TV Times
There has probably never been a more challenging time to be involved in public affairs in the broadcasting industry. But we should take a step back and wonder whether the system itself is working in the interests of the viewers.
The BBC Trust consulting on the remit and scope of bbc.co.uk. (Yet another) Ofcom inquiry into public service broadcasting – the last one completed only two years ago. More Ofcom reviews of news and children’s programming. The Competition Commission reviewing Sky’s stake in ITV. OFT looking at the regulation of ITV’s advertising sales.
Just a taster. The list could have been twice as long and still not been comprehensive. For historical reasons, broadcasting has always been a heavily-regulated industry. Analogue spectrum was scarce, and governments felt entitled to call the shots. Content on the few commercial channels was controlled in return for access to the airwaves, and in any case there was a state broadcaster in the BBC, funded by the licence fee – effectively a tax.
This arrangement began to wobble with the advent of first satellite television in the eighties, and then in the nineties with digital broadcasting. Love it or hate it – and there was no shortage of passionate comment on both sides – Sky offered people something different. Its digital satellite platform enabled the creation of hundreds of new channels. A parallel revolution - the explosive growth of the internet - created direct consumer access to millions of new sources of information. Now faster speeds permit individuals to create and share content of their own.
Yet oddly enough the regulated nature of the broadcasting system has hardly changed, despite the new choice and freedom available. In fact the DCMS and Ofcom seem united in preserving as much as they can of the old set-up.
From a policy point of view this is puzzling. The original system had been designed to ensure that certain types of content (news, children’s programming, religious broadcasting, documentaries and so on) would be made available – so-called ‘public service broadcasting’. Now the multichannel market is providing lots and lots of programmes that meet the public service criteria. This should logically have led to a gradual retrenchment by the public sector, and a greater focus on the programmes that the market cannot provide – a relatively narrow category.
But in the peculiar world of UK broadcasting, every argument against public intervention and regulatory creep is flipped into an argument for its support.
So what if there is now more programming in multichannel television that delivers public service content? This must be an argument for a bigger BBC with more services imitating the commercial players, and then more state help for Channel 4, to increase ‘competition’.
More information available on the internet from every conceivable government department, public body, charity and interest group? The answer: Ofcom must rush to spend public money (about #150m) on a new quango (called the Public Service Publisher) to fund new media content, presumably in that tiny category of ideas that are so unpopular that they cannot survive without a generous dollop of taxpayer’s money.
Are people fearlessly and independently using new technology? Time to invent a gravy-train for consultants called ‘media literacy’, to lecture people on what they either already know or don’t want to know.
These apparently counter-intuitive developments can only be explained if you look more closely at the way in which public affairs and policy-making works in broadcasting. The real power lies with the producers and the vested interests, which devote enormous resources to keeping the status quo in place. In twenty years in public affairs, I have never come across an organization with more lobbyists and quasi-lobbyists than the BBC. (It would be unkind to dwell for a moment on who ultimately pays all those salaries). The BBC, the other public service broadcasters and the many recipients of their largesse represent a powerful, articulate and influential group dependent on a steady – and preferably increasing - flow of taxpayers’ money.
What is needed to balance the ‘gimme more’ gang are strong organisations fighting the consumer corner. Unfortunately, this is the weakest part of the system.
Ofcom has a consumer panel which has plenty to say about the needs of specific communities, but very little about the day-to-day consumer.
The performance of the National Consumer Council and the Consumers’ Association (has there ever been two more inappropriately-named organisations?) in this area is a lamentable study in pious hand-wringing.
And the one genuine consumer pressure group, the Voice of the Listener and Viewer, is very narrowly based. It exists to represent the interests of middle-class people who listen only to Radios 3 and 4, and who worship David Attenborough in the same manner as remote South Sea Islanders are said to accord divine status to the Duke of Edinburgh.
The perennial inability of broadcasting to embrace the future of choice and freedom is a tragedy, as well as a colossal waste of money. We could have a funding system in which state intervention was restricted to content which the market did not provide. A regulatory system in which competition encouraged efficiency and innovation rather than subsidy-hunting. Policy-making which put the wishes of the people rather than the producers first.
We don’t. It is surely time that something was done about that.
(This blog is based on an article recently published in Public Affairs News)
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