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Rethinking the BBC Public Media in the 21St Century

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Rethinking the BBC Public Media in the 21St Century Rethinking the BBC Public Media in the 21st Century Edited by Niki Seth-Smith, Jamie Mackay and Dan Hind Collection copyright openDemocracy Published in 2016 by Commonwealth, 27 Bath Road Margate CT9 1SJ commonwealth-publishing.com The authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act of 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work. The individual pieces are published under a Creative Commons licence that permits non- commercial reproduction. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/ When attributing articles, please include the following: ‘This article was originally published in the independent online magazine www.opendemocracy.net’ Cover design by Kieran McCann Cover image is adapted from a photo by Mike Knell, under a Creative Commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ The editors would like to thank Mike Flood Page for his advice throughout the project and Billy Sawyers and Mary Rider for their painstaking assistance with the preparation of the text. Foreword Niki Seth-Smith and Dan Hind 1. The BBC Belongs To Us Introduction Chapter 1: ‘What would an autonomous BBC look like?’ Justin Schlosberg Consider a name change , Deborah Bull I Chapter 2: Saving the BBC from itself , Anthony Barnett Introduce democracy and an elected Director General, Jeremy Gilbert II Chapter 3: The new British popular , Nicholas Mirzoeff Turn over programming and curation to the people, Stella Duffy III Chapter 4: Ensuring independence, Richard Tait Think beyond the living room, Irenosen Okojie IV Chapter 5: The Beeb and British branding, Michael Gardiner, Claire Westall 2. Getting Back in Touch Introduction Make a school iPlayer, Mark Cousins V Chapter 1: The Corporation needs to care about class, Rhian Jones Allow minority groups to tell a narrative that’s not confined to cliché, Chimene Suleyman VI Chapter 2: Why the BBC has lost touch: here’s how it can reconnect, Sarah O’Connell BBC news needs a women’s editor, Charlotte Gerada VII Chapter 3: We need a new Scottish channel, Iain MacWhirter Bring back industrial relations reporting, Daniel Randall VIII Chapter 4: From Public Service to Public Control, Dan Hind 3. Regaining Trust Introduction Chapter 1: Auntie Beeb and government surveillance, Harry Blain Make programmes no one else will Brian Eno IX Chapter 2: How the BBC betrayed the NHS, Olly Huitson Support rural investigative journalism, George Monbiot X Chapter 3: The General Strike to Corbyn: 90 years of BBC establishment bias, Tom Mills Don’t dumb down, Ian McEwan Chapter 4: BBC and Brexit, Julian Petley Free your staff to voice their opinions, Peter Hitchens XI Chapter 5: Bringing investigations back to the BBC, Meirion Jones 4. How to be public in the market? Introduction Chapter 1: The growing gap between public and private broadcasting in Europe, Des Freedman Remind us why public service really matters, Allyson Pollock XII Chapter 2: The BBC as market shaper and creator , Mazzucato and O’Donovan Bring literature to the public, Philip Pullman XIII Chapter 3 Let’s not shatter the fragile economy of British PSB, Fiona Chesterton Fight for the right to Strictly! Mike Flood Page XIV Chapter 4: The blind protectors of the BBC are hastening its demise, David Elstein Sharing the licence fee could re-invigorate the BBC, Aaron Bastani XV Chapter 5: Do my biscuits pass your public value test?, Lis Howell 5. Open up, the future is coming! Introduction Chapter 1: How is citizen journalism transforming the BBC? Lisette Johnson Be the world’s broadcasting station, Bill Emmott XVI Chapter 2: From the frontlines of the fight against religious illiteracy, Aaqil Ahmed Cory Doctorow: Open up the archives XVII Chapter 3: The answer to ‘Breaking Bad blues’ is more autonomy, Peter Jukes Recruit and train content allies, Mark Lee Hunter XVIII Chapter 4: Shape the digital public sphere or die trying, Becky Hogge Time for public service algorithms, James Bennett XIX Chapter 5: The BBC’s poetry is needed more than ever , Nick Fraser Afterword Niki Seth-Smith and Dan Hind Foreword Niki Seth-Smith and Dan Hind The majority of the contributions in this book were written before Britain voted to leave the European Union. Yet its core concerns are now more pressing than ever. The media in Britain are not adequate to the task that they claim for themselves. Public debate about politics, economics and social trends is distorted by all manner of internal biases and external pressures that are themselves ignored in mainstream coverage. The preoccupations of the private media lie outside the scope of this book. But the BBC is a public institution. It is the nearest instrument to hand for those who wish to create media that presents an accurate account of the world, and that challenges the fictions to which prejudice and the lavish expenditure of money render us all vulnerable. Starting from an insistence that the BBC belongs to the public, we have brought together a diverse range of voices, including but reaching beyond media circles and academia, to investigate what this means in the 21st century. What do we want from the BBC? And who is this ‘we’? Whatever the nature of the threat you believe the BBC is facing, we can all agree that the Corporation is facing a moment of profound self-questioning, with attendant possibilities of transformation. The Charter renewal period has coincided with intense unease within British society. The BBC is a pillar of a British establishment that stands accused of losing trust and alienating the majority. As a public broadcaster, the need for the BBC to prove its separation from the state, and to navigate what has been called a ‘post-truth’ climate, has never been greater. At the same time, social media are making it more and more difficult for the BBC to control the terms on which it is discussed. It has long suited the BBC to wink at the accusation, endlessly repeated in the Daily Mail and elsewhere, that, if it errs, it errs on the side of being too liberal and progressive. But the whole notion of balance needs careful interrogation, in light of the institution’s repeated failures in its stated mission to inform. The contributions in this book are a combination of dedicated commissions and pieces originally published into the OurBeeb section of openDemocracy. The contributors are concerned with issues of governance, representation and participation: who has the power, and who gets to speak. They ask how we can deliver public value in the rapidly shifting marketplace, how we can best use new technologies to create a digital public sphere, and how we fund the BBC in a climate hostile to the very idea of universal provision. There are concrete proposals here that can be fed into the Charter renewal process, and all grapple with the core issue of how to be ‘public’ in the 21st century. We have alternated essay-style interventions with snapshot ideas, drawn from openDemocracy’s ‘100 Ideas for the BBC’ project, so that well-known media and policy figures such as Mariana Mazzucato and Cian O’Donovan, Nick Fraser, Julian Petley and Aaqil Ahmed sit alongside voices that are heard more rarely in this debate, but are greatly needed, such as Cory Doctorow, Philip Pullman and Irenosen Okojie. The Draft Charter was published just before this book went to press. Much had been foregrounded, and new developments have more than a whiff of the 'row-back and relief' strategy. Was the proposal for a majority of government appointees on the unitary board floated only in order to be dropped? One of the more unexpected changes has been the standing down of Rona Fairhead, following the government's decision to re-open the appointment process, raising concerns over political influence on who becomes the new BBC chair. So the chess pieces have been moved around, but the game looks very similar. We hope that this book, by drawing together some of the best and most interesting thinkers, writers and practitioners around the question ‘what do we want from the BBC’, will focus minds on how the Corporation can move away from attempting to serve the masses, and respond to an ever-louder demand: for the public to be brought into the heart of the establishment. 1: The BBC belongs to us ‘The BBC belongs to the public’. An article of faith to many, yet this is no straightforward assertion, as the following chapters show. In his chapter, which is an open submission to the BBC Charter consultation, Anthony Barnett calls for end to the “the era of paternalism” and for “professionalism and democracy in action”. It is an engagement with a huge and multi- layered Charter review public consultation process, based around the three main consultations by the BBC Trust and the government that took place in 2015-2016, yet it also exposes the limitations of such a process. This section takes a look beyond this superficial effort at accountability, to explore how we might achieve a more genuine kind of ownership by the people. Is such a model of ownership achievable? Crucial to this is the BBC’s autonomy from the state. Richard Tait’s chapter is a sharp warning on the importance of ensuring the future of BBC governance does not lead to further erosion of the Corporation’s independence, while Justin Schlosberg argues for a ‘networked BBC’, proposing this as an answer to the perennial problem of resisting both government and market pressures, by adopting something more like the Nederlandse Publieke Omroep (NPO) in Holland. Writing from a US perspective, Nicholas Mirzeoff invites ‘Auntie Beeb’ to move on from the old reign of Top Gear and British Bake Off to the ‘new British popular’ embodied by a variety of new political developments, from Jeremy Corbyn to the movement for Scottish independence.
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