media blog

The BBC is adamant: the public-service broadcasting review is not a binary matter.
Translation: although there is an escalating conflict about who should pay commercial television companies to make uncommercial programmes because the government says they are good for UK society, please don’t interpret it as being just a two-way fight between struggling Channel 4 (estimated losses £150m by 2012) and Auntie Beeb (known revenues £3.2bn every year till at least 2013).
The essence of the upset is that everyone in terrestrial broadcasting (Sky, of course, is above such matters) agrees that there should be PSB. Public-service broadcasting helps educate the masses and provides guaranteed high-brow-smoothing matter for those who already count themselves as educated. Whether or not you believe that an active market could just as well satisfy those two purposes (and why shouldn’t the government be a “sponsor” of educational television and radio programming in a wholly commercial market, maybe with a bit of Shakespearian product-placement on Corrie?), that premise is unlikely to be shaken.
But nobody has yet managed to make programmes that broaden both the mind and the profit margin. Hence the complaints from Channel 4 and ITV that it isn’t fair to expect them to make pro bono telly. It undercuts their ability to make money. In ITV’s case, this is a clear disadvantage to shareholders; for C4, it’s the taxpayer who will suffer, because the company, while commercially-funded, is state-owned and is not allowed to make a loss. (Channel) Five, the RTL-owned minnow of terrestrial television, seems to be adopting a wait-and-see policy on the whole issue.
The process is exacerbated by digital switchover, the commercial broadcasters argue. ITV is particularly strident on this point: “If only we had known, they say, that by 2012 everyone would be watching television provided by digital signals rather than analogue, maybe we wouldn’t have wanted this PSB stuff tied into our licence. Compensate us! At least, let us change the rules of engagement! There’s too much competition out there now. It’s not fair.”
Let us put aside for a moment the fact that both ITV and C4 must have seen digital switchover coming. After all, they operate in a sector where looking into the future is a necessary factor for survival.
There is still a basic question here: do they actually deserve to be compensated for a market development? Did BT or Cable & Wireless demand recompense because somebody invented the mobile phone? Did the merchant fleets of mid-19th century Britain scream for government cash when the first steam engines were put on board ships? Presupposing that they do deserve help is part of the spin machine’s approach to the complex issues of a fast-changing media panorama.
Still, if you want to see real spin in action, the BBC is the master.
Its 88-page contribution to the PSB review that the broadcasting regulator Ofcom can be summarised in four words: don’t make us pay.
Mark Thompson, the director general, laid out a series of ways in which the BBC could help “other PSBs” (trans: usually C4, but occasionally ITV). Solutions involved helping C4 and ITV to save money by a) implementing the same sort of efficiency cuts the Beeb has gone through and b) using all this clever, hush-hush techno stuff that BBC boffins have dreamed up recently. So keen was Mr Thompson for readers of the submission to concentrate on his generous scheme, that he had the two pages of his ideas – called “the power of partnership” – coloured blue in case we missed them. It’s enough to make a cynical journalist study the other 86 pages especially hard.
After publication of this submission, the sound of spluttering from the HQs of the respective commercial broadcasters was audible across London. The idea that, say, ITN, ITV’s news provider, has anything to learn on efficiency from a BBC operation that normally sends four camera crews to cover any breaking story, is quite humorous, to put it mildly. Moreover, in typical ivory tower fashion, the Beeb overestimates its technological advantages: C4 is at least as far down the road to “tapeless” production using digital technology as the BBC is.
But the strongest message shining through the BBC’s paper was its coded language suggesting that there is no need for C4 to get public money, especially not from the licence-fee pot. If C4 took government money, Mr Thompson argued, it would have to make sacrifices that would wreck its essential creative nature.
Does Mr Thompson believe this?
Of course he does, just as sincerely as the author of the following statements believed them too: “Channel 4 should always aim to pay its own way. But if changes in the broadcasting landscape mean we have to choose between financial survival and our public service remit, then the case for public support will be overwhelming. I’m confident that we can win that argument because I’m confident we can deliver on the promise of creativity.”
The author? Step forward one Mark Thompson, then chief executive of Channel 4, writing in 2002.
Maybe it is all binary after all.