSR: the head of its talks department, Hilda Matheson, resigned rather than accept management shackles on what she could broadcast.
During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the BBC came in for severe criticism from all sides. Writing about accusations of bias in its coverage of that conflict, Charles Curran, the BBC’s director general at the time (and the first Catholic to be appointed to that position), later summarised the Corporation’s response.
I once heard one of the BBC’s senior editors admit that we were biased. “Yes”, he said, “biased in favour of parliamentary democracy”. And he was absolutely right. That form of democracy depends on their being a plurality of opinions, on the freedom of their expression, on their public dissemination, and on the resolution, in circumstances of tolerance, of the differences of view when they arise. [BBC] news programmes are intended to provide the participants in the British democracy with the material which forms the ground of the variety of their opinions.
This was a classic statement of the BBC’s position. A public broadcaster should allow all positions to be rehearsed, giving people the information they need to make up their own minds and to understand the perspectives of others.
Across the range of its radio and television output, the BBC pledged, all viewpoints would be given their due weight: overall, there would be no bias. However, this approach has never convinced the BBC’s critics, in Northern Ireland or elsewhere. Prime ministers Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher were certainly both convinced that the BBC was biased against them.
Rather than seek to evaluate the whole range of BBC political coverage, many instead prefer forensically to examine individual programmes, or even individual news items or social media posts by BBC employees, for evidence for political bias.
Over the last two decades the BBC has faced a string of major crises of governance and repeated challenges to established ideas about impartiality in public broadcasting. Controversy over its coverage of Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq resulted in the resignation of a BBC chairman and the ousting of Greg Dyke as director general.
A string of management disasters followed, most notably generated by the revelations of abuse carried out on BBC premises by presenters Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall. The mishandling of this issue, and of unfounded allegations about the Conservative peer Lord McAlpine, cost the BBC another director general, George Entwistle.
The Corporation seems to occupy a weaker position today than at any point in its history, with fresh controversies manufactured over claims about its ‘woke’ agenda, and a significant recent debacle over the deceptions behind Martin Bashir’s famous 1995 interview with Princess Diana and subsequent cover-ups.
One of the problems we will face if the BBC is allowed to be wrecked by charges of corporate mismanagement and political bias is that, without the Corporation, very little UK content will be produced for radio, television, or online platforms. In 2019, ‘traditional’ broadcasters provided approximately 32,000 hours of UK-originated content. Netflix and Amazon’s Prime TV together provided a paltry 164 hours. Global production companies might turn to the UK for acting talent, financial incentives, and stunning landscapes for location shooting (including triumphs such as the filming of Game of Thrones in Northern Ireland).
But they are unlikely to want to make many programmes that deal with the political, social, and cultural realities of these islands. Such content does not sell globally, and that is what these streaming platforms are all about.
If we lose the BBC, and perhaps even if we move away from the TV Licence system of funding, it is hard to see how the amount of nationally and locally produced content that we currently take for granted will be made in future.
Some sort of subscription model is touted as a replacement for the TV Licence, but would enough people be willing to subscribe to support all the things that the BBC currently does?
Would we lose BBC news services, major operations in places like Northern Ireland, local radio stations, and the World Service?
These would all be hard to fund on a commercial basis. Would the government have to step in to pay the bill out of general taxation, and what would this do to the BBC’s claim, at home and abroad, that it is a crucial voice of independent journalism? Defunding the BBC might not settle the question of political bias. Instead it might spark off a whole new set of controversies.
Professor Simon Potter, is Professor of Modern History at University of Bristol and is author of This is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain?
