The BBC
Myth of a Public Service
TOM MILLS
Paperback edition published by Verso 2020
First published by Verso 2016
© Tom Mills 2016, 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-486-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-485-0 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-484-3 (UK EBK)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Contents
Introduction
1.Under the Shadow of Power
2.The BBC and the Secret Service
3.War and Peace
4.Politics, Power and Political Bias
5.The Making of a Neoliberal Bureaucracy
6.Public Service Broadcasting and Private Power
Conclusion: Democracy, the State and the Future of Public Media
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
The BBC is one of the most important political and cultural institutions in Britain, and is among the most influential and trusted media organisations in the world. Its global audience has been estimated at 308 million, while in the UK almost everyone uses its services in some form.1 The great majority of the British public watch BBC television, most listen to BBC radio, and over half use the BBC’s online services.2 We turn to the Corporation for music, sport, drama and documentaries. But it is also a vital and trusted news service; not just a cultural institution, but an indispensible source of information about the world and our place in it.
One in sixteen adults around the world are thought to use BBC news services and in the UK around four out of five do so: a reach far greater than any other provider.3 While most of us use a number of different news sources, half of the UK public consider it their most important source of news, and as many as one in five rely solely on the BBC. Moreover, it is not only the most popular provider of news, it is also regarded by viewers and listeners as the most accurate and trustworthy.4
But are we right to trust the BBC? Does it provide us with an impartial account of what is going on in the world, or does it serve particular political interests and agendas? This book argues that despite all the claims to the contrary, the BBC is neither independent nor impartial; that its structure and culture have been profoundly shaped by the interests of powerful groups in British society; and that this in turn has shaped what we see, hear and read on the BBC.
The Corporation is of course not without its critics. But debates over the politics of the BBC have been hopelessly misinformed. Although it is among the most important institutions in Britain, it is also one of the most misunderstood. It is maligned by commentators in the national press for its left-wing bias, but in fact its journalism has overwhelmingly reflected the ideas and interests of elite groups, and marginalised alternative and oppositional perspectives. It is lauded by liberal academics and journalists for its much-vaunted independence and its fostering of democratic public life, but in fact it is part of a cluster of powerful and largely unaccountable institutions which dominate British society – not just ‘a mouthpiece for the Establishment’ as Owen Jones suggests, but an integral part of it.5 It is celebrated by the left as a publicly funded bulwark against the power of the corporate media, but it has long been ‘infatuated with markets’6 and of all the national broadcasters it devotes by far the most time and resources to business.7
This book sets the record straight on the BBC. It corrects the myths and misunderstandings and the mendacious and muddled thinking that have clouded public understanding of an institution that not only lies at the heart of British cultural and political life, but is an international exemplar of the tradition of public service broadcasting it pioneered.
As we shall see, the reactionary press and the conservative movement in Britain have done much to confound public understanding of the BBC. But so too have many liberals and leftists, who have tended to overlook the reality of the BBC’s history, focusing instead on the ideal of public service broadcasting with which it is associated. This is a wider problem. To discuss the BBC is not just to debate the merits of a particular media institution. It inevitably invokes certain imperilled principles which the Corporation is seen to embody, most of all those fundamentals of liberal journalism: accuracy, independence and impartiality. Underpinning such principles is a deeper normative commitment to a certain kind of public life; an awareness that for a society to function democratically in any meaningful sense, citizens require accurate and impartial sources of information to inform their political judgements, or better still a public space to facilitate political deliberation, free from market forces and the state. While scandals in recent years have starkly revealed that the private media is utterly incapable of performing such a role, even the BBC’s most committed defenders acknowledge that in practice the Corporation has itself too often failed to live up to such principles. Accuracy has always been taken seriously, and this has for the most part at least prevented the BBC from propagating the egregious distortions and falsehoods so typical of the reactionary press. But, as will be extensively detailed here, impartiality has been routinely construed in a manner skewed towards the interests of powerful groups.
What lies behind this partial reporting? The journalist Roger Bolton, who was twice fired from the BBC over his coverage of Northern Ireland, has remarked that ‘either [the BBC] is independent, or it isn’t’,8 and put in such stark terms, the simple answer has to be that it is not. It has scarcely been independent of governments, let alone the state. Part of the problem, though, is that this question has tended to be framed in such stark and narrow terms. The BBC has never been ‘independent’ in the sense that its most enthusiastic supporters imagine. Senior executives on the Board of Governors, more recently the BBC Trust, are all political appointees, and its major source of funding, the licence fee, and its constitution – as laid out in its Royal Charter – are both routinely set by governments: a fact which inevitably influences its reporting. Neither, however, has the BBC always functioned like a straightforward instrument of Britain’s governing classes. Rather, it has always occupied a grey area – sometimes darker, sometimes lighter – between government and civil society.
The BBC started life as the British Broadcasting Company Ltd, a corporate consortium of the ‘Big Six’ radio manufacturers formed in October 1922 and granted an exclusive licence to broadcast by the Post Office in January 1923.9