Those Dirty Little Secrets

Michael Hedges August 30, 2010 Follow on Twitter

Public broadcasters generally eschew opportunities to eviscerate adversaries, those from the commercial media sector in particular, those owning newspapers in specific. It’s unkind, déclassé, even impolitic. In the UK, the knives have come out.

The MacTaggart lecture at the annual MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival is, often, the bell that rings signaling the end of summer. For more than a generation the wise, worldly and, occasionally, weird have stood before the UK media family to share their view of the state of broadcasting arts, sciences, politics and business. This year it was the turn of BBC General Director Mark Thompson.

Thompson opened with a bit of a cheeky reality, jabbing promptly at James – The Younger – Murdoch, last years MacTaggart lecturer. James made headlines referring to the UK television industry as the “Addams family of world media” and called for the “evil” BBC to be made “far, far smaller.” Since then Thompson has been faced with blistering criticism over pay and pensions for executives and talent, employees unhappy about relocations and pay cuts, strikes being imminent. And, too, he’ll soon be looking over the table at a new set of politicians beholding to Clan Murdoch with whom to negotiate funding of the BBC.

“You know, you really shouldn't encourage him,” said Thompson with a subtle nod to Murdoch sycophants. “He was so pleased with his attack on the BBC here that a few months later he decided to sink his teeth into another of those sinister forces that lurks in the undergrowth of our national life. Yep, the British Library.”

Addressing the assembled broadcasters, Thompson, as expected, refuted the younger Mr. Murdoch’s criticism of British television. “I don't believe that the British way of doing TV is the worst in the world…. I think it's faintly silly to pretend that it is.”

“I believe that the real dirty little secret about British television is about how good it is, not how bad.”

That was the set-up to one of Thompson’s main themes, to which he would return. The BBC plays a central role in the world-class British television industry and shrinking it – cutting the BBC’s funding – would affect the whole. “Do not believe anyone who claims that cutting the license fee is a way of growing the creative economy,” he warned, “or that the loss in program investment which would follow a substantial reduction in the BBC's funding could be magically made up from somewhere else.”

“Free-market purists claim that, if you took this intervention away or reduced it, the market would immediately come in to fill the gap. But look around the world. There are plenty of countries where public intervention is on the wane – license fees cut, public broadcasters in decline – but in no country anywhere has the market stepped up to replace the lost program investment.”

And perhaps to the politicians, he added; “A pound out of the commissioning budget of the BBC is a pound out of UK creative economy. Once gone, it will be gone forever.”

The oft-debated challenges of the 21st century, he mused, pale against “the looming shortfall in the amount of money available to invest in original British production.” Broadcasting – “a British success story” – “is going to need investment, creative focus, the right digital strategies. It's going to need Britain's broadcasters to break the habit of a lifetime and actually work together.”

It has been a lifetime, deep into a second generation, of sparing between private sector media and the BBC over which will lead and which will follow. Newspaper publishers managed to hold their turf, at least until the internet arrived. The BBC came to epitomize broadcasting, even as private or semi-private television and radio gained – then lost – attention. Private sector media in the UK is – mostly – united in battle with the BBC and – mostly – comes out bloodied.  

“Over the past decade we've wasted vast quantities of breath on topics which, if you just step back a couple of paces, look almost comically parochial.” Yes, for a leading global brand the toughest job is swatting flies.

“We should concentrate on what matters most and on the issues and actions that could actually make a difference,” he said. “We should think big not small.”

But the small and “parochial” loom large with a new Conservative government intent on recasting the BBC as less threatening to the private sector, which would include its patron Clan Murdoch. “The BBC has to live on the same planet as everyone else,” said Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt following Thompson’s remarks, quoted by The Guardian (August 28). The BBC must, according to Hunt, show a “much clearer understanding of its competitors.” Yes, of course, showing James The Younger a bit more understanding might prevent those temper tantrums.

Right-wing governments in France and Italy, Thompson noted, have “an agenda of weakening and undermining the public broadcaster.” He could have mentioned several others. “The same commercial and political forces which are undermining the independence of the public broadcasters in other European countries…are at work here as well.”

While praising pay TV operator BSkyB, principally controlled by Clan Murdoch, for “technological innovation, a willingness to take big risks, strategic flexibility, an ability to get close to and understand customers,” Thompson took a shot – and landed it – at BSkyB’s investment in non-sports programming. “As a proportion of Sky's own turnover and its profits, its investment in original British content is just not enough.” Thompson suggested a half billion pounds would be about right.

Endless whinging aside, British broadcasting, television in particular, is world class. Thompson even noted, “We're so good at talking down our own industry that the proposition that British television is any good at all is itself rather novel.”

The British public knows better, he said, even if their newspapers trash the BBC “every week, even though the reporters often freely admit to us that they know the story is ramped up, distorted or just plain nonsense.” Those newspaper people; they’ve never gotten over the arrival of radio, much less television and now they’re faced with that internet thing.

“Not only do these newspapers fail to reflect the view of the majority of the British public about the BBC. They don't even reflect the view of the majority of their own readers.”

Public opinion polls, not just those Thompson mentioned, continue to show strong and positive relationship between the BBC and the British public, “a relationship which is not mediated or controlled by newspaper proprietors or politicians or anyone else.” Post-election, Conservative politicians, attentive to opinion polls, seem to have slightly softened their stance on shrinking the BBC. With funding and governance negotiations beginning next year, even with the open question of the Conservative government’s survival, it remains to be seen how broadcasting in the UK will look as we move deeper into the 21st century.

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