The BBC as we know it will be dead soon... Long live the BBC
Premium- The broadcaster will have to change and leave us the poorer for it
For years the BBC and its financing model have belonged to that small category of things that make no sense in theory but work well in practice. Now that model is imperilled, and the BBC will be forced to abandon its traditional role and find its place in the modern media landscape. The UK and the world will be the poorer for it.
This is why: the UK government recently announced that the annual television licence fee, the BBC’s main source of funds, will be frozen at £159 ($217) for the next two years, then rise to keep pace with inflation for four years after that. More important, the minister in charge added (before colleagues told her to walk it back) that this would be the last such settlement. In the short term, the Beeb faces a tighter financial squeeze than the rest of Britain’s public sector. Beyond that, if the licence fee ends, the very idea of BBC-style public-service broadcasting would be in doubt.
This licence fee has always been a conspicuous and seemingly indefensible anomaly. Why is a public-sector supplier of news and entertainment needed in the first place? And, if you were going to have one, why on earth pay for it with an annual tax on TVs that demanded the same payment from people regardless of income?
Yet, look at the results. Against the odds, given the upheaval in its industry, the Beeb has managed not only to survive, but also to prosper. Yes, there’s a good deal of dreck, but the BBC produces much more than its fair share of high-quality television and radio shows of all kinds—at comparatively modest cost. Its output is popular at home and has burnished Britain’s standing in the world. Its coverage of news and current affairs is impartial and authoritative.
All these features were, and are, of a piece. The licence fee separates the BBC from the government in a way that a subvention of ordinary tax revenue wouldn’t. It requires openness and accountability, encouraging tight control of costs, for instance putting downward pressure on what stars can be paid. It cements the obligation to serve all the public, underlining the commitment to political impartiality and reminding the enterprise to make broadly popular programmes as well as more sophisticated, educational or otherwise aspirational material. In these ways, it creates a cultural space in which Brits, whether they know it or not, can relate to one another and find common space.
The contrast with public-service broadcasting in the US is stark. It’s not just that American providers are starved of public resources. Relying heavily on private donations pushes NPR and PBS towards programming that pleases their comparatively narrow, liberal-minded segment of financial supporters. American public-service broadcasting in does not even try to serve the entire public. It serves its niche.
In fact, a true American equivalent of the BBC is virtually unimaginable. The concept of public service at a distance from partisan politics still has purchase in Britain—think of the career civil service, the judiciary, management of elections, appointments to the central bank, agencies such as the Office for Budget Responsibility and countless other arms-length public agencies and non-government organizations.
In the US, the non-partisan tradition is all but dead. Perhaps the armed services are still mostly above politics. Otherwise, almost every institution that intersects with public policy—not just designing it, but executing, influencing, analyzing and explaining it—is partisan.
Nowhere is this more true than in the media. Britain has long had brazenly partisan newspapers—which made the BBC all the more valuable. In the US, esteemed newspapers such as The New York Times and Washington Post once presumed to play a similar role. I recall that many years ago, I was on a panel with a Times reporter who seemed genuinely offended by my describing his paper as liberal. Today, those once-authoritative and trusted-to-be-impartial papers have clearly chosen sides. The perfection of the media market, accelerated by social media, favours partisan commitment.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has doubtless turned against the BBC to distract attention from his latest embarrassments. But the Beeb has longer-term problems. As competition and unbundling intensify, it will continue to lose viewers and public loyalty. Sooner or later, the licence-fee model will become politically unsustainable, and the formula that delivered this great and improbable public good will unravel.
One can imagine the BBC, in due course, as just another TV and audio production company, bidding for its modest share of public subsidy. Britain, and anywhere else the Beeb can be seen or heard, will never be the same again. ©bloomberg
Clive Crook is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist
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