When I wrote “Scrap the BBC!”: Ten years to set broadcasters free, for the Social Affairs Unit, in 2007, I was pretty sure the logic and merits of my case were sound. But I didn’t think many people in authority agreed. Plenty of them would still say they love and will defend the BBC. However, more and more people seem to be making the arguments – and proposing the reforms – which will sink it and allow much more interesting things to happen.

The BBC is at bay
Like it or not, the BBC is about to change so radically that it’ll be unrecognisable. I have never seen it attacked on so many fronts by so many different sorts of people for so many strong reasons. For the first time, the BBC has smelled defeat.

Its enemies and the weakness of its response
Here’s a partial list. Ben Bradshaw, its government boss, dislikes its constitution and contemplates reducing its size. Ofcom contemplates dishing out the licence fee to its competitors. Its commercial rivals point to its immunity to recession. The right thinks it’s a socialist propagandist (that much is tripe). The Tricoteur Tendency point to its fat cats. Sky points to the dangers of its non-commercial “free” terrestrial challenge. Newspapers loathe its dominance of online news. The literate dislike its dumbing down. David Elstein proposes subscription as an alternative to the licence fee. Most impotant of all, the Tories seem to be manning-up to bash the BBC on many fronts.

The BBC will defend itself by saying it must maintain its ”offer” to all audiences in all media, or risk losing its claim to the compulsory licence fee. But its competitors and enemies will claim it only has a claim or right (limited in both cases) to do ”improving” Public Service Broadcasting. And PSB is an elitist product which (it is easy to argue) the middle class ought to buy for themselves (and give to poor people if they want to).

A big new problem scuppers the BBC
The business model for dissemination of serious news and opinion is under serious strain. People fear that locally first and nationally later some new way will have to be found to get people to pay for their news and comment. For the first time ever, the BBC is perceived as part of the problem and not a plausible part of the solution.  

The BBC is at bay
Rightly, the Corporation has in recent years feared that if it conceded any territory, it would lose all its ground. Now, it is prepared to contemplate being smaller rather than lose its unique USP. But really, it was right in the first place. Once the BBC loses its grip on its near-monopolies, its enemies will force it rapidly to shrink into a very small core business which would probably be privatised.

So what?
Let’s remember what we’d be losing. The BBC is a vast smug monolith bestriding most forms of broad- and narrow-casting in the UK. It is over-funded and over-controlled. It rules by terror: it manages to terrify millions of people into thinking it is indispensible and irreplaceable.

Truth is, there are zillions of ways for the affluent, literate, busy-body middle class to overcome such market failure as there may be in broadcasting. There is no problem of equity or access that can’t easily be overcome at small expense in cash and with minimal generosity.

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Early reports suggest Lord Carter would like to help fix the crisis in local journalism. Commercial local journalism – print and broadcast – is in great difficulty. But ITV only ever did local news because it was made to, so Lord Carter’s move merely insists that the state must pay for whatever broadcasting it insists on mandating.

The real principle here is that local people should pay for local news and comment and whether they do this through the market, or their local councils or new voluntary bodies, is really their business. They could do this as the local branch of the National Trust of the Airwaves I propose.

I doubt that locally-financed journalism would use the ITV network as its main tool of dissemination, but it might. There’s local radio and local papers standing by as cheaper methods, and of course the internet and even local newsletters.

One good role for a national body might be for Reuters or PA to take local money to maintain local journalists whose material could be quality-controlled and disseminated by the wire services, local radio and TV and local papers.

That would maintain as much as possible of the great modern virtues: keep the state to a minimum; subsidiarity in funding and control (“as local as possible”); alternative technology (keep it cheap); encourage competition; fund good things commercially and voluntarily and only compulsorily as a last resort.

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It was lazy of me, but I first came across Mr Rusbridger’s proposal by noticing Roy Greenslade’s deep scepticism about it. Mr Greenslade is suspicious of the idea that the state should be paying for news on the scale involved.

I’m inclined to suppose that the issue is that Mr Rusbridger (like Ofcom) wants to save specific institutions (local papers, say). I think the point is to stress that one should:

(a) subsidise as little as possible (and only for market failure);
(b) get people to subscribe to subsidy (keep the state out of it);
(c) apply “subsidiarity”: subsidise producers not processes.

That would imply that one might argue for a subsidy to local journalists but not to local papers and from voluntary not state sources. The papers could take the subsidised material, or it could go on websites, or to radio stations, or whatever. Once the material exists, outlets are secondary.

That’s the point of the digital age.

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Ofcom studiously avoids big change

It’s early days, but this week’s news suggests that Ofcom is stuck in the wearisome old game of keeping the existing players going. One can’t help feeling that Ed Richards and his cohorts are trying to keep as much of the BBC and Channel 4 institutional nexus alive as they can. An outsider (that would be me) is inclined to see this as the nomenclatura looking after itself.

How much bolder it would have been to reconsider the whole nature of “public” funding of broadcasting and how to dismantle rather than maintain the two state-owned broadcasters.

Answer: a new National Media Trust

Reuters Institute nearly puts its finger on it

The new Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report (What’s Happening To Our News) is not a great read but it does reinforce the idea that the web is a threat to serious journalism. I think the main point is that more and more people will consume news in an arena which can’t yet monetise their eyeballs. The news media has migrated to the web because it didn’t dare not do so, and long before it had any way of earning fresh money from the switch.

Answer: a new National Media Trust

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The two broadcast regulators are due to tell us what they think the future is for serious broadcasting: Ofcom delivers its Public Service Broadcasting review on 21 January and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport its Digital Britain report on 26 January.

Here’s my pitch.

I used to think that we needed a National Trust of the Airwaves to get broadcasting out of the state’s hands. That was one possibility I floated in “Scrap the BBC!”, written for the Social Affairs Unit in 2007. Now, I think I was too timid, as usual.

Actually, we need a National Media Trust which could fund any media, anywhere. This is especially necessary for serious journalism

The reason is that the platforms for journalism have problems across the board. Most obviously the BBC is hogging however many billions of “public” money (yours). Channel 4 is openly begging for a share of it. All the commercial channels fear for their advertising revenues and say it’s the good stuff will go first. Everyone is eyeing the web and testing it out in the face of a massive BBC presence.

That’s the electrics. Print is in a bad way, too. The recession hits their advertising and the availablility of suitable millionaires (the presses’ old standy). The quality press (especially the Telegraph) is dumbing down.

The broadcasters will huff and puff, but will have to shrink their output. That won’t matter much. There’s too much repetitive, formulaic stuff anyway.

The print media likewise will shrink: we will presumably lose titles. The world without the Independent (say) would not be a much worse place.

But the reason we need not mourn the demise of a few channels or titles is that we can imagine and institute much better ways of delivering media.

It’s important to remember that it is journalism that matters, not which platform or even employer it has.

The web and satellite and cable stand ready to broadcast any of the material which the public wants but which existing channels and printing presses don’t.

We should be thinking of funding reporters, commentators – or anything else we fancy – in quite different ways.

I imagine a National Media Trust funding particular aspects of the existing wire services, so they can cover issues and territories which are under-represented. The NMT could fund columnists or bloggers. It could fund micro-TV channels to do great interviews. (If Clive James can do it, so can others, with a wider agenda.)

The existing institutions and firms (and even the regulators) may well fight this proposal. They would wouldn’t they? They are stuffed with overpaid people who have made careers out of the existing system, and they might well not thrive in a leaner environment.

They are defending bailiwicks, not output.

It’s just an idea. But let’s imagine 10 million people subscribing £150 a year to ensure that the UK remains a world leader in information, debate and drama. I know, it’s only £1.5bn. But it would be a transformative £1.5bn.

Where would the money come from? Scrap the TV licence fee, and it’s right there – without the poor having to divvy up anything.

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In my little book, “Scrap the BBC!” I argued that markets could provide broadcast media just like they provide print media. But I also addressed the possibility of “market failure” by the emergence of, say, a National Trust of the Airwaves.

I told iPM’s Eddie Mair that I like the idea of a voluntary body funded by subscription by the affluent, literate, concerned middle class. It could fund “elite”, “posh” or otherwise unpopular broadcasting which might not be funded by advertisers.

Let’s assume there are 10m fans of Radio 4. If only 2m of them divvy up £1 a week, that more than covers the station’s £73m cost plus “central news gathering” (the BBC central news operation). I’ve also said that 5m people divvying up £100 a year would handsomely fund all of BBC radio and BBC2 television.

Further: I think TV is much less of an equity problem than radio because on a fully digital service it is easy to give the poor pre-paid scrambler cards for their (free) set-top boxes. The state or the National Trust of the Airwaves could make these gifts. That could overcome the problem that Freeview has free rider problems.

Of course I am being mischievous. I do believe what I say: better that firms, individuals and associations sort out broadcast funding than that the state does. But I also enjoy saying that “the middle class” ought to fund “elite” broadcasting. I believe strongly that being middle class is a matter of being literate, affluent and concerned. But I also believe that it is wrong for the middle classes to avoid its duty. It ought to want to lead the nation by taking on more of the work of the state. And besides, it is fun to hoist the middle class lefties on their own petard: broadcasting is something they ought to provide for the poor if they are so darned worried about poor people being unable to access quality material.

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