The label "public service broadcasting" does no service to the phenomenon it attempts to identify. It is both opaque and drearily off-putting, while gratuitously insulting to the other forms of broadcasting which can also reasonably claim to provide service to the public. None the less, casting sounds and images through the ether with the aim of informing and enlightening a mass public, rather than simply responding to consumer demand, has proved one of humanity's better ideas. Public service broadcasting (PSB) became a central pillar of the last century's cultural, educational and civic life. Now the pillar is tottering. Does it deserve to fall?
In Britain, we still enjoy the services of one state broadcaster funded by hypothecated taxation (the BBC) and another funded by advertising (Channel 4). In addition, the main commercial broadcasters are required to contribute PSB in return for their access to the airwaves, and this has helped keep our state broadcasters up to the mark. Omnibus has had to compete with The South Bank Show for awards. If the News at Ten O'Clock allows itself to be bullied into pulling its punches by Alastair Campbell, it risks being shown up by ITV's News at Ten.
PSB in both the public and commercial sectors of broadcasting has fostered creativity and buttressed national, regional and local identity. It has become part of our education system. It has bound communities together, and involved potentially alienated minorities. It has become a mainstay of public discussion and has opened the public agenda to everyone. It has provided a voice distinct from commercial interests and obliged broadcasters to aspire to impartiality in news reporting. In doing these things, it has managed to generate entertainment as well as enlightenment on what would previously have seemed an unimaginable scale. In countries as different as Canada and Japan, elements of the British system have been imitated. Elsewhere, they have been envied. In countries living under the yoke of repression, PSB has become one of the totems of civilisation which reformers aspire to embrace.
Now it is dying. This is not an original observation. Although it is, of course, denied by those with an interest in denying it-BBC executives in particular. Of course, public service programmes do still ride the airwaves. But they are growing fewer and feebler, and being pushed to ever more obscure parts of the schedule. The BBC now competes more aggressively than ever before to maximise audience size. Consequently, much of its output is becoming indistinguishable from that of the private sector. Last November an ITV executive offered this observation: "BBC1 had seven hours of PSB in weekday peak viewing last year, whereas there wasn't a single PSB programme in the same period this year."
State broadcasters used to justify their reliance on populist programming by claiming PSB qualities for the most unlikely programmes. A quiz show might be said to be binding the nation together simply by assembling its large audience. Nowadays, however, they tend to present populism as a regrettable but necessary survival tactic. The BBC must have popular programmes, they say, or people will be reluctant to pay the licence fee. Channel 4 must have popular programmes, or advertisers will not buy space. Without this chaff, there could be no wheat.
Unfortunately, the wheat is no longer what it was. Arts programmes serve up gossipy biographies of popular entertainers. News and current affairs programmes devote themselves to sensationalism and trivia, rather than scrutiny of public issues. Documentaries provide a stage for exhibitionist eccentrics rather than structured portrayals of social phenomena. Commercial broadcasters, anxious to bypass their own PSB obligations, are up to the same trick as their public sector counterparts.
Broadcasters claim in their defence that they are making important subjects "accessible" to less educated viewers. The "serious but popular" programme is an elusive beast and almost every time a programme-maker claims to have found it, he or she turns out to have erred on the side of the popular.
The public interest programmes which remain free from this pressure to "dumb down" are becoming increasingly wan and listless. Their performance reflects a drain of cash and talent, which are increasingly diverted elsewhere. As the quality of such programmes falls, their audience falls too. This then becomes an excuse to marginalise them further.
Why should PSB find itself in such straits in both the public and commercial sectors? It is not that nobody cares. The British government's white paper on communications last year was crammed with declarations of its authors' belief in the importance of PSB, and these are echoed throughout the political and cultural establishment. When asked, the people seem to share their leaders' enthusiasm. In front of their television sets, they may opt for entertainment rather than improvement, but that does not invalidate their approval for the existence of higher things.
The problems of PSB are no more caused by a shortage of finance than a shortage of supporters. More money is flowing into broadcasting than ever before. Economies are growing richer, and funding for culture is increasing. The BBC annual licence fee is ?104 and it has been promised that this figure will be increased by 1.5 per cent more than inflation every year until 2006. So what is the problem?
proximate causes of calamity can be identified. Margaret Thatcher's 1990 Broadcasting Act abolished the "beauty contest" which had forced applicants for commercial franchises to compete on the strength of the public worth of their programme plans. Instead, it required franchises to be sold to the highest cash bidder, and cut back the PSB obligations imposed on successful applicants. This created an incentive for commercial broadcasters to compete more aggressively for audiences. Fearful that this would hit its own audience share, the BBC felt obliged to move in a more populist direction.
Also, since 1990, both public and commercial broadcasters have been confronted by the proliferation of broadcast channels created first by the development of cable and satellite distribution, and then accelerated by digital compression. At the same time, competition from new leisure activities, some also screen-based, like the internet or computer games, have made all broadcasters more ratings-conscious.
Yet none of this is enough to explain the decline and fall of PSB. The truth is that behind the façade of near-universal support for PSB, lies a tangled complex of attitudes which is proving lethal to it. One factor is simply the collapse in confidence of the educated class, on whose stewardship any form of public culture depends. Lord Reith felt no qualms about determining what was good for society, but his successors do. In our relativist age, few wish to take responsibility for asserting that some cultural goods are better than others. Fear of elitism is closely followed by fear of being boring, which spawns an aversion to anything serious. In the absence of other values, popularity begins to appear the best measure of worth. Giving the public what it wants can at least be presented as democratic.
PSB also has to grapple with more overt hostility from free market liberals and the commercial interests that stand to gain from the victory of their arguments. According to the market zealots, any benefits which PSB has to offer ought to be available in the marketplace. For them, public determination of broadcasting content might have been acceptable in an era of spectrum scarcity, but it is made unnecessary by broadcasting abundance. WH Smith has magazines which cover everything (even Prospect). Soon television and radio will be the same.
Yet the economics of broadcasting do not work quite as the free market lobby claims. A television equivalent of Prospect would find it a lot harder than the print version to assemble a customer base prepared to fund its costs. (The experience of the American public service system PBS is instructive here. Although some of its output is now more serious than the BBC's, it cannot survive from subscription income and does not have the resources to make many programmes of its own. It thus has only a marginal place in the cultural life of America.) The marketeers say that if the consumers will not pay for it, then it should not exist. Yet the whole point of PSB is that its existence is supposed to benefit not merely those who consume its output, but society as a whole. We have no difficulty in grasping this idea in the field of education, for which childless taxpayers are asked to contribute, or even high culture, whose claim to social value is less obvious than that of PSB.
Even among those committed to social improvement, who might be expected to be advocates for PSB, there is now some ambivalence. In particular, multiculturalists are suspicious of something which helps to promote shared national values. As well as people who are actively hostile to PSB and people who are ambivalent about it, there are also people who are well disposed towards it who believe it is, sadly, no longer possible. They fear that as channels proliferate, people will be confronted by ever more entertaining alternatives. Fewer and fewer of them can be expected to continue watching what is merely good for them.
In fact, plenty of PSB programmes have managed to compete successfully in an entertainment-saturated marketplace. Elizabeth, presented by David Starkey, or Simon Schama's A History of Britain last year are a couple of recent examples. Viewers and listeners jaded by thin and repetitive popular programming seem surprisingly open to something different. But taking the longer view it is hard to believe that programmes such as Monty Python or The Singing Detective will emerge from a wholly commercial environment. Without PSB protections in the public and private sector their equivalents will simply not be made in a broadcasting universe subject to ever more cut-throat global competition. Recycling the tried and tested is an easier route to commercial success than experimenting with the shock of the new.
contrary to the drift of public debate about PSB, many of today's cultural and political trends actually strengthen the case for PSB. This applies even to technology. It is usually argued that with the disappearance of "spectrum scarcity" the private sector broadcasters will no longer have to put up with public constraints. In the emerging global communications free-for-all it will be impossible to control the providers of services which will be coming not only over the airwaves but down wires and from satellites.
In fact the new distribution technology puts the media at the mercy of government as never before. In the 1960s Radio Luxembourg and the pirate radio stations could send their signal from beyond British jurisdiction and thumb their noses at the Home Office. But broadband cable links cannot be laid unless public authorities have given permission for the streets to be dug up. Satellite transmissions require rooftop dishes which could be made subject to planning permission. The frequencies over which broadcasters transmit the analogue signals on which most people still depend are currently provided to state broadcasters for nothing, and to commercial broadcasters for a fraction of their real value. The state has both the opportunity and the right to impose any obligations it likes in return for such privileges. Already, it requires even Murdoch-dominated British Sky Broadcasting to carry the existing PSB channels and accord them a prominent position on its electronic programme guides. It has no need to stop there.
Meanwhile, many of the classical social and political functions of PSB-such as the promotion of national, regional and local identities-are surely growing more not less urgent. The mainly American global media giants which have recently been formed in a series of mergers have yet to make their impact felt on the outside world. When they do so, we can expect American culture to achieve something of the dominance in broadcasting (excluding news) which it has already achieved in film. What will happen then to our regional or local identities?
Moreover, growing wealth and individualisation make it possible for people to pursue activities ever more specifically tailored to personal tastes; we therefore need more, not fewer, forces working to preserve an idea of our interconnectedness. For most people, broadcasting is the main source of information about public life. Its ability to combine sound and images makes it more effective than print at expounding ideas, at least at a simple level. It is better suited than print to the communication of argument, through interview and discussion. PSB is also obliged to attempt impartiality, whereas print is not. So it provides an invaluable counterweight to the noisy partisanship of the newspapers.
The health of democracy in most western countries is a source of increasing concern. The disengagement of voters from the political process is already undermining the legitimacy of government, with potentially dangerous consequences. This hardly seems the moment to relinquish what has become both the principal means of examining public issues and the main channel of communication between politicians and the people.
Because commercial operators such as Sky voluntarily show news programmes (and submit to the rules of balance and impartiality), it is sometimes suggested that we can entrust the news functions of PSB to an unregulated private sector. In fact unregulated news programmes tend to have a very different agenda from those of, say, the BBC. And the survival even of populist news programmes without regulatory pressure cannot be taken for granted. Audiences for conventional news programmes are falling everywhere and experience in households with extensive viewing choice suggests that news programmes are watched less, as people opt for experiences tailored more closely to their personal tastes.
In a wholly commercial broadcasting universe without PSB regulation, the public agenda would still make its presence felt. Yet, this would happen less through news or current affairs programmes than through the exploitation of newsy topics by the producers of fiction. Far from making people better informed, such fiction distorts its raw material to generate drama, glamour or pathos. This introduces a form of bias which is all the more potent for appearing unintended. Rebels become heroic whatever their cause, the disadvantaged are to be pitied even if their troubles are their own fault, and the quick-fix solution to the problem of crime becomes the violence of the just.
Relying on PSB to correct such deficiencies poses a problem in the new climate. As entertainment alternatives multiply, fewer people will choose to watch programmes designed to inform. Part of the PSB ideal is that you lure people into watching more informative and challenging material than they would normally choose by mixing up the sophisticated with the mainstream. For a host of reasons this ideal is retreating, as I have argued, in the face of greater choice and market segmentation.
However even if PSB broadcasts receive far fewer viewers than in the past that does not mean they are pointless. They bestow benefits on society beyond the immediate circle of those who watch them. Before the age of the mass media, people depended for their political opinions on the guidance of trusted individuals who stayed abreast of public affairs-clergymen, teachers, retired uncles, village headmen or tribal chiefs. As people opt out of following politics, they will come to rely once more on second-hand opinions. Dinner tables, pubs or bus queues may become the places where people pick up a line on the issues of the day from others who have bothered to find out about them. This select few will, however, still need to base their judgements on thorough and reliable reporting and analysis, if society as a whole is to make the right decisions. In future, these few may form the only audience for current affairs programmes, except in times of national crisis. Nevertheless, "secondary dissemination" may ensure that these programmes play a far more important role than their ratings imply.
for the moment, however, PSB continues to wither away-in both the BBC and the private sector. Perhaps understandably, those who preside over it rarely attempt to trumpet its importance. Instead they tiptoe away from their public obligations and base the case for their continued existence on the size of their audiences, rather than on their value to society. Year by year, this case grows more threadbare, fuelling the growing argument that PSB should be swept away completely. Yet if the truth is that we need it more than ever, what is to be done?
More than anything else, we need simply to restore our own faith in the concept of PSB. Next, we need to spell out what it is supposed to do. Then, we need to create an institutional framework that will make this happen. Both the BBC and Channel 4 have beaten off privatisation proposals during the recent past. This may not, however, have been quite such a triumph for PSB as has been assumed. For they have both lost sight of their mission and it might be better for the lead role to pass to a new body. Private broadcasting companies, earning revenues from popular programming but required to meet carefully defined obligations by a rigorous regulatory body, might deliver PSB rather more effectively than our self-regulating, and self-indulgent, nationalised corporations have managed to. This may seem a surprising idea, but it was just such an arrangement that produced the most impressive public programming Britain has so far seen-that transmitted by the ITV companies during the 1970s, under the stern supervision of the Independent Broadcasting Authority.
We could privatise our public broadcasters, and subject both them and our existing commercial broadcasters to the control of another such draconian regulatory authority. This body would need to be very different from the "light touch" Ofcom with which the government proposes to regulate broadcasting in future. It would need the confidence to make subjective judgements on matters of detail, the power to enforce them and plenty of high-calibre staff. Of course, its operations would immediately become politicised and disputed by every imaginable interest. This would be all to the good, stimulating interest and encouraging participation. The body should publish all its assessments and adjudications and encourage public debate on them. The resulting arguments would be entirely healthy, both for the broadcasters and for the rest of society.
Broadcasters could retain free or cheap access to the airwaves, as well as their other privileges, but in return be expected to provide the PSB programming the regulatory body saw fit to demand of them. They should also have to pay for it out of their income from advertising or subscription, which is of course how commercial broadcasters' PSB programmes are already funded. The licence fee will, in any case, no longer make sense once computers, as well as television sets, can easily show broadcasters' output.
To create extra funding for PSB programming and to enable a wider range of broadcasters and producers to participate in it, extra money could be raised from the Lottery, the Exchequer or private sponsors. The regulatory body could then allocate these funds to the programme-makers who pitched for them most persuasively.
All of this is a long way from the system we have inherited. But that system is not only ineffective but dishonest too. The ideal it is supposed to embody is now more relevant than ever, and it deserves better.
