The BBC: Myth of a Public Service by Tom Mills (Verso £9.99.)
Some people think the BBC is so left-wing and anti-British that they call it the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation. On the other hand, its recent fawning coverage of the death of the Duke of Edinburgh and the consequent disruption to TV and radio programmes attracted so many complaints that a special on-line form was set up to make it more straightforward to object. But of course that also led to comments such as: how dare the BBC make it easier to complain about the treatment of a deceased member of the royal family.
As Tom Mills shows here, though, the BBC is very much part of the Establishment. Formed in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company Ltd (it became a public corporation in 1927), it clearly took the government side during the General Strike. Many of its early top brass had military and/or intelligence backgrounds, and there were fairly close links with MI5. Security vetting of staff began in 1937 and continued till 1985, when it was exposed in the Observer. The World Service in particular was seen by the Foreign Office as an instrument of ‘soft power’. The BBC motto is ‘Nation shall speak peace unto Nation’, but its coverage has generally been pro-war, much more so than that of commercial television.
Down to the 1970s, it was ‘broadly tied to the social-democratic consensus’, but under the impact of Thatcherism it became ‘a neoliberal, pro-business, right-wing organisation’. There was far more reporting on business, with less attention to the concerns of workers: fewer industrial correspondents and fewer interviews with union representatives. Working at the BBC has itself become more casualised and precarious, as the Corporation has added more bureaucracy.
None of this is probably very surprising, but Mills gives a clear account of the development of the BBC and how it has been subjected to pressures from the government and other power-holders. The BBC News is dominated by Westminster politicians, and there is to some extent a revolving door with politics, which sees reporters going on to become MPs and ministers. Of course, the Establishment is not itself a monolithic entity, and the BBC reflects disagreements within it, being ‘an arena of conflict and contestation between different groups, especially rival factions of the elite’. In 1987, for instance, Alasdair Milne was forced to resign as Director-General, as the governors did not trust him to introduce the neoliberal overhaul they wanted.
The BBC is not directly a state broadcaster, but the government sets the licence fee, and this gives it a great deal of influence and power. Mills suggests it be placed on a statutory footing to avoid the periodic negotiations with government about its future, but that would make little if any difference to its role as a mouthpiece for capitalist interests.
Paul Bennett
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