I have been talking about this on another board and someone talked about a piece private eye have done on the BBC VS Murdoch. I have not read it but i was wondering if anyone here has seen it?
The poster said that they wrote about Archie Norman was appointed head of ITV (Sky has a stake in ITV of 17.9%). He was the Chief Executive of the Conservative Party and a Tory MP for 8 years.
Also details the direct links between News International, the Conservative Party and the Press Complaints Commission.
There's a kernel of truth in all this, actually, but it's blown way out of proportion. Especially when you consider that Archie Norman was WAY down the list of preferred candidates for the Chair of ITV. They had a lot of people turn down the job before he accepted it, and had a nightmare filling the role for various financial and board-related reasons.
But there certainly are some links between News International and the Conservatives. This is hardly surprising considering the Tories are favourites to win the next election and the Sun recently switched sides to support them. It would be odd if the favourites to be elected didn't have media connections, esp. considering Cameron used to work for Carlton at one stage.
But cast your mind back to pre-1997 and the intense courting Tony Blair did of Rupert Murdoch. Wining and dining the media and forming close connections and revolving doors between the press and political parties is just normal.
There is always a thriving revolving door of employment between various papers, think tanks and whichever party happens to be in the ascendancy at that moment in time.
The problem with all that speculation though Holdfast is that this country has never existed without the BBC... The BBC may be an artificial distortion of the market, but now without them I think a large part of the market would collapse.
This (and wamdue's version of the same post) is at its heart a restatement of the "too big to fail" doctrine applied to larger financial institutions during the recent economic distress. It essentially suggests that removal of a dominant market player that has been indulging in anticompetitive practices should not be allowed to happen because of the systemic effect on the rest of the market, leading to catastrophic collapse.
I hated the bank bailouts from an ideological perspective but accepted them because complete collapse of the financial system would have had catastrophic consequences for our entire way of life.
I cannot be convinced the same consequences threaten us if EastEnders goes off the air. What I mean is, the market will always right itself eventually. If there's a market for quality drama, etc, etc, a commercial broadcaster will find a way of making it pay, as people generally like to make money. A few years of relatively poor television in between, while private competitors grow and move into the market, is hardly sufficiently serious consequence to negate the longer-term benefits of reducing the size of the public sector, encouraging private industry and wealth creation, cutting taxes, increasing invidual choice over what one pays for, and removing the state from a broadcasting role.
Drastically shrink the BBC's remit/funding and there would certainly be a brief but serious period of upheaval since you are quite right that it is a major player. But sooner or later other players would enter the field and make programmes you'd enjoy watching. It works in other countries, I see no reason it couldn't work here.
(and just to preempt an obvious rejoinder: saying you tend to watch more BBC output than international imports is totally spurious as a judgement on the efficacy of their markets, since their output is actually intended to appeal to their own domestic markets not to you as a British audience. New companies that arose in the UK following the shrinking of the BBC would cater in large part to our tastes and so appeal more to the domestic audience... though I suspect they would also want to create programming suitable to export too).
But if I was drafting an ideal country, when I got to page two zillion and three and starting sketching out the TV system, I sure as hell wouldn't have a massive state-funded broadcaster.
oh well if we are talking about fantasy land, sure draw up what you like.
The point I was making with that line, is that the whole discussion we're having about the role of the BBC is fantasyland, since neither party is actually going to make any truly significant changes to the BBC (the suggestions the article talks about are really very minor - not to mention counter-productive - in the grand scheme, and internally generated by the BBC).
It is however much more interesting and fun to me to actually consider what the role of the BBC in the state should theoretically be, which was the direction the thread was moving in when I chimed in upthread.
