Oxford NUJ campaign to defend local media and public service broadcasting values

Defend the public service values of TV and radio



Organising across Europe to defend public service broadcasting was the
subject of one of three meetings hosted by the NUJ at the European Social
Forum, in London October 14/15. Below we reprint the speech delivered by Tom
O'Malley from the UK Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom.





We need to organize on a European level to defend public service
broadcasting against neo-liberalism. From 1954 until 1990, broadcasting in
the UK was public service broadcasting. It was provided by two main
suppliers, the BBC, which was funded by the licence fee, and ITV, which was
funded by advertising. The BBC was and remains a public corporation - it is
non profit making. There were at least 15 separate ITV companies. They were
not allowed to merge.



What did this mean for programming? Public service broadcasting in England
meant producing television programmes designed to cover the widest possible
range of outputs made universally available to everyone free at the point of
use.



Public service broadcasting had serious drawbacks. It was top down. The
people who ran it all came from Oxford and Cambridge, public schools and
places like that. It adapted slowly to cultural change, and should have been
much more politically accountable and democratic. But, it provided a space
in the UK where communications were not dominated by purely commercial
concerns, as in the US. That was very very important.



Neo-liberalism

The rise in neo-liberalism in the 1980s in the UK and Europe and globally,
led to an attack on public service broadcasting. From the late 1980s
onwards, politicians like Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair, broadcasters and
civil servants were all converted to the idea that broadcasting should be
run like a business.



The underlying argument for this, developed in the 1986 Peacock Report, drew
on economic neo-liberalism associated in this country with the Institute of
Economic Affairs. This idea argued that technological change meant that it
would be possible to have the same kind of market in broadcasting as there
was in shoes, or sweets or cars. The public could express their choice by
paying for individual programmes. If this meant that the market only
provided programming that the public already liked, well that was OK. If
there needed to be better programming, then there might be a case for
providing this through a separate tax-funded body, but we'd have to wait and
see.



This idea that broadcasting should be run like a market has been the
underlying principle government broadcasting in the UK since the 1980s. The
1990 Broadcasting Act, the 1996 Broadcasting Act and the 2003 Communications
Act - all very boring pieces of legislation for anyone who has been
unfortunate enough to have to read them - have all gone in a certain
direction.



Broadcasting Acts

The 1990 Act reduced the amount of public service broadcasting that ITV had
to produce, and forced companies to bid huge sums of money for the right to
broadcast. The 1996 Act set up the scene for the explosion of commercially
driven digital broadcasting, and changed the rules on media ownership. The
2003 Communications Act opened the door to more commercial competition, by
setting up a regulator, the Office of Communications, OFCOM. OFCOM is simply
there to promote commercial forces in broadcasting. That is its job, that is
what it is there for. And if you read its documentation, you will realize
that that is its main purpose.



These changes have led to an explosion in commercial competition to the BBC
and ITV. As a result, ITV, which was once 15 companies, is now 1 company,
and it has been cutting its staff in order to make a profit. In 1983, for
instance, ITV had four regular, weekly, peak-time current affairs
programming. Now it only has one. And now it is a tabloid-style, life-style
oriented television programme. As the controller of ITV News recently said,
"If current affairs is to stay in the peak-time schedule, it has to punch
its weight in a competitive market". In other words, news has to be there to
sell soap powder, it has to be there to sell cars, it has to be there to
keep an audience - not for the sake of being news.



And of course the real driving force behind all this has been money. The
broadcasting industry in the UK has grown tremendously in the last decade.
It is now worth £7.6bn a year. Of this, £2.5 bn comes to the BBC in the form
of the licence fee. But compared to subscription, and compared to
advertising, the BBC is getting increasingly smaller.



Subscription

In 2003 TV subscription revenue in the UK overtook the advertising as the
main source of revenue. Subscription stood at £3.3bn and advertising at
£3.2. In other words, broadcasting in the UK is now economically dominated
by subscription and advertising. The BBC is an increasingly a small part of
the broadcasting cake.



Tony Blair's Government, is pushing ahead on a fast-track agenda to further
expand the market in the UK. It has placed the whole of the commercial
sector in the hands of OFCOM. OFCOM is run by an economist with no
experience of broadcasting or the media - his name is David Curry. Its chief
executive is called Steven Carter, who worked his way up the greasy pole by
working for J Walter Thompson, an American advertising agency, which since
the1930s has campaigned successfully for the introduction of commercial
radio and television in the UK. So the future of our broadcasting in the UK
is now in the hands of an economist and a man who made his career working
for the UK arm of a major American multi-national pro-commercial advertising
organisation.



The OFCOM review

In its latest publication on the future of Public Service Broadcasting in
the UK, OFCOM has made some very startling statements. It advocates getting
rid of almost all of independent television's public broadcasting
responsibilities. It is basically saying that ITV should no longer be a
public service broadcaster. More importantly, it is saying that in the
future, the real amount of money spent on public service broadcasting in the
UK - not in relative terms, but the real amount - will be frozen. So the BBC
may have £2.7 bn licence fee at the moment, which is about one third or one
half of the revenue for commercial broadcasting, but it will always stay at
that level in real terms. So as the whole broadcasting market expands,
public service broadcasting will diminish financially. It is going to
replace ITV's public service broadcasting with a puny, tiny organisation,
called a "public service broadcaster" and it is going to give it £300 m a
year to produce public service broadcasting. The BBC has £2.7bn. Commercial
revenues for subscription are £3.7 bn. The new public service broadcaster
won't have enough money to pay for a tube ticket across London - it's an
extraordinarily small sum of money. So OFCOM is pushing forward, very
swiftly, with a neo-liberal deregulatory agenda in the UK.



The future of the BBC

What about the BBC? The government is reviewing the BBC's position, but it's
under immense pressure to diminish the BBC's role. In February of this year.
The Conservative Party sponsored a report called "Broadcasting beyond the
charter" and it was chaired by a man called David Elstein. David Elstein has
had a very chequered career. He started off as a firebrand of trade union
activist in the 1970s, and I have a picture of him addressing a meeting like
this. However, he has taken the Murdoch shilling. He was a former TV
producer and activist, who graduated to working for Murdoch's Sky TV as head
of programmes, and was by 2004 a high-profile supporter of pro-market
policies in broadcasting. Now this report recommended that the licence fee
should be reduced and that ITV should be released from its public service
commitments and that a new public service broadcasting authority should be
set up. It basically argued for breaking up the BBC's production arms and
opening up the BBC to competitive scheduling.



Now BBC managers have reacted to all of these pressures by trying to show
that they are tough commercially minded guys and girls. They are really
hardline free-marketeers. They are trying to defend the BBC by actually
doing some of the things their opponents want them to do. In November 2003,
the BBC managers decided to sell BBC Technology to Siemens, in spite of the
fact that BBC Technology is an incredibly successful part of the BBC. It
provides the backbone for its digital expansion. I know people who work at
the studios there. You sell them off, and you lose a major part of the BBC.
The BBC has ordered a review of its commercial arm as well. There is some
speculation that it will be selling off large parts of its production base
after the Charter Review.



I cannot predict the precise outcome of the BBC review or the OFCOM review.
I can however predict the general direction of policy. Mass audience
broadcasting in the UK - and that's the important term "mass audience
broadcasting" will in the next decade be largely handed over to commercial
forces, with very few public service obligations. The BBC will survive in
one form, but it will be diminished relative to its rivals. It will be cut
back internally by time-serving senior managers concerned to keep their
noses clean with their political masters. It will be cut back by a
Government eager to listen to right-wing media entrepreneurs anxious to make
more money. And - this is important - we will have less of a place for
public discussion and dissent on the airwaves to mass audiences in this
country than has hitherto been the case.



A European campaign

What should we do? Domestic campaigning is incredibly important in France,
Spain, Italy and Germany as well, through trade unions and political parties
and pressure groups. In the UK I am a member of the Campaign for Press and
Broadcasting Freedom, I'm also a member of the NUJ, and the Campaign is
organizing an electronic (e-mail) system for activists. But first of all you
must lock in to your national campaigning organizations and trade unions to
work on this. There is an urgent need for media to be taken seriously as an
arena for political reform in the wider international labour and community
movements. As I said earlier, there is a need for a coordinated
international media campaign, resourced by trade unions, to press for the
reversal at the European and Global level for the neo-liberal drift in
communications policies.



It can't be done in Germany on its own, France can't do it on its own, and
in the UK it cannot be done on its own. The forces threatening public
service broadcasting organize internationally and they organize in a
disciplined and a clear way, and we need to as well. We need to coordinate
our activities on an international level. We need to share our experiences
of the commercialisation of the media and work to combat it. We need to make
the media a central issue in the politics of the struggle for a better
world, because without so doing, the world will not become better.
Interpretation of the world will remain in the hands of the privileged few.

We have many urgent issues to confront. The media, in my view, has to be at
the top of the political agenda.

Tom O'Malley

15 October 2004


N.B. Don't forget Oxford NUJ's meeting at 6.30pm on November 4, in the Town Hall