What now for the BBC?
Charles Moore may be out of the picture, but the
intensified attacks against the corporation are real, and its chief enemy is
the government. It’s time to explode the myths
by Peter
York
Fri 23 Oct
2020 12.00 BSTLast modified on Fri 23 Oct 2020 13.24 BST
So Charles
Moore isn’t going to be chairman of the BBC after all. Perhaps he withdrew
because he was upset by Julian Knight MP, Conservative chair of the digital,
culture, media and sport select committee, saying that appointing him would be
like a convicted fraudster running a bank. Perhaps it was the money: one story
goes that he had negotiated for nearly three times what the current chairman
Sir David Clementi is paid. Will we ever know? That’s not to say there’s no
other speculation. Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of the Sun, is apparently
applying and, if appointed, he says the first thing he’d do would be to sack
Emily Maitlis.
There was
even talk of appointing George Osborne as chairman, the man who has done more
harm to the BBC than anyone, before he ruled himself out. And there remains the
possibility of Paul Dacre using his forthright turns of phrase at the morning
briefings of regulator Ofcom, with its higher ranks of economists and former
Whitehall mandarins. I can’t quite see it. Yet even if none of the most
notorious BBC-haters ends up in either chair, the act of trailing their names
before the start of the appointment process may well have deterred some
candidates from applying.
On 27
September an article in the Times quoted an anonymous government source who
said an “all out war” is “being waged on the broadcaster by the government …
the most concerted attack it has ever faced”. In February Tim Shipman in a
Sunday Times piece also quoted an anonymous “government source” saying they
would “whack” the BBC licence fee: “We are not bluffing on the licence fee. We
are having a consultation and we will whack it.”
When exactly
did that language creep into government briefings? What other parts of the
constitution need whacking? The judiciary? The civil service? Parliament? The
Electoral Commission? Nonetheless, the recent stories centring on Moore and
Dacre – widely attributed to Dominic Cummings – did their job. They thoroughly
gaslighted the BBC and its many supporters.
The only
real qualification either Moore or Dacre had was that they hated the BBC and
constantly said so. They weren’t just “critics”, as they were described. Nor
was their “Conservatism” important – the BBC has had many Conservative
chairmen. These jobs have never been reserved for “liberals”; rather the
opposite.
The story
was intended to put the wind up some people and enthuse others. It is all part
of the new way this government does things – a Trumpish pre-emptive kind of
rumour, followed by a vague not-quite-denial from an official source – in this
case the culture secretary Oliver Dowden.
But the newly intensified attacks against the BBC are
real, and the attacker is the government. This PM seems to be the most hostile
towards the BBC of any in living memory – including Margaret Thatcher.
The threats
to the corporation are piling up: they include its taking financial responsibility
for the (£750m) free TV licence-fee concession for the over 75s. This
responsibility was palmed off on the BBC from what was originally a central
government welfare payment – like the two billion a year winter fuel allowance
– in a secret process by the then chancellor Osborne in 2015 with no public
consultation, but six meetings between Osborne’s team and Rupert Murdoch’s. If
the BBC is forced to pay the whole sum it will face drastic cuts.
And there’s
another “whack” potentially due. The government wants to decriminalise
non-payment of the licence fee – which would cost the corporation at the very
least £200m. Only five years ago, a Conservative-commissioned independent
review rejected the idea, but the government set up a new public consultation.
(Though that closed over six months ago, it mysteriously hasn’t reported yet.)
And then Ofcom is about to review the BBC Sounds radio streaming initiative for
competitive impact, just months after they’d said the BBC should do more to
engage younger audiences.
People want to
destroy the BBC to create a US-style media ecology in the UK – and they think
their time has come
The world’s
most admired and successful public service broadcaster now faces hits to its
income of anywhere between £500m and £1bn. (A billion would be around a third
of its current public funding.) And the recent attacks come on top of far
deeper cuts than people have realised. In March 2020, consumer group Voice of
the Listener & Viewer (VLV) analysed the BBC’s finances. The results are
astonishing: since 2010, Osborne’s funding cuts have reduced the net public
funding of the BBC’s UK services by 30% in real (inflation-adjusted) terms.
It’s remarkable that the BBC’s services have held up so well in the
circumstances.
Using VLV’s
figures, the net public funding of the BBC’s UK services in 2019-20 was
£3,203m. In 2010-11 it was £4,580m in the same (2019-20) money. If the BBC’s
public funding had merely kept pace with inflation, it would be 43% – nearly
£1.4bn – higher than it is now.
Against
this background of cuts, the cultural skirmishes we’re used to between the BBC
and politicians have become all out war. There are people who aren’t ashamed to
say that they want to destroy the BBC and create a full-on American-style media
ecology in the UK – and who think their time has come. The context is the surge
in rightwing populism and its emotive hot-button campaigning, combined with
certain toxic effects of the internet, and finally the increasing influence of
American political techniques of all kinds. We know now that this particular
war has been planned for some time – in fact since 2004.
According to Cummings: ‘The right should be aiming for
the end of the BBC in its current form.’
As the
Guardian has revealed, in a 2004 blog from his shortlived thinktank New
Frontiers Foundation, Cummings set out his plan to discredit the BBC and create
a new US style media landscape in the UK. His objective wasn’t veiled in
conventional thinktank talk about free markets or other abstractions. Achieving
the goal was essential, he said, if the Conservatives were to gain and hold on
to power, because he believed – in paranoid fashion – the BBC was the “mortal
enemy” of the party.
The
inspiration he cited was work done by the American right – financed by the
fossil-fuel billionaire Koch brothers and their billionaire friends – to
discredit the US “liberal” mainstream media and shift the US political centre
of gravity rightwards – as documented in Jane Mayer’s superb book Dark Money.
According to Cummings: “The right should be aiming for the end of the BBC in
its current form.”
The BBC,
Cummings wrote, had to be discredited by a combination of monitoring and
perpetual trolling, including leaks and “stings”. And then a brave new world
could be built in the UK. This world would have three key elements. The first
was a Fox News type partisan rightwing TV broadcaster. The second was the kind
of shock jock phone-in radio station you find all over America – which made
stars of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Finally, the UK should remove the
barriers to big money political campaigning as they had in America. This would
mean that, say, billionaire Conservative supporters such as Lord Ashcroft could
buy political advertising in TV ad breaks, and make politics a game for the
super-rich.
It was a
strikingly modern plan for 2004. And Cummings advised that – because
establishing new broadcasters and changing the law would be highly visible,
contested and expensive – the right should get on with discrediting the BBC
straight away, quietly online. At the time he was an outlying rightwing
campaigner; now he is chief strategist, and there’s every sign that the plan is
being put into effect.
Research shows people certainly trust the BBC
far more that they trust the politicians and rightwing newspapers telling them
not to
Researching
the war against the BBC, my co-author Patrick Barwise and I were struck by how
intensively the corporation appeared to be “trolled” online – both on excitably
named websites such as Biased BBC and on YouTube. Apparently far away from the
smart Westminster political world of MPs, journalists and SW1 thinktanks, there
was a raucous world of people who ranted about the BBC as “commies”, and
sometimes “paedos” and “goons”. The point of such “Astroturf” (fake grassroots)
campaigns is to convince the world that a minority, partisan and planted view
is a widely held natural one – something “real” people are very worried about.
The latest
seems to be “Defund the BBC”, a campaign that grew earlier this year, in June,
from a Tweet coming from James Yucel “just a student in his room” reacting to
the “defund the police” demand from Black Lives Matter. Yucel turned out to be
a media-experienced Conservative activist working as an intern for a Tory MP.
And an analysis of the online spread of the campaign suggested that its
astonishingly rapid growth and generous initial fundraising was anything but
random. Now, four months later “Defund the BBC” has employees from Westminster
thinktank land, proper funds, and is putting up posters attacking the
corporation.
There are
at least two Fox News-like plans for rightwing broadcasters under way – one,
News GB, to be chaired by Andrew Neil, has already had investment from the
American Discovery Channel. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the Trump-supporting
Fox News in the US, is also reported to be planning a UK TV news service.
•••
During our
research we kept hearing deep and damaging misunderstandings about the BBC –
myths, endlessly repeated by people who either should know better, or really
did know better and were deliberately spreading lies. Such people were often
connected to opaquely funded Westminster thinktanks, rightwing newspapers and
grumpy reactionary politicians. The misconceptions can be divided into two
categories: complete myths and widely held but doubtful beliefs.
The
complete myths:
1 “Lots of
people don’t use the BBC but are still forced to pay the licence fee or go to prison.”
In reality, only a tiny (although unknown) number of households pay for the BBC
yet use none of its services – unlike with many other public services that cost
much more. The £157.50 licence fee (43p per day) gives every household member
unlimited access to all the BBC’s services for a whole year. The only time the
BBC’s total household reach has been measured, in 2015, 99% of households used
it in just a single week. No one is jailed for licence-fee evasion. The
Conservative-commissioned 2015 Perry review recommended against decriminalising
licence-fee evasion, describing the current system as “broadly fair and
proportionate”.
2 “The BBC
is bloated, wasteful and inefficient.” Not according to the data. The
corporation puts most of its income into content – mainly original UK content
(in which it’s by far the biggest investor) and distribution. Its overheads are
actually below the average for media and telecommunications companies.
3 “It’s the
best-funded public broadcaster in the world.” No, it isn’t: both Japan’s NHK
and Germany’s ARD both receive more public funding.
4 “It does
things that should be left to the market – crowding out competitors and
actually reducing choice.” But studies of the BBC’s market impact have
consistently found it to be minimal and nowhere near enough to reduce overall
choice.
5 “In 2015,
it agreed to fund free TV licences for all over-75s but has now reneged on that
agreement.” This is simply untrue.
6 “If it
didn’t overpay its senior managers and star presenters, it could pay much or
most of the cost of free TV licences for all over-75s.” This, too, is wildly
untrue. The BBC generally pays its managers and presenters less than the market
rate. If, nevertheless, it cut to £150,000 per annum the pay of everyone
currently paid more than that, the annual saving would be only £20m – less than
3% of the £750m annual cost of free TV licences for all over-75s. Which
services should it cut to cover the other 97%?
The three widely held beliefs that are mostly untrue:
1 “Its news
and current affairs coverage is systematically leftwing.” The evidence from
independent academic research is that the BBC constantly strives to be
impartial in its political coverage and, when it departs from this, it tends
towards over-representing the establishment, right-leaning view – increasingly
so over the last 10 years. Its coverage tends to be biased in favour of the
government of the day, but more so when the Conservatives are in power.
2 “It’s
anti-Brexit.” The only evidence of systematic anti-Brexit BBC bias comes from
the opaquely funded monitoring organisation News-watch, which never publishes
its methods and results in peer-reviewed journals and never debates them.
Independent academic research reaches very different conclusions, suggesting
that the BBC’s coverage was largely impartial both before and after the 2016 EU
referendum – and when it was not, it marginally favoured Leave rather than
Remain.
3 “People
no longer trust it.” Despite decades of constant attack from rightwing media,
politicians, rightwing Westminster thinktanks and, now, shadowy websites and
channels, the BBC remains by far the nation’s most trusted news source.
Research shows people certainly trust it far more that they trust the
politicians and rightwing newspapers telling them not to.
•••
The
positive case for the BBC is familiar: it creates social cohesion within the
country – “One Nation” – and develops the UK’s “soft power” externally –
“Global Britain”. Both things are, we are told, important to this prime
minister. Without the BBC we would be more fragmented, we wouldn’t share the
same realities, we would be more vulnerable to disinformation and polarisation.
Recent
research from the University of Zurich examined the factors that make nations
more or less “resilient” to sweeping disinformation, such as conspiracy
theories. One key resilience factor is the existence of an independent public
service national broadcaster at scale, such as the BBC. The US – nearly off the
researchers’ scale in its vulnerability to such conspiracy theories as QAnon –
has never had an equivalent-sized public service broadcaster.
The BBC has
had a good lockdown – the nation trusted it to tell the truth about the crisis,
and its news programmes’ ratings shot up. And, over the months, attitudes to
“public service” changed too. People talked about “our NHS”. Even the
influential Institute of Economic Affairs, a constant critic of the NHS’s
funding and advocate of increased market involvement (and, no coincidence, a
consistent critic of the BBC), toned it down over the period – it just wasn’t a
good look.
The BBC is
publicly owned (but not state-owned or the “government broadcaster”), not owned
by City shareholders, private equity or mysterious interests headquartered in
overseas tax havens. It’s fascinating how many of the BBC’s opponents, those
who accuse the corporation of being unpatriotic, are themselves based offshore.
The
powerful economic case for the BBC is less well known. It simply spends far
more on British TV content than anyone else. It has pump-primed the development
of the creative industries since the second world war. And its constant
inventiveness, from programmes (Killing Eve, I May Destroy You) to technology –
such as developing the iPlayer when Netflix was practically a baby Blockbuster
– has raised Britain’s game. The BBC ups its competitors’ games too, it obliges
them to invest more in local content.
There’s a
lot that needs fixing at the BBC. But it’s not what its enemies say (obsessive
wokeness, or its alleged metropolitan worldview: half its employees are outside
London, and the numbers are rising). It’s the historical timidity and caution
at the corporation’s centre – understandable after all the bashings from
successive governments. It’s the avoidance of stories that annoy governments,
with the “burden of proof” excuse.
There is a
case for thinking through the licence fee arrangements as the world changes,
but it’s not as urgent as the BBC’s enemies pretend. There needs to be a
properly independent review, driven by public interest, not the commercial
interests of its global billionaire competitors or the paranoia of its
political enemies. Whatever happens, the BBC needs to be made politician-proof.
Since its foundation it has suffered from an ambiguous relationship with
government, which has made it susceptible to political pressure through its
funding. As the current war against the BBC escalates, it needs to get the
hands of government from around its neck.
• The War
Against the BBC by Patrick Barwise and Peter York is published by Penguin on 26
November.
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