The hysterical media reaction to the BBC debacle is as much to do with resisting the forthcoming Leveson recommendations, as with upholding journalistic integrity or protecting licence-fee payers
The BBC crisis unfolds just as Lord Leveson is due to recommend changes to press regulation. That conjunction goes some way to explain the unbridled malice of newspapers in reporting corporate mayhem at the corporation, especially those directed by the Murdochs.
Coverage has been hysterical - as if the problems of one programme compromised the BBC’s vast daily output of journalism - let alone its entertainment and instructional programmes.
Tory MPs are hurling themselves on the bandwagon, to have a shy at a perennial target, claiming the BBC is stuffed with liberals (an odd charge since the government is stuffed with them too). Labour MPs, too, find it hard to resist having their pennyworth, their own dark secret the handling of the BBC during the Iraq war episode in 2003.
The noise from the right is about breaking up the BBC, which would suit the Murdochs nicely, thank you. From Labour there’s support for the proposal to institute an editor in chief to operate alongside a new chief executive figure – a plan which looks increasingly likely.
Massive attention is paid to the BBC, for the wholesome reason that its journalism is immensely important to the public life of the UK. But it’s also in our gaze because it remains a towering anomaly. Here is a state institution, its programmes paid for out of public money. How many other public services are so directly and continuously on display?
Television licence fee income amounting net to some £3.2bn in the year to 2011 is state income in the same way as VAT or corporation tax, at least from such companies as deign to pay it. The government takes it, then pays the BBC the money agreed in the periodical settlements, allowing it to push former obligations such as the World Service on to the BBC’s books.
But that word ‘anomaly’ needs watching. The UK public space is littered with anomalies. ‘We’ (a panel of MPs and others ostensibly acting on behalf of that portion of the UK where the Anglican church is established) have just appointed an anomaly in the shape of Justin Welby. The Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the state church, whose prelates sit in our legislatures as of right. Network Rail is pretty anomalous, too, borrowing huge sums even in the depths of the age of austerity, on the back of predictions about the revenues of the private companies running the trains – and not all of them are private companies since travellers to Edinburgh, Newcastle and Leeds voyage on a nationalized service.
As for the television licence, is it such an odd tax? Opposition to paying it is usually fomented by malign newspapers; the public is broadly apathetic or content. As long, that is, as the BBC hierarchs exercise both a sense of proportion and recognise the immense privilege the BBC’s peculiar status gives them as agents of a glorious public purpose operating within a quasi-privatized organisation.
Paying bigwigs City style salaries is both unnecessary (because most BBC promotions are internal) and unjustified (because the job is immensely rewarding in itself). Chris Patten and the BBC Trust made a big, additional mistake in giving George Entwistle an extra pay off, which has kept the pot on the boil.
No institution, however hoary and sanctified by tradition, should escape scrutiny. But with the BBC you have to be immensely careful about the bona fides of its critics – and its allies, since it operates as a vast system of patronage and many are those who hope for favours (including invitations to appear on broadcasts).
This storm will abate, and the BBC will sort itself out. Unfortunately it may not recover its editorial nerve in time to provide muscular coverage of the self serving and ultimately corrupt newspaper interests that are now mobilizing to resist Leveson’s sensible suggestions about state regulation.
