David Elstein

David Elstein is currently Chairman of openDemocracy. He is also Chairman of DCD Media, Screen Digest, Luther Pendragon,  and the Broadcasting Policy Group. He is also a director of Kingsbridge Capital Advisors, and a supervisory board member of two German cable companies.

He has also chaired Sparrowhawk Media, the British Screen Advisory Council, the Commercial Radio Companies Association, Really Useful Theatres, XSN plc, Sports Network Group, Silicon Media Group, Civilian Content plc and the National Film and Television School. He was also a director of Virgin Media Inc and Marine Track Holdings plc.

Previously he launched Channel 5 as its Chief Executive, worked for BSkyB as head of programming, was Director of Programmes at Thames Television, Managing Director of Primetime Productions and Managing Director of Brook Productions Ltd.

His career as a producer/director started at the BBC in 1964, and his production credits include The World At War, This Week, Panorama, Weekend World, A Week In Politics, Nosenko and Concealed Enemies. He has been a visiting professor at the universities of Westminster, Stirling and Oxford, having been the inaugural Visiting Professor in Broadcast Media at Oxford in 1999. His six lectures there were entitled "The Political Structure of UK Broadcasting 1949-99". He was the lead author of the Broadcasting Policy Group's 2004 publication, "Beyond The Charter: The BBC After 2006".

He has been external editor of the Media&Net theme of openDemocracy. 

Recent articles

OurKingdom on Nick Griffin and the BBC: What is the BBC's game? Anthony Barnett > The BBC and the BNP, Anthony Barnett > After Nick Griffin and Question Time, Gerry Hassan > This post 

The BBC handed the BNP a propaganda coup on Thursday, as 8 million people tuned in to the heavily publicised edition of Question Time. I have no doubt the BNP will gather more support than it loses as a result of Nick Griffin's appearance, despite his rather under-whelming performance.

But don't blame the messenger entirely. And don't be depressed by the turn of events. Whatever my other criticisms of the BBC, it was inevitable after the European elections that Griffin would at some point be invited onto Question Time. The BBC kept Churchill off the air in the thirties, and Enoch Powell in the sixties. For decades before 1968, there was no mention on the BBC of gerrymandering and discrimination in Northern Ireland. All these suppressions were acknowledged as counter-productive in retrospect.

It was also inevitable that a Griffin invitation would create a ballyhoo. He could not be eased quietly into one of the chairs. We therefore had a furious build-up to what turned out to be a highly-charged programme. Nor could the BBC treat Thursday as if it were just a standard QT session: that would "normalize" Griffin, the very charge the BBC was so keen to avoid - hence Mark Thompson's use of the word "challenge" in his defence of the invitation.

Unfortunately, this back-fired. As David Dimbleby observed at one point in the exchanges, if all the other guests were trying to put aggressive questions to Griffin at the same time, he could avoid answering any of them. As it turned out, he floundered two or three times, but the overall effect of the programme was of an unpleasant person being swamped by a sea of self-righteousness. Even the casting - Sayeeda Warsi and Bonnie Greer - was an implicit editorial swipe at Griffin. The only time the programme resembled a normal QT was when Jack Straw was forced onto the back foot over the government's immigration policy.

TechCrunch reports on the continuing decline of revenues in US newspapers – down $5bn since the start of 2008 compared to 2007. Even online revenues are falling. The “Rusbridger Cross” that was meant to see online revenues rise to compensate for print declines, is looking compromised in the US market. All of this matters a great deal to journalism -- “quality” journalism has, I have argued, always been cross subsidised inside the newspaper. As the fat goes, so will the recipients of cross-subsidy.

I asked David Elstein, well-known media executive and watcher, how the US picture related to what was happening in the UK. Things are even worse here for the commercial sector, he says. Much of this is due to the BBC's dominance. All the more important to understand, then, what the BBC, by its nature, cannot do.

Here is David's reply in full:  

“The US position is largely reflected in the UK. Regional newspaper revenues are particularly hard hit, and companies like Johnston Press and Trinity Mirror have suffered massive drops in value (94% and 89% respectively). That is why Ofcom and the BBC Trust were so emphatic in rejecting the BBC's plan to add video to local news websites.

National newspapers are also suffering revenue declines, but are mostly shielded by parent company finances - even then, thousands of jobs are being cut, and some titles are vulnerable - notably The Independent, which has just run for shelter under Associated's roof. The recession is simply amplifying the long-term drift of ad revenue from print to on-line.

Advertiser- funded television is in serious trouble. Ad rates are back down to 1992 levels, but total ad revenue is still in decline, despite TV viewing levels being seemingly unaffected by online activity. However, much of this damage to ad revenues is self-inflicted. The CRR (Contracts Rights Renewal) mechanism that ITV invented five years ago in order to get the merger of Granada and Carlton through the competition authorities effectively torpedoed the commercial TV market-place. Put simply, it allowed advertisers to reduce their spend percentages committed to ITV (typically, 70% of total budget) year by year in direct relationship to ITV's reduction in delivery of commercial impacts (ie total number of 30-second spots viewed in commercial breaks) - an entirely predictable reduction in a world with ever-growing multi-channel viewing share.

ITV's suicidal policy at first appealed to competitors like Channel Four and five, imagining that revenue leaving ITV would turn up in their pockets, but what actually happened was that advertisers found that the impacts they had been buying from ITV at top of the market prices could be bought much more cheaply elsewhere - so revenue simply drifted out of TV.  In this, the UK was unique - all similar markets saw an average 22% rise in cost per thousand (CPT) over the last five years, whilst the UK suffered an 11% decline.  As I said, we are now back to 1992 CPT, but still cannot pull back the advertisers.

What adds to the pressure on ITV in particular is the guaranteed strength of the BBC, which prevents ITV from cutting its spend on programmes (till now, anyway - rumours are it will be cut by over 10% next year), so leaving it with the lowest operating margins of all similar operators in Europe and the US.

Commercial radio is in similarly poor condition, as the BBC inexorably increases its share of viewing off the back of a massively larger programming budget.

However much we love the BBC, it is increasingly hard to deny the displacement effect of the BBC's strength.  This was well-demonstrated by the 2005 Ofcom Public Service Broadcasting Review, which (without acknowledging such) showed that the high GDP territories with the highest GDP share spent on public broadcasting (the UK and Germany) had the lowest ratio of private spending on broadcasting (1:1), whereas the US, with low public spending, had an 8:1 ratio (ie 8 times as much spent on private broadcasting as on public).  Other West European economies filled the space in between, with a steadily corresponding increase in ratio as the proportion of GDP spent on public broadcasting declined.

In the UK, this effect is felt by commercial TV, local newspapers and commercial radio, and it is exacerbating the exogenous impact of online growth and economic recession.  All in all, a nightmare scenario.

A dispute over the political views of a leading BBC journalist reflects the concerns of the corporation’s hierarchy over its relationship with Britain’s New Labour government, says David Elstein.

Terrorist attacks challenge journalists to report freely and assert their independence from state influence. How well do they perform under pressure? David Elstein looks critically at the record of the Anglo-American media since 9/11.

Will Iraq’s legacy be a resentful, mistrusted America? In the fifth of a series in which original voices from around the world exchange letters with Americans, the British broadcaster David Elstein, a libertarian conservative and anti-anti-American, expresses his dismay over recent United States foreign policy to the Hudson Institute’s Irwin Stelzer.