BBC’s Thompson Responds to Criticism

September 18, 2009 World Screen
CAMBRIDGE, September 18: In a speech delivered to the Royal Television Society Cambridge Convention, BBC director-general Mark Thompson defended the BBC’s position as a public institution and reiterated its intent to examine how the BBC can best serve the public in the digital world.
 
He first addressed the criticism James Murdoch, the chairman and CEO or Europe and Asia at News Corporation, levied against U.K. media regulation and the BBC, claiming state support gives the BBC an unfair edge over commercial media firms.
 
Thompson responded, “At the heart of James’ speech is a simple proposition: that only an unregulated free market can guarantee editorial independence, choice and quality, and that there is no space between this market and the state. Media properties are either commercial and therefore truly free, or they are state-sponsored, state-controlled and therefore not just paternalistic, but authoritarian. You have to choose—and in James’s view, in so many ways with BBC, Channel 4, Ofcom, the rest of PSB [public service broadcasters]— Britain has made the wrong choice.”
 
Thompson countered that in the U.K., not only the BBC and other PSB but also universities, museums and galleries, many orchestras, and so much of the collective cultural and social life, exist in the “Public space,” and “wherever it can be—and certainly in the case of the BBC—public space is free at the point of use,” explained Thompson. “And the more people who use it the better. Consider the contrast between the availability of music and arts on Sky Arts and on BBC Television. Sky Arts is one of the most positive developments in multi-channel television. It has some brilliant programming. It extends the choice and range of music and arts available on TV. In a typical seven days, it reaches perhaps half a million people.
 
“But arts on the BBC is simply of a different order,” continued Thompson. “To quote just one statistic, this summer more than 12 million people in this country sampled the Proms on BBC Television before the Last Night. I’m not claiming any special credit for that, by the way—the BBC exists in part to make the arts universally available, Sky does not. Private space focuses on the minority who already have a taste for the arts, public space reaches out across the population.
In the case of the BBC, there’s another important characteristic. There’s no demand curve and no exclusion. You can’t buy a better service from the BBC no matter how wealthy you are. And you can’t stop people who are less well off than you enjoying just as good a service as you do. Public space is shared space. That’s why we will never erect a pay zone around our news.”
 
On the subject of public support of the BBC and its license fee, Thompson said support has never been stronger. “The assumption that, as choice expanded, the market failure argument for PSB intervention would progressively diminish has turned out to be false. Indeed, market failure is popping up in unexpected places; and, as Steve Morrison said last night, the BBC has a more important role than ever as the investor of last resort in high-quality content.
 
Instead, many commercial media business models are in crisis. People argue that a powerful BBC is making this problem worse. There’s no evidence that that’s the case. If anything, the traditional media industry is facing even more daunting economic challenges in the States where there is no large-scale public intervention in broadcasting.
 
Thompson then reiterated his intent to conduct a review that will examine the BBC’s role in the post-switchover world of 2012 and beyond, “to develop a clear strategy for what kind of BBC could best serve the public, and best support the media sector. Defining the public space the BBC should occupy and being explicit about where space must be left for others will be the thread through the whole review.”
 
The review will throw up difficult choices, explained Thompson. “Over the past 20 years, we’ve been able to use productivity gains—enhanced during some of the period by a license fee which grew in real terms—to opt for what you could call a ‘both-and’ strategy: both maintaining, indeed sometimes being able to increase investment in existing linear services, and launching new digital ones.
 

“The British public tell us that they continue to want a strong, confident BBC which delivers real value to every household in the country,” continued Thompson. “But in a period where not just the licence fee, but the wider public finances and the revenues available to commercial media, are constrained, and after years of squeezing efficiencies out of the system, ‘both-and’ must and will give way to ‘either-or’. And that means choices.”