Praising the BBC ... through gritted teeth!
Just to piggy-back on Doctor Media's fine post, if I may: I can't help but notice that the piece she refers to in the (UK-based) Economist is quite happy to describe the BBC in its first reference as "Britain's mammoth public-service broadcaster" and in the third reference as a "Britain's lumbering giant of a public-service broadcaster" [My emphases]. It makes sure to highlight the corporation's "annual £2.8 billion [$5.4 billion] public subsidy." It lauds the very market-oriented former BBC Director-General John Birt - perhaps the most hated D-G of recent times - as having had the vision to take the BBC into the web. You get the impression from reading this piece that The Economist is not exactly Auntie Beeb's best friend! And you'd be right. Make no mistake, when this influential and economically conservative magazine praises the BBC's "excellent" web sites, it's doing so through very gritted teeth! In fact, it's fair to say that The Economist is fundamentally opposed to everything the BBC as a psb stands for, and has on more than one occasion called for the abolition of the license fee and the freeing of the BBC "brand" to do battle in the marketplace. Too bad if you can't afford the product.
The tone of The Economist piece here is a little schizophrenic. Even though it rightly praises the quality of the BBC's web sites, it does not make an explicit connection with the the essential public-service value of these sites. Even though the article recognizes that most British newspapers (apart from the Guardian and maybe the FT) still don't quite "get" the web, the tone is still implicitly critical of the BBC for having had the audacity to figure out the internet first and then make it harder for the poor, suffering, commercial British press to turn it into a "nice little earner." How, you can almost hear them think, can this socialistic, "mammoth," "lumbering giant" of an entity actually do something right? Why isn't the BBC more like British Rail or British Leyland, i.e., just rubbish?
In fact, if I may be so bold, The Economist cares not a whit about public service in this case: all it sees is a market opportunity lost because of that public service. Now it'd be one thing if the BBC was providing a crummy service with all this public money (£15 million, or $27 million pa, apparently) spent on the web. But this has not been and is not the case. The BBC was and is in the best position of any media organization in the country to do what it does, and it's doing precisely what it should be doing - providing a top-quality service that the people really use and really like - and doing it well. If the BBC wasn't doing it, commercial operators (whether from the press or wherever) would step in - but the service would likely be inferior and definitely be more fragmented and would of course cost lots more. Unfortunately, something tells me The Economist would really like that!
The tone of The Economist piece here is a little schizophrenic. Even though it rightly praises the quality of the BBC's web sites, it does not make an explicit connection with the the essential public-service value of these sites. Even though the article recognizes that most British newspapers (apart from the Guardian and maybe the FT) still don't quite "get" the web, the tone is still implicitly critical of the BBC for having had the audacity to figure out the internet first and then make it harder for the poor, suffering, commercial British press to turn it into a "nice little earner." How, you can almost hear them think, can this socialistic, "mammoth," "lumbering giant" of an entity actually do something right? Why isn't the BBC more like British Rail or British Leyland, i.e., just rubbish?
In fact, if I may be so bold, The Economist cares not a whit about public service in this case: all it sees is a market opportunity lost because of that public service. Now it'd be one thing if the BBC was providing a crummy service with all this public money (£15 million, or $27 million pa, apparently) spent on the web. But this has not been and is not the case. The BBC was and is in the best position of any media organization in the country to do what it does, and it's doing precisely what it should be doing - providing a top-quality service that the people really use and really like - and doing it well. If the BBC wasn't doing it, commercial operators (whether from the press or wherever) would step in - but the service would likely be inferior and definitely be more fragmented and would of course cost lots more. Unfortunately, something tells me The Economist would really like that!
posted by hdougie at 4:07 PM
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