The BBC model

The BBC is an engine of the mind. It has become a national treasure and world resource because it has been given the creative freedom and political responsibility to attract audiences, tell the truth and be playful. Even if it sometimes fails to get the whole truth or gain our trust completely, at least we can argue that it should try harder—which is part of its glory: it is “ours,” not its shareholders. Indeed, the BBC is possibly more famous than Britain, (though probably less famous than British football). Such a standing cannot be taken for granted—it must be husbanded. In a world of turbo-charged media empires, reputation and power can shift dramatically. Yet in the shanty suburbs of Addis Ababa and out in Ethiopia’s rural villages, where there is a generator there is a café, and where there is a café there is a television which people pay small sums to watch. Standing in the smoky haze of freshly roasting coffee one journalist friend recently saw the locals watching the war in Afghanistan on the BBC. In another café, another anthropologist friend saw the Ethiopians enthusiastically engaged in watching an Arsenal game. Surreally, in the middle of a refugee camp in the midst of the horror of war in Southern Sudan there was a television and an audience for the BBC. Meanwhile in America this summer in skanky, cool, Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York, in a café with my cappuccino, I realised that two adjacent lap-tops, (each accessorised by an achingly fashionable youth), were checking the news on the BBC website. This is simply because the BBC has become one of the world’s great objectivity traders. They are very precious, they are very few, and they are endangered in any number of ways.

For the first sixty years of its existence the threat to the BBC has been political: now it faces even more formidable foes: huge, rapacious, rich, multinational information/entertainment empires that see it as a competitor they would like out of the way. These are able to wield greater power because governments are more economically “liberal” and less willing and less able to protect public services. Behind closed government doors, and in the corridors of the regulators, beyond the public eye these commercial interests argue, often successfully, for their own interests. Indeed, while it is possible to have a clear battle with a political party, commercial interests are far harder for the corporation (and those who seek to support public service values) to fight against. The public often does not like the pressure a government exercises on a broadcaster, but hardly thinks of the media conglomerates.

In America there are public service ideals in the media but no institutions to put them into practice. The abolition of the “fairness doctrine” in 1988 (that had required political balance of broadcasters) led directly to this emaciation of public discussion. It has led to public ignorance in America, and squandered the authority of its “soft” power, with consequences for the whole world. In Britain and Europe, we have the institutions (though we barely value them or their practitioners) but will we permit them to innovate sufficiently to survive if they can?

The BBC is an institution: it has been a broadcaster, it generates all kinds of content, it is many other practical things (the inventor for example of well informed and expert help lines), but most importantly it is a set of values embodied in considered and evolving practices which it can use to re-engineer public life in the interests of the public.

The origins: inform, educate and entertain
What is the BBC? How did it become itself? The British Broadcasting Corporation was established in 1926—and miraculously formed the ambition to be independent, impartial, informative, glorious and amusing: a public service. Sorting out how to do all of this took experience and experiment, and a good deal of failure. It was decisively formed by the formidable, austere, Presbyterian John Reith, the first Director General. Reith’s domination of the corporation in the early days was massive, totalitarian and idiosyncratic. The BBC would have been different if its first leader had been a civil servant or an intellectual or a newspaper man.

The BBC emerged as a social solution to a technological innovation. Getting the technology right is still the most important challenge. The corporation had originally been set up simply to provide “broadcasting” for the new fangled “wireless” and as a monopoly provider because the government wanted to ration the use of the then very scarce air waves. But Reith turned it into a crusade, clearly identifying the radical potential of the new technology. Reith, after being wounded in the First World War, had been in charge—in America—of improving the quality of mass produced armaments. This experience almost sums up the BBC project: the quality-mass puzzle.

However, what the BBC was a reaction against was also influential. It was formed out of a widespread revulsion against the propaganda of the First World War. The wholly partisan press had lied to the British public by whipping up hysteria about German atrocities, and even more damningly failed even to discuss the vast casualty figures. Government domination of the press had misled the nation. There was also an underlying distrust and hostility to politics as being one sided and potentially revolutionary on the one hand and corrupted and moribund on the other. A sinister reservation about “democracy” in the 1920s and 1930s was, in the hands of Reith and the BBC, slowly turned around in favour of a spirit of rational enquiry and non-partisan information that added immeasurably to democracy. In addition to this the BBC was set up just as the final full franchise was enacted and there is no doubt that Reith saw the BBC as a means of producing informed electors. There was also, in the 1920s, unease with capitalism, which was viewed as an inefficient way of running public utilities. Reith developed this unease into a philosophy that regarded programming as independent from commercial considerations. The BBC was not there to “sell” the public any politics or any product or any view.

Not a state broadcaster
How was all of this to be managed? The BBC was not and never has been a “state” broadcaster (although its relationship to the state is more complex than it looks at first sight). The licence fee, a regressive poll tax, or a hypothecated tax of the kind most people resent, on the right to receive radio signals, gave it an income separate from a state grant. Like many British constitutional arrangements such independence is a fuzzy concept. Governments set the level of the licence fee. However, whatever its imperfections, the licence fee has been a real constitutional prop. The BBC had its own income. Of course now we have an institution—the BBC—but a means of financing it the technology may make impossible.

In addition to an income there were other constitutional niceties that protected the BBC from undue political pressure—up to a point. That politicians have sought to bring pressure on to the BBC is not the issue; how the BBC and indeed politicians have handled the pressure is what has mattered. The BBC is independent from any particular government—and has particularly onerous responsibilities—because it out-lives them all. But the BBC is an institution which in some sense has to pursue the same objectives as the state, and it has undoubtedly been one of the mechanisms that has kept politics decent. In turn, of course, it has been bullied, harassed, charmed, wheedled, chivvied, threatened and argued over by all governments. While there is little or no public discussion of whether the press is reasonable or how it spends money, there is a heated debate about all of these matters over the BBC and this in itself is a public good (even if the overwhelming hostility of the press increasingly represents the interests of commercial competitors).

However, the BBC time and time again has also negotiated with the British state; on the basis that there were some things it understood better than the classes. This is most apparent in news and foreign broadcasting when the corporation has often felt that it has special expertise in understanding the “hearts and minds” of audiences. But on many domestic issues as well the BBC has not been a client of the state but an independent dealer with it.

Impartiality, objectivity and freedom of speech
The first condition of a decent society is some kind of common discussion—in public—of the realities of that society. This is the underpinning idea of public service broadcasting. The BBC has sought strenuously to inform and to hold the forum open for the public. Comedy, drama, the rules and mores of reality shows, radio chat programmes, music, programmes exploring faith and telling us about the police, programmes about animals, children’s programmes all play a role in elaborating this. If we are shown verities we recognise, (and of course it is a messy, awkward business capturing the zeitgeist and yet moving it on) such realism engages us in a mobile dialogue about who we are, what is happening and what we wish to be. And, at its best, the BBC brings to the process of engaging with the reality of our contemporary life, public service values of judgement, and experience—that is the basis of its capacity to hold politicians, governments, businesses and institutions to account. Added to this there needs to be wit and creativity—and the nagging moral anxiety that produces a continual questioning of clichés and fashions.

More starkly, at times, the BBC has also helped us, the citizenry, to hold ourselves to account. Even if it is not always a comfortable picture, showing us what we are like is valuable. What worries us, what we can occasionally grimly observe that we take for granted, what we aspire to, are not givens, they mutate and can be shaped. This has been part of the process of reflecting on our collective circumstances that has been, over time, a sanitising scrutiny, creating a shared and relatively objective understanding of the world we occupy—and make. But it is worth pointing out that it is what anybody, anywhere in more testing political and economic circumstances also needs. It is a universal condition of greater decency.

The BBC has become a world exporter of “impartiality” and, more importantly, “objectivity.” This is a very simple principle, important in news, but with a wide cultural reach: the ambition is to describe the world as it is, not through pre-set ideological blinkers of any kind. In news you do it through attending to all sides, in culture you do it by creatively permitting a variety of truths to be expressed with all the fluency that can be mustered. In the old days, you were being impartial if you “balanced” a “left-wing” point of view with a “right-wing” one, and the BBC could (and often did) argue that if both “sides” complained, it was doing its job. Yet, as a former BBC director put it, “A Britain divided puts the BBC on the rack.” Now on almost any issue there are many more varied opinions, and Britain is a more diverse society—with globally linked communities.

A recent BBC report attempting to grapple with multi-ethnic, multi-world connected audiences argued that now there was a “wagon wheel” of contemporary contending views. Impartiality, however, is testing work and not about being in the “centre.” Thus. for example, one BBC news executive added a useful idea—that of “hard impartiality,” a robust determination to report what is happening—not what audiences, or authorities, are comfortable with. Thus there should be no impediment to exploring and displaying the most alien of views, including those of our “enemies,” (or one might say especially our enemies) in any conflict. Thus a report on the Taliban’s changing tactics from inside the group by an “embedded” reporter was a perfect example of proper journalism in this tradition: despite some cries of treason it told citizens what they needed to know in the classic public service tradition. Yet “impartiality” is often treated as if it were a thing, or a goal. It is neither—it is merely a tool, a sceptical injunction to avoid assumptions. It also means that audiences trust a source which they know is not lecturing them for its own purposes, in which they can see their own views, but in which they are also exposed to other views and may come to appreciate them.

Objectivity is more important, as it demands judgement not a weak “balancing” of views. But, in turn, judgement does not mean campaigning. These are vital arguments and delicate decisions to make in a very opinionated but not very informed world. However, there is another issue that is central to public service broadcasting: freedom of speech—and the limits to it. Thus another duty of public service require news and other kinds of content to provide a forum for the wide variety of views that exist. Freedom of speech is a lovely, buxom, bountiful idea about holding the court of opinion open. It is especially important in contemporary societies. You are bound into a society where your views and position are given a hearing. However, while a public service broadcaster ought to report and respect the sincerity of views—not the strength of the belief, nor the authenticity of the believers, nor the fashionableness of the ideas are sufficient. An objective report is likely to have been tempered by and adjusted to the widest possible range of views, yet reporting is not excused by the process of consulting a variety of views from the obligation to account for the world as accurately as it can. Creationists ardently believe what they claim to be the origins of the world, there are a lot of them about, they have all sorts of consequences in schools, we all need to know what they are saying and why. They certainly have a right to say what they want to. But the BBC does not fulfil its obligations if it is “impartial” between the well founded scientific evidence of evolutionists and the sincere beliefs of creationists. It must apply objectivity. But it must also hold the forum open to views that many find un-palatable.

Empathy
The key to what the BBC has done is an empathy with the audience. This is not the same as always following what the audience thinks it wants. The public service broadcaster has a duty to lead as well as follow. Rather it means a constant worry about how audiences understand and respond to things: very often it is a question of tone of address. It has been the defining feature of the BBC’s World Service (and what has made it so different from Voice of America, which explicitly sees itself as articulating American views). For example, throughout the cold war the World Service was very careful of Russian audience’s sensibilities, it understood that they wanted accurate information and did not want propaganda—but, argued the World Service it was also important not to be rude or dismissive of Russia and its achievements, the audience had pride. Of course such a strategy was double sided; it was both honourable and cunning. More people listened if you spoke to them in a way they felt comfortable with.

However, “seeing things as audiences see them” is also an aspect of a quite different issue of taste and decency. Mores shift, generations have different tolerances and different taboos, yet a public service broadcaster has both to represent and reply to change and yet in a broad and, it seems to me, legitimate way, consider standards. At times the BBC has been seen as stuffy and out of touch and at other times too dangerously satirical and avant garde. But what is appropriate and proper for audiences to see, and when, is a genuinely different issue from selling them whatever sells best.

In one way taste and decency is simply a matter of politeness. But it is not some index of things you mustn’t do or say—rather it is a flexible interpretation of propriety. How often and under what circumstances do you re-show the pictures of 9/11? How do you cut footage of victims of car-bombs? Are topical jokes, nasty, funny, taste-boundary jokes acceptable when they are repeated later at a further distance from the event they may satirise? How do you script and use and show a Down’s syndrome actor? Getting these decisions right are all issues of sensitivity to audiences.

Quality versus popularity
The BBC has always performed best when harassed by competitors. It drives the urgent desire to be popular. People need to turn to, watch, listen, and download, for no purpose whatsoever except amusement, escape and diversion. Even in our age of personalised programming such pleasures involve sharing enjoyment with lots of other people: a common culture of entertainment. The BBC should be “popular” because it serves the nation which pays for it. But also because this is an essential value: comedies, variety, game shows, soaps, fun, are a key part of the public service mission. It is not providing “high” culture for a discerning audience nor “low” culture for the masses but at its best something far more generous: both simultaneously and, if it does it right, always with added value. Its opponents, commercial, intellectual, political have always wanted to confine it to the narrow snobbery of a refined service for toffs, or “quality” services that it is said the market cannot deliver. The “popular” involves two way traffic; it holds institutions in a tense relationship with public reality—and this is a good thing in itself—but delight may also be educative.

The absolute commitment to the popular is vital. “Don’t bore” is one valuable consequence. It is also a competitive pressure to go on capturing the attention of the public and as you cannot do anything without that. The audience has always—even when the BBC was a monopoly—had other things to do, things it would prefer to do or needs to do, (like the gardening—gardeners have always been an especially passionate and vocal part of the BBC constituent audiences). But being “popular” is something like “being democratic” and is the best shield against pressure.

Artifice
The BBC at its best has also been there to create, imagine and fantasise. As a public service broadcaster with privileges it must take risks, be inventive. Dowdy, weary repetitive formats are as deadening to public intelligence as partial news. Some of the best things have taken time to develop and to develop a public following. The BBC is the largest patron of music in Britain, and during the 1930s and 1940s it re-discovered 18th century music—for the world, as it turned out. Later it helped make the “early music” revolution that overturned the repertoire and re-invented how music was played and heard on “authentic” instruments. Take The Proms—the world’s largest series of concerts, in which, magnificently, the people standing uncomfortably and very cheaply on the floor of the concert hall are the morally important audience. Yet the pressure, and it is a good one, has always been to make the wild and the grand more accessible to more people. Yet arts programming and serious documentary strands are struggling and may be threatened by the whole new bureaucracy of commissioning.

Public service in a web of public services
How has the BBC survived? The corporation has been repeatedly saved by three allies. The first saviour has been government. There have often been rows to threaten the BBC, but nevertheless, in the last instance, governments have recognised something which operated in the interests of public life. Politicians and politics are more beleaguered now than ever before. However, it is probably to politicians that we must still look for engineering the solutions to the survival of values.

Secondly, public service broadcasting has been protected by a network of impartial institutions—impartiality is highly valued yet under tremendous threat. The British civil service has time after time gone out and adjusted the machinery appropriately to do its best to protect a service that it has understood is based on compatible principles. Which gets us to the regulatory bodies that we now have in place, both nationally and internationally: are these regulators interpreting their job properly? In America the regulator is part of the problem. It has collaborated with the impoverishing of public discussion. Then there is the public. Being popular and valued has—at least until now—been the best political strategy for survival.

At home the BBC has repeatedly metabolised Britishness. It has reflected the world of Britain, but it has also added something to the reflection—creativity and principle. This metabolising is hard and imperfect work. Yet we also need the BBC and institutions like it to hold the international organisations that control so much of our condition and our collective futures to account. We need new international audiences because we know that without open scrutiny institutions fail to pursue public ends. So we are in a moment of immense opportunity—but will we go on willing public knowledge?

Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster in London, the official historian of the BBC and the author of several books on the media, for example, Power Without Responsibility. The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (1981), Politics and the Media (1998) as well as Carnage and the Media. The Making and Breaking of News About Violence (2005).