Image: Flickr / m0gky
Following last Thursday’s publication of the BBC Charter Review Green Paper, it is worth stepping back to consider the longer-term view. Placing this consultation document and how it is framed in their historical context, it becomes evident that this latest development is part of a process that seeks to dramatically challenge the status quo in public service broadcasting. Driven by industry pressures and on the back of enabling technologies, it expresses an ideological response to the scale and scope of public service provision in the UK’s communicative infrastructure. It questions universality and threatens to reduce the BBC to irrelevance and insignificance. The arguments put forward are familiar. They echo the 1986 Peacock Report into the financing of the BBC, more recently reappraised in IEA’s Public Service Broadcasting without the BBC?, and reworked versions have been resurfacing with increasing tenacity, particularly around junctures like the current one.
Putting this process into perspective, it becomes clear that over the last 25 years the BBC has been gradually objectified by successive governments. It becomes an instrument of public policy, and its resources are treated as divertible, even serving explicit government objectives.
