The BBC green paper is a red rag to its critics

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jun/28/bbc-green-paper-red-rag-to-critics

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First things first. We’re still trying to discover David Cameron’s wish list for Europe and George Osborne’s cuts list for benefits – but here comes John Whittingdale’s prospective green-paper list of BBC reforms to set the Royal Charter wheels grinding. Goodbye BBC Trust. Goodbye, perhaps, to another chunk of corporation funding as the Treasury money that gives over-75s a free licence fee is carved out of Broadcasting House’s budget (along with C4 Welsh-language programmes and the World Service). Hello to more privatisation. Hello, as glumly prophesied, to more hard times on the studio floor.

And see how the malign mood music swells in anticipation. Already there’s a clear, if bizarre, need for some kind of impartiality regulator to rule on press yarns (and political diatribes) about the BBC. For the corporation, these past few days, has taken a terrible – and terribly unfair – drubbing, with no sanctified independent agency to draw lines of fairness and balance in the sand.

You can be a proponent of change and a champion of BBC survival at one and the same time

The Daily Mail says that only £2.4bn of the BBC’s annual £5.1bn income goes on what you and I must call content: programmes to watch or listen to. How shocking! Cue standard Mail homily about overpaid bureaucrats and cringing liberal time- servers. Cue also a detailed blog from the BBC director of finance demonstrating, with hard numbers attached, that 90% of available revenue goes on creating and supporting content, with just 10% left over to feed an administrative non-monster. But do facts have any bearing on the argument? Dream on.

Here’s the Times, serialising the memoirs of Roger Mosey who, for a month or three, looked the trusty most likely to become Tony Hall’s deputy director general (until he chose to be master of Selwyn, Cambridge). Mosey has witnessed firsthand “the chaotic governance and insular management exposed by the Savile scandal”. He describes “a news management system inclined to distort the news rather than report it”. He analyses “a liberal-defensive mindset that bears scant relation to the real world”. And so on and forth.

An impartiality regulator (apart from asking who owns the Times) might pen a few lines here remembering the chaotic governance or worse exposed by the phone-hacking scandal and wondering what, in all insularity, son James told Les told Rebekah told Rupert (not to mention the liberal-defensive mindset that made James Harding editor of the Times before he became head of BBC news).

As for David Cameron supposedly telling the boys on a campaign bus that “I’m going to close them [the BBC] after the election”; as for Bill Cash and euro-emetic MP colleagues demanding the appointment of a “referendum broadcasting adjudicator” to “ensure impartiality” in coverage; as for Mr Secretary Whittingdale telling the Telegraph that “external regulation” of impartiality is high on his pondering list … let’s simply conclude that a Cameron talent for bad jokes is widely shared.

Prime ministers throttle and weaken the BBC; they don’t close it. Finding an adjudicator who could ring Cash’s bell might be tougher than getting Tony Blair to sort out the Middle East. And ask, in similar vein, if Ofcom would prove remotely up to the task of instantly policing 70% of Britain’s broadcast news provision? No: they’d run a mile. This is a grey area of sticky fingers stretching right across Whitehall.

There are genuinely fair and balanced questions you can ask about Broadcasting House reform. Does the corporation exist to provide something for everyone – as director general Hall, in the footsteps of John Birt, maintains – or does it need a smaller, more durable settlement? Is the licence fee system safe for only another 10 years, as Hall maintains? In which case, what follows on? Is the German model of a simple tax on all households really the best way to greet the new digital dawn? You can be a proponent of change and a champion of BBC survival at one and the same time.

But champions don’t follow the Daily Mail’s yellow brick road to statistical perdition. They don’t contrive absurd theses built on a few paragraphs of an otherwise amiable book serialisation. They don’t deal in wild threats and impossible monitoring regimes.

The BBC we have – and can have – needs to be seen fair and square. But the weird, ridiculous thing is that as the debate moves on, stuffed with racketing rows of corporate self-interest and heaving illogic, so the fate of Britain’s EU membership and Britain’s public service broadcasting systems seems somehow to blend into a shrill, demented, single issue of quasi-religious fervour.