It’s more than broadcasting – it’s about protecting our democracy
This 5 minute clip captures why this BBC Charter Review is vital not just for the BBC or the creative industries but for the health, strength and resilience of UK democracy itself.
The is an extract from the evidence given by me, Sir Peter Bazalgette (former chair of ITV PLC), and Dr Alex Mahon (former CEO of Channel 4 Television) to the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee yesterday. You can watch the full session here, or read the transcript.
Before us, the Committee heard from Marina Hyde and James Graham. Marina made the point that the BBC’s resistance to polarisation – the fact that we still have a shared mainstream – is something we can see the absence of all over the world. James spoke from his own experience as a writer who was given opportunities and learned his craft through public service broadcasting. Remove the BBC, and you remove the pipeline. Stories from the regions don’t get told. Voices that aren’t commercially obvious don’t get found. The right to fail disappears.
Six men now own or control most of the platforms through which content is discovered, shared and consumed. They own the data. They own the algorithms that decide what rises to the top of your feed. The BBC is the only organisation of scale that gives us any resilience against those – or other – actors behaving in a malign way. As I told the Committee: this is not just about the BBC and spectrum. It is much more existential than that.
A few things came up in the session that don’t get enough attention. Most people don’t know that the BBC is currently required to keep money in reserve for its own winding-up, because if the charter isn’t renewed, the BBC simply ceases to exist. We don’t ask “shall we have an NHS?” every 10 years; we have an NHS and argue about what to do with it. The BBC deserves the same footing. And then there’s the George Osborne problem: he’s said couldn’t believe how much leverage he had over the BBC. That is not independence. It is the opposite of independence.
The risk in this charter review is settling for the status quo. The opportunity is to give the BBC the independence audiences are demanding, a bold mission and the funding to deliver it – and to end the existential threat that hangs over it every decade. I’m grateful that the Committee members seemed to recognise that.
As I said in closing: Push. Be ambitious. This is one of the few areas where Britain is still world-leading. There is a win for everybody if we get it right. There aren’t many of those at the moment.
