Broadcasters face being Foxed
SERIOUS BROADCASTING is under serious threat in Britain from a dogma driven ‘Culture’ Secretary who seems mainly determined to settle old scores with anybody that tried to tell it straight about the madcap plan to leave the EU during the Leave campaign.
Ms Nadine Dorries, one of the Prime Minister’s blindest, most loyal followers, has been making threatening noises towards the BBC for some time.
Now she has come up with a plan to ‘privatise’ Channel 4, the channel that probably more than any other represented a modest threat to the disinformation operation that marked the Leave campaign.
The justitification for this move is that it would “free” the channel to compete with streaming giants such as Netflix.
It is an argument that has been roundly condemned by virtually anyone with an informed knowledge of the business.
Channel 4 has grown to occupy a very special position in broadcasting in Britain. Destroying it without any coherent plans to maintain its independence is little short of vandalism.
The oft-repeated threat to the BBC of abandoning the licence fee is more serious still. No one can deny that the funding model that has sustained a world leading organisation over many years now faces a serious challenge.
Glib arguments about replacing the fee with something similar to the monthly charge made by the streaming services do not stand scrutiny.
To retain any sort of viability, the corporation would need to make enormous, swingeing cuts to many of the more ancillary cultural services it sustains.
Maintaining an orchestra is a massively costly operation. The BBC keeps both regional and national ones and, of course, funds the universally praised Promenade Concerts, not to mention the brilliant Radio 3.
Though they were quick to retreat from the suggestion, the corporation’s most miserable snipers tried to denigrate the brave coverage of the Ukraine war by so many of its fearless correspondents – putting their lives on the line in the pursuit of the truth – before these critics were found out.
Setting up new tv channels is not as easy as some recent entrants may have imagined. Though it has secured Murdoch backing, Piers Morgan’s TalkTV channel could struggle to make a serious impact, while GBNews, the channel Andrew Neil had a very brief association with, is little more than a nightly joke.
Is trying to imitate Fox News really a worthwhile ambition?