Media: future of the Beeb

By Richard North - March 27, 2024

There is an old joke where Yasser Arafat comes to New York to speak at the United Nations. Afterwards, he is invited to the White House to meet Ronald Regan.

While the pair are waiting for the photo-shoot to be arranged, they engage in some small talk. Regan asks Arafat whether his hotel was comfortable, and the Palestinian leader tells how much he had enjoyed his room, and especially the giant TV on which he had watched the latest episode of Star Trek.

There’s one thing that upset me though, Arafat complains. I watched the programme from end to end, and I saw there were no Arabs in it. That’s easily explained, said Regan. The programme’s set in the future.

This is very much how I think things should be when it comes to the future of the BBC. In my ideal world, it simply wouldn’t have one. The sooner the Corporation is abolished, the better.

The oddest thing about this ramshackle organisation, though, is that its champions really do, sincerely believe that its output represents the pinnacle of excellence, as indicated by director general Tim Davie’s speech yesterday.

That it was carried by most newspapers, despite a packed news agenda, is indicative of the importance of this tedious subject, but then it also covers the fate of a business which extracts £3.8 billion a year through an archaic licence fee system which criminalises non-payers.

Predictably, the BBC website gives the speech a good airing with a headline which, in its extraordinary arrogance, is as good an example as any of why the BBC needs to go.

This tells us: “BBC to explore how to reform licence fee, director general says”, reflecting Davie’s announcement in his speech, where he said the Corporation will look at the licence fee’s scope, how progressive it is and how it is enforced. “It is right”, he declared, “to ask fundamental questions about its longevity”.

The telling point here is that it is not for the BBC to decide on the long-term nature of its funding. This is for the government of the day to do, with the approval of parliament. And, in December last, culture secretary Lucy Frazer announced a licence fee review.
The review, we were told, would be supported by a panel of independent experts from across the broadcasting sector and wider business world, and would assess a range of options for funding the BBC.

It would look at “how alternative models could help secure the broadcaster’s long-term sustainability amid an evolving media landscape, increased competition and changing audience behaviour, while reducing the burden on licence fee payers”.

Crucially, the terms of reference stated that the panel would explore the sustainability of the BBC’s current licence fee model and build an evidence-based understanding of alternative models for funding the BBC.

It was also stated that the review would be supported by analysis which would include externally commissioned research but, in his own hubristic way, Davie has jumped the gun,

With the government’s official review having been described by one member of staff at the BBC as comprising a “panel of gravediggers”, the director general has announcing that next year his organisation would “open up our biggest-ever consultation process so the public can inform and drive the debate on the future of the BBC”.

This, in effect, amounts to the BBC marking its own homework, and already Davie is attempting to set the parameters for the review, rejecting the idea of the BBC being reduced to a paywalled subscription service, or abandoning the breadth of its programming.

Elaborating on these points, Davie says: “We should not create another commercial walled garden or a narrow BBC that provides a niche service for the most hardcore users”.

And it is here that the BBC bubble exerts its malign effect, where he adds that: “The very wonder of the BBC is that quality news sits next to genres such as drama and sport thus ensuring widespread usage”.

Davie goes on to assert that the BBC was still highly valued: “When I travel abroad, and see what others aspire to, there is almost universal admiration for what we have achieved. It is so precious, utterly unmatched”, he says: “Not perfect, but trusted from Belfast to Boston, from Kendal to Kyiv”.

This, of course, is the news service which has constantly misrepresented the situation in the Middle East and which has been so quick to propagandise on behalf of the Palestinians in Gaza that it has become an almost full-time shill for Hamas, which it refuses to name as a terrorist organisation.

This is a service that seems so obsessed with “diversity” that, before I finally abandoned it as unwatchable, had so many diverse hires amongst its reporters and presenters that one could easily forget that it was the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Interestingly, Davie refers to the long-term funding of the BBC World Service, which he says should be paid for by the government. The cost used to be carried by the Foreign Office until 2014. Since then, we are told, there have been varying levels of grant support from the government, but it is at the moment largely paid for by the licence fee.

What we have seen as a result is an ill-founded attempt to merge domestic and world service news programmes, with common content, staff and presenters.

Said News digital director Naja Nielsen back in July 2022, the way people consume current affairs is changing. “In recent years we’ve seen a huge surge in audiences coming to our live coverage, with tens of millions following live pages when big stories and events unfold”, she said.

Typical of the hubris of this organisation, she grandly declared: “As the world’s most trusted source of news, with a huge depth and breadth of expertise, the BBC is uniquely placed to offer audiences the best analysis and explanation as these stories are unfolding”.

In a bid to attract and expand its international audiences, the practical outcome of the BBC’s ambitions was to ensure that most of the on-screen staff were not white British, and certainly not males.

Without them ever having declared this as an agenda, the way the BBC is being structured suggests that the Corporation is progressively reinventing itself as a global broadcasting operation, on the lines of CNN, perhaps looking to draw an income from advertising to its international audiences in the event that the UK license is eventually junked.

This model, in fact, has not proved too successful and last April’s merger is in the process of being dismantled after criticisms from both journalists and audiences.

From the look of it, this is forcing the BBC to look again at its licence income, with Davie telling us that his review will look at the issue of making the licence fee “fairer for those on low incomes”, although he says that the Corporation is committed to a “universal fee where everyone has a stake in it”.

The Corporation may be committed to it, as a source of free money, but the reference to making the fee fairer to those on lower incomes has been taken to suggest that the wealthy will be charged more for the BBC output.

This has been quickly dissed by the Tories, with one Tory source responding: “Charging better off households more for receiving the same service as audience shares and trust fall is not something a Conservative government could countenance”.

Needless to say, Davie gets a sympathetic hearing from the Guardian, which has the director general setting out a plan for the future in which the BBC would “pursue truth with no agenda, back British storytelling and bring people together”.

The Corporation, Davie asserts, “could act as a ballast against increasing polarisation exacerbated by social media”. Content would also be curated using “serendipity, curiosity” and “what […] BBC editors may judge to be important stories”, he says.

Increasingly, though, it looks as if the BBC will be talking to itself, as 91 percent of Telegraph readers call for the licence fee to be scrapped. Short of that, people are working round the rules to access digital services, as terrestrial viewer are heading down the pan.

Given the garbage it is producing, this cannot come a moment too soon.