Post by Teddy Bear on Apr 25, 2007 21:24:20 GMT
Article in today's Independant
Deborah Orr: The BBC is under fire from all sides. But the biggest threat comes from its loss of nerve
Much of this lack of spirit is put down by insiders to the dreadful shadow of the Hutton report
Published: 25 April 2007
There's always a bit of a hum of cultural controversy around the BBC, but of late the hum has become a disturbing whine. All sorts of people are cross with the Corporation, for all sorts of reasons. The BBC is glancingly involved in the television quiz scandal, with no more innocent a purveyor of wholesome programming than Blue Peter implicated in the affair.
The decision to deprive the nation of Moira Stuart was greeted with concerted media efforts to suggest that the BBC was being ageist, misogynistic, racist and plainly dumb. It took until yesterday for the director-general, Mark Thompson, to refute those claims with the sensible explanation that the BBC was moving over so much to content presented by reporters in the field that there just wasn't much work left for studio-based presenters at all.
The Daily Telegraph, in a rare bout of concern for the socially excluded, has become upset about the fact that the poorest people use the BBC the least, even though they pay the same licence fee as everyone else. It's been plain for years that the licence fee, like nearly all state arts funding, is a regressive tax. Of late, though, the BBC seems more inclined to get in a flap about the accusation, and is said to be looking into ways of tackling the problem.
But that very high-profile stuff is just the tip of the iceberg. The lawyer Steven Sugar complains about the BBC's refusal to reveal the contents of 2004's Balen report, which allegedly contains robust criticism of bias in the broadcaster's Middle East reporting. Stubbornly, the BBC has gone as far as the Court of Appeal in its insistence that the report derogates from the Freedom of Information Act, because it is held for the purposes of journalism.
The BBC has been accused for a long time of having an anti-Israeli bias, and its dogged refusal to allow sight of the report therefore looks suspicious and shifty. But the BBC is also beginning to alienate the people it ought to be cherishing - some of the risk-taking writers it can still attract.
Francis Wheen complains of not even being consulted or warned over the decision meekly to pay Harold Wilson's former secretary Lady Falkender £75,000 after broadcasting The Lavender List, the BBC4 drama documentary he scripted. The magazine Wheen works for, Private Eye, asks why "BBC executives are so unwilling to defend a programme which they originated, vetted and approved".
Hanif Kureishi complains of censorship because his short story, Weddings and Beheadings, was pulled amid fears about the fate of the kidnapped Gaza-based journalist, Alan Johnston. The BBC contends that this decision was a matter of timing, since a previously unknown organisation had only just claimed to have killed him. Kureishi says, not that he's really in a position to know, that Johnston would not have wanted freedom of speech to be compromised because of him.
The film-maker David Puttnam complains about the BBC Trust's suspension of BBC Jam, an internet children's education service that has fallen foul of vociferous moans from commercial rivals in the marketplace, thus leaving schoolchildren without a huge chunk of the education service they have been receiving for decades.
In truth, the BBC Jam saga really is a shocker, because there are so many arguments in favour of the BBC being the natural home of computer-based educational material for children, and none of them has been aired. The pattern is of capitulation in all of the above cases, except in the case of the Balen report. Though hiding behind the Freedom of Information Act, instead of opting for public accountability, could be seen as the most craven capitulation of all. Presently, the large team responsible for BBC Jam is engaged in putting together an alternative package, which will be subjected to a "public service test" that will ensure that a future service will concern itself with "minimising negative market impact".
Much of this lack of spirit is put down by BBC insiders to the dreadful shadow of the Hutton report, which more or less laid responsibility for the suicide of former UN inspector Dr David Kelly at the door of the Corporation. The legacy of Hutton has been a culture of caution at the BBC that can only do damage to its ability confidently to take risks and defend them.
All this creative timidity could not have come at a worse time. The new 10-year BBC Charter came into effect in January, with a below-inflation licence-fee settlement delivering the £2bn shortfall in funding, at a time when the BBC is under other huge financial pressures, including bearing the cost of ensuring that "the elderly, the disabled and the vulnerable" are not short-changed in the switchover from analogue to digital in 2012. All this and more conspires to suggest that quality of services, reliance on licence-fee revenue, or in the worst-case scenario, both, will be severely compromised in the near future.
We won't have to wait too long to see exactly when what some call the "creeping commercialisation" of the BBC will modestly begin, because it was announced yesterday that on 23 May the BBC Trust will rule on management proposals to sell adverts into the BBC Worldwide Internet service. There are many critics, of course, who talk darkly of this move being the thin end of the wedge. But perhaps surprisingly, only a fraction of the Corporation's vast staff has signed a petition against the idea.
Instead, the loudest complaints about this issue again come from the commercial sector, which under the auspices of the British Internet Publishers Alliance - which has a membership including the digital branches of all the major newspaper groups, including this one - complains that the BBC will be nicking business that really ought to be theirs by some sort of right.
Yet the logic of the move is surely unanswerable. Adverts don't appear on the internet service provided for the UK because by and large the service is used by people who pay the licence fee. But users abroad, who don't pay the licence fee, also get the service for free. Clearly it's unfair that British licence fee-payers are subsidising my American brother-in-law, who loves the BBC, when providing his preference could easily be funded commercially.
The provision of an impartial, quality worldwide British broadcasting service remains as intrinsically desirable as it always has been (which is why the World Service is funded by the Foreign Office). But the BBC's internet content attracts a huge and wealthy US audience, and it's hard to see why this popular service should be paid for by us.
Adverts on BBC Worldwide can be seen as a step in the direction of preserving the global integrity of the BBC as a public service, and clearly have few implications that could be seriously considered a threat to the broadcaster's core values. The threat to those, instead, comes from the BBC's own failures of nerve.