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‘Red-tape’ is at the heart of the BBC’s democratic remit

The so-called ‘sharing economy’ is composed largely of opaque shoddily managed companies. Rather than mimicking these models, the BBC must make the case for improving and developing its much-lamented bureaucracy.

By Barbara Speed
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Ant Smith/Flickr. Some rights reserved.

The recent attacks on the BBC in the run-up to its charter renewal have all had something in common: a distrust of a media organisation owned and run by the government.

Daily Mail stories on the BBC endlessly reference “BBC bosses”, sometimes to critique the salaries (too high, they argue, for license fee-funded jobs), but also to remind us that the BBC is controlled from the top down. The organisation’s nickname, “Auntie”, fell into popular usage in the 1950s to critique its “prudish, cosy, puritanical ‘refrained’ image” in contrast to the fun and irreverant ITV. 

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0