Why does the BBC still matter? How can it be saved? Even a decade ago these would be surprising questions to be asking. But in this, its centenary year, the BBC has accumulated some powerful enemies and threats to its existence. Billionaire-owned newspapers target the organisation on an almost daily basis. Successive culture secretaries have hinted it may not be around for long. Vastly wealthy tech and streaming companies outgun it financially. Its ability to compete is hampered by a series of painful licence fee settlements. A flailing prime minister is happy to throw it out as a piece of populist chaff.
And there have been the self-inflicted wounds. Martin Bashir, Jimmy Savile, Cliff Richard and the death of David Kelly will all make dismal chapters in any future BBC history. The broadcaster can come across as profligate, bureaucratic and self-satisfied.
But imagine—for we now have to—what our society would look like with a BBC that had been allowed to wither away and/or become much less accessible. The funding mechanism—tied to ownership of a television set—surely has to reform. But how would the UK change were its national broadcaster to become a subscription service for those civic-minded or middle class enough to want to pay?
This is an age of information chaos, of echo chambers, of citizens no longer quite sure whom to believe. The fractured American media scene shows us the peril that a society can suffer when partisan and polarised information is—for the large majority of people—all there is. What happens to a society when no one can agree on facts or truth?
Some commentators and politicians—mostly, but not exclusively, on the right—complain that the BBC isn’t impartial. The BBC’s regulator, Ofcom, doesn’t share that view—hence the attempt by the government to impose its own choice of chair on the regulator. But were the BBC to be, in effect, regulated by the party in power, it would cease to be independent. It would become something like a state broadcaster.
The lamentable influence of Fox News on American democracy serves as a terrible warning of the road that we go down once we allow a universal public broadcaster to be diminished. And yet Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, is poised to launch a version of Fox, Talk TV, in the UK. It promises to be “straight and balanced”—an unironic echo of Fox’s “fair and balanced.”
The current culture secretary Nadine Dorries has—as she gleefully tweeted—negotiated a settlement that will lead to deep cuts (£285m a year by 2027) in the BBC’s budget, which has already fallen nearly 30 per cent in 10 years. She did so via a leak to a newspaper, before tweeting that this would be the last licence fee negotiation. Other countries have managed rational discussions about the funding of their public broadcasters without embroiling them in culture wars or “Big Dog” distractions to save a prime minister’s skin.
As it turns 100, “straight and balanced” discussion about the future of the BBC may be thin on the ground. So we invited a number of leading figures to answer the questions we didn’t think we would need to be asking: why does the BBC still matter? And how can it be saved?
More important than ever:A panel of leading figures defends the BBC
Malcolm Turnbull
The BBC, like its Australian counterpart the ABC, is more important than ever. Both of these public broadcasters have a legal commitment to deliver accurate and impartial news and current affairs.
Our liberal democracies are under enormous stress today. Not from authoritarian China and Russia, but from the corrosion of integrity in our public life, the normalisation of lying and so much of our media’s move away from reality.
In the world’s most powerful and consequential democracy, the United States, a majority of Republican voters believe that Donald Trump won the last presidential election. This lie was promoted by right-wing media, especially Murdoch’s Fox News, and led directly to the attempted coup on 6th January last year.
Wherever we look we see the abandonment of reality. Thousands die unvaccinated because they have been told lies about Covid, just as they have been deceived about the reality of global warming.
Very often the blame for all this is laid at the door of social media platforms. But mainstream publishers have not been far behind the crazy posts on Facebook.
In years past, most mainstream publishers, even those that traditionally leaned to one side of politics or the other, would nonetheless report the news with a high degree of accuracy. Facts mattered. Alas, they all too rarely do today.
Critics of public broadcasting would always ask: “why should the government fund a publisher to do what the private sector is doing?” Yet all too often now the private sector is failing to do the vital job of providing factual news and current affairs.
We used to believe that competition was the key; that in the free market of news and ideas the truth would prevail. Well in the US, home of the First Amendment, politics is drowning in lies.
There is a massive public interest in ensuring that we do not descend into the world of “alternative facts.” Strong editorial leadership is vital: facts must be checked, commentary should be balanced. In a frantic rush to post stories online, the temptation to cut corners is immense—but it must be resisted.
A year on from the attempted coup in Washington, we should not be complacent about our democracies. As things fall apart, a strong, trusted source of accurate and impartial news and information will help ensure the centre is held.
Malcolm Turnbull was prime minister of Australia from 2015-2018
Jeanette Winterson
In 1985, Margaret Thatcher’s government commissioned a review of how the BBC was funded. Ideas to bring the corporation into line (the Thatcher line) included manufacturing TV sets that only showed ITV and Channel 4. Anyone owning those sets wouldn’t be obliged to pay the licence fee.
This was driven by a Tory perception of bias. The BBC could no longer be relied on to uphold Tory values—even though Thatcherism itself was a confrontation with the traditional Conservative bedrock of land and class. Love it or hate it, that shift of power, with the potential to affect all our lives, warranted more than cheering and flag-waving from the national broadcaster. Was the BBC really “biased” in applying scrutiny? Or was it doing its job?
Four decades later, here we are again. Another powerful Tory government is irritated by the BBC. Another determined attempt is being made to neuter, or ruin, what cannot be directly controlled by the state. It’s pathetic, but it’s also frightening because the threat is real.
Nadine Dorries is a culture wars enthusiast. She calls the BBC “unrepresentative” of Britain. There is no broadcaster in the world with a wider range of programming than the BBC. BBC radio alone is worth the licence fee. It’s all there: music, current affairs, politics, comment, history, nature, books, arts, science, plus the eccentricities the BBC is so good at, like when someone just talks about something that matters to them.
The BBC licence fee is populism at its best; we all pay a small amount—not much more than three quid a week—to conserve a world-class corporation that has endured for 100 years. Modern Conservatives are not much interested in conservation: destroying things is easier.
Dorries wants to destroy the BBC. She will have plenty of cheerleaders among the Murdoch press, and those interested parties who see pickings among the ruins. Whatever your politics, we should come together against this vandalism. Losing an independent BBC is bad for Britain.
Jeanette Winterson’s most recent book is “12 Bytes” (Jonathan Cape)
John Sawers
Every week around the world, hundreds of millions of people living under populist or oppressive regimes turn to the BBC for news they can rely on.
I saw this first as a young diplomat in Damascus in 1982, following the unfolding horrors of the massacres in Sabra and Chatila on the BBC World Service. Going for a breath of fresh air between bulletins, I realised that many gatherings in shops and cafes were tuned into the BBC Arabic Service to get objective information on what was happening in Beirut.
In South Africa at the end of apartheid, I saw how the BBC was a source of trusted news that couldn’t be slanted by the authorities. After the Cold War, we learnt just how important the BBC’s vernacular services were to those in central Europe striving for the end of Soviet domination.
In the 2000s, the BBC started to broadcast a Farsi TV channel into Iran that became immensely popular because it was trusted. The channel helped to level the playing field in the 2009 Iranian elections, which were won by the opposition candidates before the results were brutally overturned.
Today, the regimes in Russia and China do all they can to suppress the BBC’s broadcasts and websites as they don’t want their people to access reliable news. Russia has forced BBC journalists to leave. Beijing has banned all BBC World TV services and forced the Hong Kong broadcasters to cease carrying World Service radio.
All this is a testament to the BBC’s standing and influence. For most people around the world, the BBC is their first experience of Britain. As a broadcaster it is genuinely independent and is not trying to project a political line. And people discovering they could trust the BBC meant they also learned to trust Britain.
That trust contributes to our national security. As head of MI6, I talked to some of the brave people who work with us inside terrorist groups or states that threaten the UK. A recurrent theme was that they were willing to put their trust in MI6 in part because they had developed a trust in Britain from listening, often covertly, to the BBC.
None of this would be possible without the secure base the BBC has enjoyed—until now—at home. We British are going through a period of change. As we seek a new role in the world, it would be folly of the first order to undermine Britain’s biggest global brand and a wellspring of people’s trust in our country.
John Sawers was chief of MI6 from 2009-2014
Justin Welby
The stakes are never higher than when truth is on trial. Jesus said: “for this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth…” At the trial that led to his death, Pilate asked Jesus: “what is truth?”
Truth is always essential and always contested. Finding it and harnessing it—for good or ill—have been the aims of philosophers and the powerful for as long as people have thought. In our own era, the pursuit of truth feels more urgent yet more complicated by the day. But if truth often feels elusive, abandoning the belief that truth exists and can be found is a counsel of despair.
The BBC exists in this maelstrom, amid debates about access to truth and power. Strong democracy requires governments to consciously support structures that can challenge and potentially undermine them. When they support media organisations that can scrutinise—and criticise—them publicly, and when they resist the urge to abuse their role in that power dynamic, governments willingly limit themselves for the benefit of the people.
In turn, truth-seeking journalism that strives for impartiality makes space for people to disagree well, and for different opinions to be heard and challenged. Strong national institutions like the BBC can support the flourishing of free speech, and encourage a society that listens and responds generously and with grace.
Operating in a global market economy, but driven by an ethic of public service that transcends the market, the BBC has established its soft power around the world by building trust rather than publishing propaganda. It has a capacity for reflection, self-criticism and learning from its errors.
Because truth is both essential and contested, the BBC will always be attacked as it seeks to inform. The attacks will often come from those either seeking power or seeking to protect it. Because it is run and staffed by humans, it will make mistakes. Because of its tradition and ethos, it has shown it can learn from them.
The BBC has a vocation to serve the whole nation, and seek the truth however complex it may be. The question of how to fund this service ethos will always loom large, perhaps now more than ever. But, as we remember Jesus standing before Pilate, more important is the question of who, in a troubled world, will stand for the pursuit of truth, even—perhaps especially—when it confronts power. That question is bigger than any media organisation, and one that every society must continually keep in mind.
Justin Welby is archbishop of Canterbury
Claire Wardle
Our information ecosystem is in crisis. Trust in traditional gatekeepers is declining, while rumours and conspiracies cause real-world harm. From arson attacks on 5G towers to vaccine refusal to democratic erosion, the impact is clear. Social media platforms have played a key role in the dissemination of misinformation. But, as a British researcher on misinformation based in the US, I have seen two critical factors that explain why the crisis has been so pronounced in America: the devastation of local journalism, and the rise of hyper-partisan television news and talk radio.
The 6th January riots were a turning point for many of us who study misinformation. Those who stormed the barricades weren’t merely people who had watched one too many conspiratorial
videos on YouTube. As they rampaged through the Capitol rotunda, it was clear they were living in a shared, alternate reality. They truly believed that they were the ones protecting democracy and upholding the constitution. What we now know is that they had been exposed to a torrent of almost identical content for the previous two months: content from the president, from their Facebook feeds, their group chats, their favourite talk-show radio hosts and 24-hour cable. It is likely—and this is the case for most people on the left in the US too—that they weren’t consuming any content or spending any time with people that challenged their existing views.
I often get asked about “solutions.” My go-to response every time is that Americans must invest in public service media in a way that rivals what you have in Britain. The BBC—sometimes imperfectly—provides British people with such a comprehensive service that they bump into it without even thinking, whether that’s the Strictly final or primetime news headlines. The only things I watch in the US that feel truly shared are the ads that get aired during the Super Bowl.
The idea that this is the time to withdraw funding from the BBC is unfathomable. Misinformation impacts everything, from the financial markets to election security to trust in science. Mitigating its impact should be everyone’s priority.
Claire Wardle is the director of First Draft, a New York-based non-profit dedicated to tackling the challenges of misinformation
Jonathan Sumption
Like almost everyone, I find the BBC infuriating. Its news coverage is sometimes tendentiously selective. It frequently sacrifices rigorous analysis for emotional impact. It pursues the goal of balance only within a relatively narrow range of respectable or conventional opinions.
Why then do I deplore the culture secretary’s recent announcement about the BBC’s future funding? First, because it seems likely that there is an ulterior motive behind the bland assertion that savings are required at a time of financial hardship. The government has had it in for the BBC for a long time, because it views it as a powerful source of alternative values to its own. The BBC tries to reflect the cultural instincts of the population at large. This is vexing for people like me who abhor many things about the zeitgeist, but mine is only one point of view. As for governments, they are here today and gone tomorrow. It is inherently undesirable that a national broadcaster should share the cultural instincts of any particular government.
Second, the BBC has an unmatched range and depth of coverage of current affairs. It employs more journalists in more countries with more specialities than anyone else. Its standards of accuracy occasionally slip, but are on the whole impressive. Whatever one’s opinions, as a source of raw information it has few equals.
Third, the BBC is an outstanding broadcaster of sport, drama, music, literature, history, education and general entertainment. Much of this is only possible because the BBC’s financial model does not require it always to aim at maximising its audience or pleasing any particular constituency.
Defunding is an act of vandalism against an institution that enjoys strong public support and is respected internationally for its independence. Many countries have envied the international reach of the BBC and its success as a cultural ambassador for this country, and have tried to emulate it. None has succeeded. This kind of reputation is easy to destroy, but will be exceptionally difficult to recreate. People will be thankful for (and infuriated by) the BBC long after they have forgotten Nadine Dorries.
Jonathan Sumption is a former Supreme Court judge. He delivered the BBC Reith lectures in 2019
Ruth Davidson
As the mum of a toddler, I would simply advise the BBC to threaten to axe the CBeebies channel any time the corporation’s future comes up for debate. Wholesome, entertaining and ad-free educational content, it gives parents the chance to leave the room to do wild things like put on the tea or catch up with the washing while junior is watching.
At almost every stage of our lives, the BBC is the go-to broadcaster. It has around 40m users every day—with more than nine out of 10 British adults and eight out of 10 children consuming some form of content on television, radio or
online.
The size of the BBC is often used against it: the complaint is that it swamps or stifles other producers. It can certainly feel unwieldy when, as happened to me recently, you are contacted by 17 different news producers on one day asking you to come on different programmes across national and regional output.
But I digress. The size of the corporation allows it to invest at scale. Particularly on the creative side—whether that is affording the time and talent it takes to get those perfect shots of polar bears or tree frogs for an Attenborough nature documentary, or the lavish sets and stitching that allow a Sunday night period drama to pull in millions and secure export to a dozen other countries worldwide.
The UK’s creative industries—particularly film and television—are worth tens of millions. It is estimated that for every pound the BBC spends, it generates double that for the wider UK economy.
It’s easy to look inward and moan because we disagree with a news report or don’t enjoy a particular programme. But I fear that we often don’t truly value what we have until it’s gone.
Ruth Davidson was leader of the Scottish Conservative Party from 2011-2019
Pat Younge
The late chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks came to speak to a group of BBC leaders in the early 2000s, at the invitation of the then-director general Greg Dyke. Sacks began by thanking the BBC for the quality of the recent programmes we’d done on Passover, and said that in a world of increasing personalisation and algorithm-driven “narrowcasting,” the BBC had not only reflected this important festival back to Jewish viewers but helped others develop insight into the Jewish faith. This was, he said, the unique power of public service broadcasting—the ability to overhear other people’s conversations, to challenge people with views and perspectives outside their echo chamber, to open their eyes to new ideas.
The BBC’s most important cultural role is to provide representation for all parts of the UK, to reflect the UK back to itself and to others abroad. For that representation to be meaningful it needs to be authentic—and factor in geography, race, gender, disability and class far better than it does today. But it is the BBC’s USP, and should be the core of any defence of the broadcaster.
Why does the BBC matter? There’s a crisis in local journalism in Britain, with local newspapers closing or becoming platforms for aggregated content, and local commercial radio stations becoming increasingly centralised. For much of the national print media, it is increasingly hard to separate the self-interest of the owners from the “journalism” served up to the public, while tech platforms are the home of mis/disinformation. On the international front, for all the talk about competition from streaming services, not only do they commission (and therefore employ) a fraction of the production staff employed by the BBC, but many of their shows are set in a mid-Atlantic “otherwhere.” As brilliant as Netflix’s Sex Education may be, you would never know from watching it that it is filmed in south Wales. There is a similar absence of place, culture and identity in many of the streaming platforms’ other non-US shows.
The BBC’s current commitment is to spend 60 per cent of its money outside London. So far, so good. But for the strategy to really work it will have to decentralise decision-making. A BBC that’s closer to the audiences that depend on it will be a BBC that better serves everyone.
Pat Younge is a director at Cardiff Productions and a former chief creative officer of BBC Television Production
Fiona Hill
On the eve of the BBC’s centenary, this venerable institution remains relevant and necessary. Some of its curated content may be of variable quality, and its funding mechanism seems antiquated when personal devices are replacing television sets and radios, but the BBC’s fundamental proposition is still sound. Indeed, if the BBC didn’t exist, we might have to invent it.
When the BBC emerged just after the First World War, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were cementing power in Russia. The Soviet Union’s authoritarian propagandist state, alongside fascist Germany and Italy, threatened western democracy and inspired George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Today, we live in Orwell’s dystopia, with democracy imperilled.
In the US, the expansion of commercial cable news and the proliferation of online sources and social media have swamped us with information. Weaponising that information is everyone’s game. The “alternative facts” our friends and family share on Facebook undermine established social and scientific truths, sometimes with dire consequences for public health, domestic politics and global security. Anti-vax conspiracy theorists thwart efforts to combat the pandemic. Media outlets seeking ratings and revenue propagate Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election. Trustworthy news sources that refute him sit behind paywalls. Revered local newspapers have been outcompeted and decimated by internet news.
Beyond the BBC, there are few common resources to anchor us by disseminating basic facts or relating the course of events. News is what you pay for, or what someone else pays for. Populist politicians, polemicists and people pursuing profit and power shape our news consumption.
When other sources are so diminished, the BBC and its World Service function as a moral compass—a Global Positioning System. International broadcasters, policymakers and the public should look to the BBC more than ever as they make their way through the terrain of conspiracies and lies in search of truth.
Fiona Hill is senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of “There is Nothing for You Here” (Mariner)
Udit Bhatia
Many in the UK higher education system would recognise the trajectory the BBC is currently on—and the outcome that must be avoided at all costs. The experience of marketisation in higher education should remind us how ditching the “public good” model inevitably limits options rather than increasing them. Ideas too bold to bet money on will struggle to find investors. Long-term initiatives will give way to programmes that deliver safe and quick returns. Among other things, the BBC serves as an insurance policy for artists to test out programmes, formats and themes that players in a market would be too cautious to touch. This space, relatively free from the commercial imperatives facing the average digital platform, is worth preserving.
Marketisation of a public service threatens not only the service it provides, but also its relationship with those who use it. Public broadcasters, like universities, need to challenge and be challenged by the people they serve. Their role must not be limited to catering to preferences or views and treating these as fixed. Rather, the point of such institutions is to help question, contest and potentially re-shape those preferences. And that requires a fundamentally different relationship than the one that private service providers share with customers.
None of this should be taken to mean that the BBC or its financial model is beyond reproach. No doubt there is much scope for reform. It must become more representative in its programming and employment practices. Sky-high salaries must continue to be questioned. And we might also ask if a flat licence fee should apply to all or whether a more progressive funding model might be preferable. In considering all of this, though, our conversation must centre on what marketisation risks displacing altogether—the public mission of the BBC.
Udit Bhatia is a lecturer in political philosophy, University of Sheffield
Lynsey Hanley
As a lonely child I was a BBC addict, nourished as much by Radio 1 and the CBBC Broom Cupboard as by the popular science of QED and Horizon. In the holidays, I watched Why Don’t You?, a participatory children’s programme that encouraged bored kids to “switch off (our) television sets and go and do something less boring instead.” Each episode featured a group of children from different parts of the country, who would explain in thick Scouse or Brummie or Belfast accents how, for example, to make an ice-cream float or build a go-kart. “Why don’t I?” I’d think.
The BBC has helped forge my outlook. Its programming encouraged me not to be scared of the outside world, and furnished me and other working-class people growing up far from the centres of power with at least some of the tools to decode it. I doubt this would have happened otherwise, growing up in the 1980s, amid the multi-state violence of neoliberal economics and nuclear one-upmanship. The BBC made it possible for me to imagine alternative worlds against all available evidence.
Someone who has grown up taking the possibility of alternatives, of choices, for granted is less likely to recognise the significance of this. Unfortunately, too many of those people end up in positions of power; to have a job at the BBC is a position of enormous power. When that power is abused, even unknowingly, it means we’ve given up on those who need alternative worlds the most.
Lynsey Hanley is the author of “Estates: An Intimate History” (Granta) and “Respectable: Crossing the Class Divide” (Allen Lane)
Patrick Barwise & Peter York
If the government tried to abolish the BBC overnight, the backlash would make the poll tax riots look like a vicarage tea party. We still spend an average of over two hours a day using BBC TV, radio and online services. And, despite decades of right-wing newspapers telling us not to trust it, when asked which one source we’d turn to for trusted news, half of us pick the BBC—versus 1 per cent or less for each of the papers telling us not to trust it. Large majorities also support its public service mission and think it delivers on it better than anyone else.
But most British people take the BBC for granted, and a large minority—almost 30 per cent—say the £159 licence fee (for those who have to pay it) represents poor value for money. In 2015, a BBC-commissioned study invited a representative sample of this large BBC-sceptical minority to live without it for just nine days, in return for nine days’ licence fee (£3.60 in 2015). At the end, two-thirds had changed their minds, having realised how much they used, enjoyed and relied on the BBC and how little it was costing them.
The BBC’s Achilles’ heel is politicians’ control over its income. In 2010, George Osborne—with no published analysis, public consultation or parliamentary scrutiny—cut its funding. In 2015—after six secret meetings with Murdoch executives—but, again, no other consultation—he cut it even more. By 2019, its real (inflation-adjusted) public funding was down 30 per cent on 2010.
The government is now freezing the licence fee for another two years—with annual inflation running at over 5 per cent. As the National Audit Office has confirmed, this further cut in real funding will significantly reduce service quality, with fewer original UK programmes, more repeats, and so on.
In the BBC’s centenary year the government is still, quite deliberately, stealthily salami-slicing it to death. And presumably hoping the public won’t notice—or that they’ll mistakenly blame it all on Netflix.
Patrick Barwise and Peter York are authors of “The War Against the BBC” (Penguin)
