Just imagine if The Crown had been made by the BBC. Think about the howls of rage; the acres of foam-flecked newspaper editorials; the questions in parliament; the demands for the director general’s head.
The usual suspects would be mouthing the usual things. How this arrogant, out-of-touch, elite organisation needs to be defunded/cut down to size/abolished. Yet more evidence that, in the 21st century, there is no rationale for a “state broadcaster”. The BBC’s time has passed, now that the free market delivers such high-quality content that is so much more responsive to ordinary people’s tastes. Etcetera.
There have, of course, been some noisy protests to Netflix over some dramatic liberties Peter Morgan has undoubtedly taken with the lives of the royals. But there the argument peters out. Morgan’s attitudinising on Netflix’s dollar can’t be bent to drive home a broader message about “socialist” ownership models or “woke” workforces.
Take the other royal/BBC running story of recent times: whether Martin Bashir used underhand means to persuade Princess Diana to give him an interview in 1995. It’s a serious charge and it’s right that it should be investigated by someone of stature and independence. If the case is proved, that will almost be a career-ending moment for Bashir.
But much of the wall-to-wall coverage of Bashir and Diana can feel like just another excuse by the opponents of the BBC to imply that there’s something more generally rotten about the whole idea of a publicly funded broadcaster.
The last time a senior judge was called in to investigate a BBC editorial failing – Lord Hutton in 2003 – it ended the BBC careers of not only the reporter, Andrew Gilligan, but also the director general and the chairman.
How unlike the privately held Murdoch organisation, where the penalty for presiding over a gargantuan ethical failure (the £500m-and-counting phone-hacking scandal) was, after the small matter of several trials at the Old Bailey, to be invited back to run the organisation all over again. Mote, please meet eye.
Murdoch’s tanks, so long parked on the BBC lawn, are certainly back on manoeuvres: launching a radio station; planning a UK TV station; making Fox News available again in this country. None of these ventures would be harmed by enfeebling, or even abolishing, the BBC.
Does this government care? For a while, it felt as if the prime minister was an ideological prisoner of his singularly strange adviser, Dominic Cummings, who seemed to have an obsession with destroying institutions, among them the BBC. An optimistic view is that, now Cummings is off the scene, the irrational malice towards the corporation might subside.
But it may be premature to relax. There was the sheer oddness of the government’s initial picks for chairs of the BBC and Ofcom: Charles Moore and Paul Dacre, two former editors not known for impartiality or sympathy for the BBC, its journalism or its funding model.
Then there was the establishment by the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, of an advisory panel that looked, to some, as though it had been designed to deliver a result that would please both Cummings and that ever-present ghost at the cabinet table, Rupert Murdoch.
One of its members, Lord Grade, was quoted as welcoming the end of the era of impartial TV news. He told a conference organised by Freeview: “I don’t see why the Daily Mail shouldn’t have its own news channel with its point of view, or the Financial Times, or the Mirror, or the Sun, or anyone with a point of view.”
It’s hard to know where to begin. Britain has, unusually, a highly polemical and often partisan press. Nothing wrong with that, so long as there is also a universally available source of news that aspires to be something different. Words such as impartial, fair, balanced and objective come to mind. Many people might not want to live in a country with the BBC as a sole source of news. An equal, or larger number, might not want Fleet Street to dominate the airwaves as well as the print and online spheres. The mix is all.
The timing of this debate is extraordinary. We are drowning in a world of information chaos, with many surveys showing a public no longer knowing who to trust. The middle of a pandemic, where real lives depend on the supply of widely available and reliable information, is an odd time to be playing up the possibility of destroying the very basis of our most used and trusted public service news source.
Cummings is on record as wanting more Fox News-style broadcasters in the UK. Yes, that’s the Fox News that dismissed Covid-19 as a hoax and slavishly parroted the White House line until the moment Murdoch decided to pull the plug on Trump himself. To replace the BBC with Fox News feels like a kind of national death wish.
The most recent Ofcom report into the BBC described an organisation still used by 90% of the population for news. Three-quarters of the users said it was important; 78% said it was high quality; 71% trustworthy. The corporation had, said Ofcom, responded “effectively and rapidly to Covid-19, additionally offering a significant amount of educational content to fill the gap when schools were closed”. There were zero breaches of the code requiring due impartiality or accuracy.
More recently, Ofcom has begun to think creatively about how public service broadcasting can thrive in both broadcast and online forms. Let’s hope that thinking can survive whichever chair is imposed on it - hopefully someone with experience of how true impartiality works.
The BBC is not perfect. It was loathed by both sides during the drawn-out agony of the Brexit referendum. Everyone knows that its funding model needs reform. But many other countries, knowing the same thing, have already moved to different kinds of funding.
Only in the UK has a government chosen this moment of information chaos – with other ways of sustaining serious journalism in dire trouble – to toy with the idea of ditching the concept of news as a public service. I suspect that Boris Johnson, who spent his entire journalistic career gleefully throwing stones through greenhouse windows, has little idea of what true public service news looks like. The rest of us should worry.
Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of the Guardian, is the author of News and How to Use It (Canongate) and chair of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
