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I’m a strong supporter of a well-funded BBC as a guarantor of the presence of a bedrock of quality programming. At the same time, even people within the corporation have begun to acknowledge that in certain areas it has over-reached itself, paradoxically to the detriment of the civil society it seeks to enhance.
Recently the BBC Trust, which oversees the Corporation, nixed plans for a vast network of local news sites. The reason? They accepted the argument that it would simply kill large numbers of local newspapers, who would be faced with competition from a $100 million initiative which not only did not have to turn a profit, it didn’t even have to generate any income at all.
The problem is that the Corporation had expanded into areas where competition operates in very different ways to the original arenas of radio and television.
Though they complain, commercial broadcasters have, by and large, been able to compete with the corporation. Much of that is because the audience do not, by and large, object to advertisement slots (at least not at the frequency currently allowed in the UK). If a programme is good, people will watch it whether it is publicly funded through the license fee or commercially through advertisements.
When it comes to news and magazine content on the web, however, there’s little doubt that the enormous resources the BBC brings to bear in providing free content makes it somewhere between difficult and impossible for others to make a living. You may be able to finance a blog with on-screen advertising but you can’t pay for a network of high-quality correspondents. In effect the Corporation are in danger of stifling the whole eco-system by offering for free what others can only offer through some kind of subscription system. Just because the Murdoch empire is evil, it doesn’t always mean that they’re wrong.
There is precedent for clipping the Corporation’s wings to make space for others. Over recent decades there has been a massive move to outsourcing of programme production. The result has been the growth of a healthy market-place for independently-made programmes which would once have all been generated internally by BBC employees. It has been a win-win situation for the viewing public and the UK economy.
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