so as to create a market for the technology they had patented. The BBC emerged as a result of their protracted negotiations with government and was funded out of a levy on the sales of radio sets. Lobbying by the private media meant the new radio service was initially prevented from broadcasting much news, which was limited to bulletins after 7 p.m. based solely on agency reports. But over time, the BBC would become one of the most important and trusted sources of news for the British public. The initial restrictions on news bulletins were lifted in 1926 with the onset of the General Strike. As we shall see, the General Strike is a particularly ignominious episode in the BBC’s history, and it has rarely been quite so utterly subservient to power, or so overtly partisan. But the quasi-independence it was then afforded set a pattern that has endured to this day. In 1971, the then director general Charles Curran astutely observed that the BBC ‘is a creation of the Establishment, and it depends on the assent of the Establishment for its continuance in being’. But he also noted that ‘its activities are, by their very nature, which is to ask questions, constantly open to the accusation of being subversive’.10 Indeed, simply reporting accurately and offering even highly circumscribed political debate is sometimes capable of disrupting the agendas and strategies of the powerful. More than that though, the BBC has on occasion offered more critical perspectives. While its journalism rarely presents any fundamental challenges to the social order, the liberal and radical political culture of the 1960s created pockets of critical, independent reporting, especially within current affairs. The Corporation underwent something of a cultural shift that decade under the leadership of the liberal director general Hugh Greene, adopting a less austere style of broadcasting and producing socially conscious dramas and satirical programmes. The BBC, Greene himself claimed, was no longer a ‘pillar of the Establishment’, it was transformed by a ‘new and younger generation’.11
The cultural changes that the BBC underwent in the 1960s, the political significance of which have tended to be exaggerated,12 were partly attributable to the establishment of commercial television in 1955. Having lost its monopoly, the BBC was forced to innovate in order to restore its audience share and maintain its legitimacy. But they also reflected broader social changes that were under way. Relative prosperity, technological innovation, greater equality and full employment, combined with Britain’s decline as an imperial power, created a climate in which political, social and cultural norms were increasingly challenged – especially by the new generation of economically independent young adults. As Stuart Hood (controller of programmes, television) recalled, the BBC in this period for the first time attacked ‘some of the sacred cows of the establishment – the monarchy, the church, leading politicians and other previously taboo targets’.13
While this is certainly true, it is also important to recognise that the BBC was as much a target of this hostility as it was an antagonist. In 1977, the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting noted that the sixties had seen a growth of hostility ‘to authority as such; not merely authority as expressed in the traditional organs of State but towards those in any institution who were charged with governance’.14 The BBC, the paternalist institution par excellence, came increasingly to be seen as part of a bureaucratic and unaccountable Establishment, and like other powerful institutions found its hegemony over public life increasingly contested.15 Scholars influenced by sixties radicalism no longer took for granted social structures and the ideas which legitimated them, and sociologists powerfully undermined journalistic notions of impartiality and objectivity – professional norms that were not only strongly held by journalists, but justified the BBC’s privileged position in British society. In this period, the media, and the BBC in particular, came under considerable pressure from conservative moralists and a range of social forces on the left, including the broadcasting unions. Radical sections of the labour movement also agitated for structural reforms, inspired both by class-based critiques of media institutions and increasingly popular notions of worker self-management.
In understanding this period, it is important to recognise that these political struggles played out not just at the level of formal politics, nor just between social movements and the Establishment, but between and within a range of institutions including within the BBC itself. In 1979, during a discussion by senior BBC editors of Bad News, a highly influential sociological study of the reporting of industrial disputes, the documentary maker Tony Isaacs complained that ‘there was a whole generation now in journalism and politics who in their days at the London School of Economics in the 1960s had grown to believe that the BBC was fascist and everything else that was bad’.16
It is sometimes imagined that the ‘death of deference’ in the 1960s, and the impact this had on journalistic culture, led to the combative style of political interviewing exemplified at the BBC by figures like Jeremy Paxman and John Humphreys. While not entirely erroneous, this is something of a misreading. The social change of that era no doubt opened up space for this type of journalism; but the irreverent style stems less from the egalitarian spirit of the 1960s and ’70s, and more from the bumptious posturing of the public school and Oxbridge debating societies, or the ‘moots’ at which would-be barristers pitch their wits against one another. Indeed, Sir Robin Day, the great pioneer of the adversarial interview, was a president of the Oxford Union and was later ‘called to the Bar’, the culture of which is hardly alien to the political elite.17 The real journalistic legacies of the liberal and radical upheavals of the 1960s were not the ‘tough’ interview, but the ambitious, innovative and popular current affairs programmes which subsequently emerged, such as Granada’s World in Action and to a lesser extent Panorama and other BBC programmes produced at Lime Grove, the BBC’s labyrinthine and remote studios where Paxman trained before fronting Newsnight.
The journalistic legacy of the democratic and egalitarian agitation which began in the 1960s lasted well into the 1980s. But it was then subject to a vigorous counterattack which reshaped the BBC as well as the broader political culture. In the 1970s, the New Right, which cohered around Margaret Thatcher, began its long march through the institutions, the BBC among them. From the mid-1980s, the Thatcher Government and its allies launched a series of public attacks on BBC political programming, and the increasingly bitter conflict with the government was only resolved when political appointees on the Board of Governors forced the resignation of Director General Alasdair Milne, a seasoned programme maker who personified the more independent stance the BBC had assumed in recent decades. With Milne’s departure, the institutional culture of the BBC was gradually transformed, first under his successor, the accountant Michael Checkland, but most of all under Checkland’s deputy and successor, the committed neoliberal John Birt. In his autobiography Birt would lament that when he arrived at the BBC in 1987, the Corporation ‘had not yet come to terms with Thatcherism’, its journalism being ‘still trapped in the old post-war Butskellite, Keynesian consensus’.18 Assisted by a small coterie of radical reformers, he worked tirelessly to put this to rights. In the purported interests of analytical journalism, he introduced ‘rigorous procedures for monitoring particularly sensitive programmes’.19 Systems of newsgathering and editorial authority were centralised and programme scripts were routinely vetted. Later, as director general, Birt imposed a neoliberal-inspired managerial restructuring on the BBC, instituting buyer–seller relationships and competitive pressures through an internal market system which integrated the BBC more fully into the private sector. Birt also shifted the BBC’s journalism in a more business-friendly direction, a trend which was accelerated significantly by his successor as director general, the amiable millionaire Greg Dyke, who was later famously forced from office by the Labour Government of Tony Blair. After Dyke’s departure, editorial controls were further extended, and the BBC drifted further to the right.
This book will outline the above history in much more detail, explaining how it was that the BBC was transformed from a pillar of the social democratic Establishment into a neoliberal, pro-business, right-wing organisation; and how it is that powerful interests have been able to shape the BBC, influence its output and stifle its potential for independent journalism.
The BBC is a large organisation, the origins of which go back almost a century, and so a relatively short book such as this could not hope to do justice to the breadth of its activities or the complexities of its history. The focus here is more or less exclusively on the BBC’s journalistic content, rather than its broader