This New Noise (14 page)

Under such circumstances, it is no wonder that the BBC has often resembled a damaged, bullied child, defensive and afraid. The stakes for BBC news are immeasurably high. If we believe in the BBC as a beneficial ideological intervention in our lives, if we believe in it as the greatest, and best-loved, signifier of Britain there is, then things have to change – outside the BBC as well as inside it. The whole culture that surrounds it needs to become less vituperative, more mature. As one of the journalists I spoke to said, ‘The fact is, you are more likely to be bullied if bullies think they can bully you.’

Some of the most outspoken critiques of the BBC come from within it. One cold sunny morning in early 2014 I visited Jeremy Paxman in his flat in west London. As he padded around in his socks, filling the cafetière, he railed against what he described as the BBC’s ‘closed corporate culture’. He said, ‘It is smug. I love the BBC in many ways, but at the same time it has made me loathe aspects of it, and that’s a very odd state of affairs. When I see people being given £1 million merely for walking out of the door’ – he was referring to the payments made to executives such as former deputy director general Mark Byford, who was awarded £949,000 in 2011 – ‘when I see £100 million being blown on that DMI [digital media initiative] thing, a stupid technical initiative like that, I start wondering: how much longer are we going to test the public’s patience?’ Not long after we spoke he resigned from anchoring
Newsnight
, after working on the show for 25 years, though he continued as a presenter of, among other shows,
University Challenge.
On another occasion a prominent BBC broadcaster railed passionately to me against the ‘corruption’ of management, who had ‘helped themselves’. ‘The BBC’s greatest enemy’, he said, ‘is itself. They are handing people ammunition.’

It has been observed that the nearer one gets to the centre of the citadel of the BBC the easier it is to dislike
aspects of it. According to Lord Burns, the chairman of Channel 4, ‘I love the BBC. My life without it would be’ – he paused, and said with great emphasis – ‘terrible. But it is not an organisation that does very much to help itself: there is a strange situation where people love what the BBC does but the closer they get to the BBC the less attractive a place it seems.’ Paxman, like many critics of the corporation I spoke to, told me he believed the corporation was too big:

He went on:

These were strong words from a star BBC presenter. From outside the BBC, however, comes a chorus of much more consistent and committed opponents of the corporation, many of whom husband their hatred of the BBC with the kind of single-minded tenacity that makes Paxman’s outburst of frustration seem mild-mannered.

There are many variations, but the central objection to the BBC, from which many related critiques flow, arises from the fact that it is an intervention into the market, with a historical tendency towards expansionism. Martin Le Jeune, a free marketeer and a former director of public affairs at Sky, wrote, for example, in a pamphlet for the think tank Centre for Policy Studies: ‘Far from being a powerhouse of originality, the BBC is a persistent me-too broadcaster with a serial record of imitation. Pirate radio stations spawned first Radio 2 and then Radio 1. Sky News brought forth BBC News 24 (virtually until the moment of launch the BBC official line was that there was no need
for rolling news) … The BBC is too often a parasite on other’s ideas to allow its claim of creative contribution to be taken at face value.’ The reasons for this ‘intellectual larceny’, he posits, are both psychological (the BBC’s unflinching self-belief and sense of mission) and a matter of policy. Because the BBC is funded by a ‘universal tax … it is under a corresponding obligation to seek to provide services of all kinds to all people’.

Also noted by critics is its paradoxical position as both a publicly funded civic organisation and, in the shape of its for-profit arm, Worldwide, an aggressive business that exploits its brand ruthlessly in the commercial world – and from a highly advantageous position financially. Pure free marketeers also object to it as a paternalistic organisation devoted to giving audiences what they ‘need’ (rather than what they want). The market, these critics argue, is an excellent mechanism for matching broadcasting supply to broadcasting demand. Linked to that is an on-principle objection to the licence fee. By its critics this is seen as not only a regressive tax (everyone pays the same regardless of their means) but also intrinsically unfair, since one is obliged to pay it in order to watch anything on TV, even if one does not use the BBC’s services. (One must also own a TV licence, incidentally, to be able to watch live-streamed material from 4OD and ITV Player as well as the BBC iPlayer, though viewing on-demand services was not, at the time of writing, subject to the ownership of a licence.) Licence-fee evaders were, at the time of writing, subject to prosecution, a sanction regarded by critics as overly draconian and a drain on the resources of
magistrates’ courts, though in September 2014 the culture secretary, Sajid Javid, announced a review into the law making non-payment a criminal offence.

Frequently appended to these overarching criticisms is the notion that the BBC, through its very constitution and nature, is unconsciously statist in outlook, a worldview that it inevitably reflects, especially its news coverage. Furthermore state funding and lack of a bottom line lead inevitably to complacency and an overgrown bureaucracy, it is argued – and in recent years to highly inflated pay deals at the top. According to Le Jeune, ‘Anyone who has had to spend much time with its managers and numerous lobbyists struggles to remember [its] glorious record in the face of so much intellectual self-satisfaction and so little sense of obligation or accountability for the vast wealth which the BBC has.’

But such arguments hardly account for why passions against the BBC run so high. What fuels a loathing that seems for some to become almost a monomania? One of the most prominent critics of the BBC is the
Daily Mail
, which rages almost daily at the corporation, while simultaneously running avalanches of articles devoted to the clothing, diets and love affairs of the stars employed by it. Paul Dacre, the paper’s editor, politely declined to be interviewed by me, but sent instead a copy of his 2007 Cudlipp lecture, which, he told me, still accurately represented his views on the BBC.

It made for arresting reading. He began with the traditional
Daily Mail
claim that the BBC is too big (the
Mail
has pretty consistently since the 1920s set itself against the
monopolistic nature of the corporation, on principle and for reasons of commercial anxiety). From there, he quickly moved on to argue that the corporation exerts a kind of ‘cultural Marxism’. This, he says, attempts to undermine ‘the values of conservatism, with a small “c”, which, I would argue, just happen to be the values held by millions of Britons’. He picked out for special mention what he saw as the BBC’s pig-headedly liberal stance on immigration and Europe.

The corporation, he said, though it ‘glories in being open-minded, is, in fact, a closed thought system operating a kind of Orwellian Newspeak … this, I would argue, is perverting political discourse and disenfranchising countless millions who don’t subscribe to the BBC’s worldview’. Thus, he argued, the BBC had been responsible for ‘the current apathy over politics’. Even the greenish-centrist stance projected at the time of the lecture by David Cameron was, argued Dacre, a result of a kind of emasculation wrought by the BBC – a ‘blood sacrifice to the BBC God’.

The word ‘worldview’ was key. The
Daily Mail
’s own worldview (and, to be fair, that of all newspapers, to a greater or lesser extent) is a fabrication, a jigsawing together of structural templates, stock narratives and character types. The
Daily Mail
’s worldview is especially seductive; it is bought into on a massive scale by the British public. If one were looking for the most internally consistent ‘closed thought system’ in the domestic media landscape, one would, surely, have to turn to the
Mail
. And if one actually believes that the
Daily Mail
offers a complete
and accurate reflection of Britain as it really is, then no wonder that the BBC looks inadequate or out of step. But I also wondered whether there were something else afoot in this long-nursed enmity – consciously or not. The
Mail
, founded in 1896 by Lord Northcliffe, comes from the same era of mass communication that spawned the BBC. It was the
Mail
that saw some of the early potential of broadcasting: it sponsored Dame Nellie Melba’s broadcast from the Marconi headquarters. The
Mail
and the BBC are sprung from the same time and the same set of historical conditions. Far-seeing Reith got it wrong when he wrote, in
Broadcast Over Britain
, ‘Some prophets are foretelling a colossal struggle between the powerful Press interests and ourselves. I do not believe there need be any such thing.’ There was a colossal struggle and, arguably, the
Mail
lost.

Dacre also claimed in the lecture that he would ‘die in a ditch defending the BBC as a great civilising force’ and would ‘pay the licence fee just for Radio 4’. For the fact is that few principled BBC critics have cursed the corporation entirely out of existence. (Direct commercial rivals may be another thing: Christopher Bland, for example, is not alone in believing that Rupert Murdoch ‘would be the happiest man in the world if the BBC were abolished, or, even better, if he were allowed to buy it’.)

There is a sense from a number of its critics that the BBC would be entirely tolerable – if only it would conform to one’s own view of what it ought to be, a view often infused with a certain nostalgia about an older, better, half-remembered corporation; certainly one that was smaller,
probably with Radio 4 at its heart. Quentin Letts, the
Daily
Mail
columnist, whose articles are capable of boiling over with fury about the BBC, has, paradoxically, applied to be its director general, twice. Was he serious? Well yes, up to a point. ‘I was so angry,’ he told me in the canteen at the Palace of Westminster, where he is based as a parliamentary sketch writer. ‘I saw all these bloody careerist lefties prospering at the Beeb, and I thought, “Why should they have it?” I mean some of those people are as nuttily left-wing as I am nuttily right-wing, and yet they all get bloody top executive jobs, and not a sniff of a rightie.’ He smiled. There was something immensely disarming about his candour – though I wasn’t sure that he had much evidence for the BBC’s being full of ‘lefties’. For example, in December 2014, one of the BBC’s producers, also based in Westminster, made a high-profile departure to become director of communications of Ukip. And Letts himself had hardly been banished from Broadcasting House; he was the presenter of a successful series on Radio 4. ‘I knew I didn’t have a chance,’ he added of his DG applications, ‘but I thought, well, I’ll try and make the point … complete failure!’

Margaret Thatcher, of course, looms large in the story of the BBC, as the avenging fury of the private sector, under whose premiership the door was opened to Murdoch’s Sky, and in whose later, hawkish cabinets were those who would have seen the BBC privatised. She herself, according to her biographer Charles Moore, a former editor of the
Telegraph
, lacked the appetite to raze it. She disapproved of the licence fee in particular as a regressive tax, and the BBC in general as, in Moore’s words, ‘left-wing,
monopolistic, anti-her’. She listened to the
Today
programme; Denis paced the ramparts to tell her how awful the rest of the BBC was. Coverage of Northern Ireland, the Falklands, and her contention that the BBC was grotesquely inefficient and overstaffed (based on personal observations of the BBC’s turning up mob-handed to film her) provided the backdrop for an especially fraught and hostile period of the BBC’s relations with the government. But as for destroying the BBC wholesale, Moore said, ‘I think if you look at it politically it just probably wasn’t worth the effort. It was useful politically to keep on attacking it, to take the wind out of its sails and make it try to examine itself and get a bit frightened.’ He added, ‘There was a strand in the BBC that she liked – a sort of high-minded public service broadcasting ethos – the daily service, covering state occasions, that kind of thing.’

I met Moore in a formal members’ club in the City, all wood-panelling and discreetly attentive service. I had asked him to tell me about his time as a licence-fee ‘martyr’. Softly and precisely spoken, he described his antipathy towards the licence fee, comparing it to