Letter: BBC independence? (2003)

Letter to the Editors from the November 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

In dealing with the ongoing spat between the government and the BBC, Pik Smeet (Socialist Standard, September) is of course, absolutely correct in stating that the elite control the media through structural predispositions than an automatic chain of command.

Nevertheless, government does directly invoke its powers of veto over BBC programmes when it thinks fit: for instance its suppression of programme material on Northern Ireland in the shape of the omission of the speech track on TV coverage of legally elected members of a legitimate party – Sinn Fein – in 1988.

These powers of government control over programme content, originally spelled out in the 1927 BBC Charter, appear also in the latest Charter renewal of 1996. and as before, BBC is not even required to publicise the fact when government so instructs it.

In any case, it would be difficult to envisage an institution, set up and operating under government licence, and being government funded, which could escape some level of complicity, however subliminal, with government, however vacillating and unclear the government line may be. For as Lord Annan pointed out in that section of his 1974 Committee on Broadcasting Report, headed “External Pressures”, which dealt with the compromising dependence of journalists on political sources for information, “the constitutional authority of radio and TV to function at all stems from an organ that political parties control”.

What seems to be overlooked is the glaringly obvious doublethink involved in appeals to government to preserve BBC independence. If government action can affect its alleged independence, then BBC is clearly not independent.

W. Robertson, 

Brighton