Liberal criticism of the BBC

As I have said before, I am fan of the BBC. That does not mean it receives my unqualified support.

I’m afraid I think that the arguments of the ‘Biased BBC’ et al. are rather mean-spirited. Although I disagree with it very strongly, there is a perfectly respectable argument against the BBC’s existence. You could, for instance, say that for a government to have its own broadcaster is dangerous or that it gives the state control over the EM spectrum that would be better dealt with as private property. Although I disagree with them, they are serious arguments that bear consideration.

There is also an argument to say that the BBC is biased. I know Labour activists who consider the BBC to be anti-Labour at the moment (having been anti-Tory during the Thatcher years). There are, as we know, people who feel the BBC is incorrigibly left-wing. These are both arguments for change or reform, but they do not address the rationale behind the BBC’s existence. Funnily enough, I know people in the Labour party who are convinced of its anti-Labour bias; Cameron’s comments are picked up more readily than Brown’s, Andrew Neil and Nick Robinson are there as commentators and the BBC really had it in for Blair over Iraq. Some of the criticisms of the pinko-liberal-Guardianista-limp wristed-vegetarian BBC as trying to force multiculturalism down our throat may be defused by the ‘White’ series that is about to start; we shall see, but you cannot say that the BBC does not grasp the nettle. To try to remove something you don’t like by running it down rather than honestly expressing your arguments is, if nothing else, profoundly undemocratic and expressive of a despair of convincing others of your opinions.

It also makes it harder to constructively criticise the BBC. There are some specific criticisms I would make.

One of the great things about the interweb in general and blogging in particular is that anyone can say what they want, run it up the flagpole and see if anyone else salutes it. It allows for personal, intellectual development, communication and entertainment. That doesn’t mean that everything, much or anything that’s said is worth saying. Much like the end of the film version of Fahrenheit 451, it is impossible to make out a single book because everyone is talking. On the internet, real estate is cheap or free, so it doesn’t matter. BBC News 24 has a grand total of twenty-four hours per day; broadcasting time is limited. Given that I can find out what Barry from Bognor thinks by looking on the internet or ‘pressing the red button’, I fail to see why newscasters feel the need to read out the blitherings of people trying to make a soundbite.

I have a particular complaint against newsreaders. The key there is reader; someone who reads from a prepared script and, if the VT fails, might have to apologise and come back to that story later. They are not there to interview; some of the questions they come out with are particularly uninformed. Why would they be anything else? I am happy to hear a correspondent’s opinions because they specialise in a subject. My concentration span is not so short that I need a thirty-second spot broken up into sub-bite-sized chunks.

Emotive words are another bugbear. Part of the BBC’s remit is to report the facts; describing something with a phrase like ‘terrible atrocity’ attaches an emotive content that the BBC has no right to do. I similarly object to the hand-waving tendency. Watch any news broadcast, BBC or not, and you will see an awful lot of gesticulation. I fear that the reason for this is much the same as the emoting and interviewing; journalists want to be the centre of attention. Someone else cannot be allowed to take the screen during their face time and not only must their story be the most important but we must know that it is their story and we are privileged to receive their opinion. A competent telling of the facts is not enough for them. The genesis of this trend is obvious enough – the emotional impact of certain exceptional stories, like Michael Buerk’s reporting of the famine in Ruritania and the rise of celebrity newscasters. It would be entirely fair to say that I want the BBC to talk about ‘a dying child in the same tones as one would talk about the parts of an internal combustion engine’. The BBC has a strict duty to neutrality that the leader of the Labour party simply does not.

This is part of a general dumbing-down of news. I think the phrase is a little unfortunate; it is rather a dumbing-down of us, the audience, in the opinions of the news broadcasters. This is, I think, due in no small part to the baleful influence of the market’s tendency towards replication of successful models. While Sky News may well make money, they are a commercial organization that makes profit in a manner that the BBC does not. I would also raise the issue of Rupert Murdoch. It is true that the BBC cannot be biased and it is true that interference by the state in broadcasting is, at the very best, seriously problematic and at worst dangerous. However, if all the media subscribes to a given view or set of views, it becomes increasingly difficult to generate and sustain a reasoned debate. Rebekah Wade’s recent appearance at Parliament notwithstanding, I do not believe that Rupert Murdoch exercises no editorial influence over his large stable of media.

As I mentioned above, some of the criticisms made of the BBC are not unreasonable. It would be wholly wrong of the BBC to come out and say that Gordon Brown is the second coming or that David Cameron is like mayonnaise¹. There is an implicit bias whenever private, emotional qualifiers are attached to a bare-facts story. This doesn’t mean that investigative shows cannot go on or that Paxman can press people on Newsnight. It doesn’t mean that people and their actions cannot be criticised by the BBC. It does mean, though, that the separation needs to remain and to be clear.

Alex Deane, in what can only be a portent of the last days, has said that there is something positive on the BBC: the Larkin Tapes. I think he accepts that this is a “good thing” that would not be provided by the market. I disagree with Alex’s sentiment inasmuch as I don’t think the BBC should just be producing things that are high-quality but not likely to be produced by the market (or programming for the middle classes); it should be, in the same manner as its news programming, be providing a spur to improve the general level of programming by closing the option of producing endless, cheap programming to commercial broadcasters. Now, it’s easy to see how that happens with David Attenborough. I am unconvinced that ‘What Not to Wear’, ‘Changing Rooms’ or ‘Airport’ meet that test as good value for public money. The amount of money that some presenters – notably but not exclusively Jonathan Ross, who earns £4.5m a year – earn is out of proportion to what could be bought with that money given that the BBC doesn’t need to compete in the chat show market.

In short, I think that the BBC could fulfil its remit more effectively by having less programming but programming that forces other channels to avoid a race to the bottom.
There is a similar debate to be had around sports. This may just be because I don’t particularly like most sport, but I don’t know that chasing after the top sports is a good use of public money given that it’s available on satellite television in (what seems like) every public house in the land. Equally, there is precious little coverage of teams lower down the leagues. If I think of the town where I was born – Yeovil – the football team³ is a major part of the life of the area. It’s the only decent football team for some distance around. Promoting it on the television would do more for the area and the team than showing a Manchester derby, for instance, particularly as there seems to be no shortage of coverage of the top flight. I suspect the same is replicated across the country and for other sports. Under its new Charter, the BBC has to apply a public value assessment that I am not sure this meets. The counter-argument – that this is part of our culture and so needs to be available to all – doesn’t hold up to even the most cursory glance and, in any case, applies as much to the first and second divisions as the Premier League.

BBCi, the name for Auntie’s collective online offering, generally works pretty well it complements and isn’t trying to usurp the TV or radio. I hope that the revamp that will be happening soon goes well and isn’t too slavishly ‘Web 2.0’. My criticism of letting the passenger on the Clapham omnibus have their 160-letter text read out doesn’t apply as web real estate is very cheap and close to limitless. That having been said, I hope it remains a very minor part; most of the comments on the forums are, frankly, worthless. Moreover, I hope the BBC stays away from social media and similar

I am very supportive of the idea of the iPlayer and I hope it’s extended so that more of the classics from yesteryear are available. However, the Beeb has chosen to limit its iPlayer content to that you have to use Microsoft Internet Explorer on a computer with Microsoft Windows XP or Vista for full functionality. Anyone using an older version of Windows or any flavour of Mac or Linux is shut out. This is a reversal of its previous policy of platform agnosticism. DRM is controversial and, at best, deeply flawed. I will save rehearsing the arguments but will say that if the BBC insisted you used a (say) Panasonic TV to watch a programme in colour, we’d be up in arms. This is precisely what is happening with iPlayer. Quite aside from giving a commercial advantage to a single commercial company, it is a particularly bad company to have chosen. It has recently announced Service Pack 1 for its new operating system, Vista. There is nothing unusual in that, except that it might stop programmes working. An advantage of platform neutrality (and, but not necessarily, open source) is that it is much harder for a single actor to cause serious damage. Equally, Microsoft has courted controversy for its attitude towards free markets. Having just been fined €800m (yes, eight hundred million euro) for anticompetitive practices, Microsoft finds itself being hauled up by Neelie Kroes once again.

I hope that the basis on which I support the BBC is clear; it should not be a government-funded version of Sky News or CNN, ITV or UK Gold. It should be making things available that wouldn’t be otherwise and providing such things as might be available at a certain quality that provides a benchmark. The commercial networks don’t seem to achieve this. Channel Four’s unusual setup seems to work, but it does have a lot of misfires.

I have not addressed the World Service, which I think is wonderful; I wish that BBC News 24 were more like it. I hope the BBC continues; I just hope that it is not another source of dross.

xD.

1 – Rich, thick and oily²
2 – and smells faintly of eggs
3 – I declare an interest; my brother is a physio at Yeovil Town FC.