What has the BBC ever done for us?

LoIn recent weeks, the BBC has been running various adverts between programmes on the theme ‘What has the BBC done for me?’. The aim is to show the quality and breadth of the Beeb’s output. But by highlighting the delights of Mr Tumble, Gavin and Stacey, Dr Who and Radio 4, it has not only revealed a certain sensitivity about the BBC’s position but also shown the slight identity crisis of the BBC as an institution.

Another interesting symptom of the BBC’s current predicaments is when Amol Rajan, a presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme for the past five years, announced he was leaving the programme in order to explore the new media landscape and escape the organisation’s sinking finances.

In the past year, over half a million less people paid their license fee, leading to an announcement that the BBC would be cutting up to 2,000 jobs and cancelling several longstanding programmes. No wonder the BBC has taken to thanking us on a regular basis for keeping up the payments and toned down the warnings about the consequences of licence-fee avoidance. Critics argue that licence-fee desertion is hardly surprising as the quality of the BBC is not what it was before.

Perhaps more damagingly, the British public has lost faith in the impartiality of the organisation. It has been a year of scandals and controversies, where two documentaries were condemned for breaching editorial guidelines, one doctoring a speech made by Donald Trump and the other failing to disclose the connections of a Gaza documentary’s child narrator to Hamas. A survey by Demos showed that the net proportion of people expressing pride in the BBC has fallen since 2011 from 48 per cent to -11 per cent.

But is the BBC bigger than a couple of concerns over political bias? Supporters argue that it has been the cornerstone of British culture for the past century. Created in 1922, and being publicly funded by a licence fee since 1927, it has played a key role in the spread of music, TV, news and radio across the country.  The chair of the BBC stated that it is ‘an instrument of social cohesion in a world where division, disruption, and distrust are becoming a way of life’. The BBC continues to provide national ‘water cooler’ moments like Celebrity Traitors, which had an average audience of 14.8million.

Is the fall of the BBC just due to its behaviour, or due to the changing face of media? With Netflix, Amazon Prime and even Disney+ producing not just entertainment shows but documentaries, too, there is much more competition than ever before. Meanwhile, people are turning to podcasts and YouTube for their political commentary. So, even if the BBC were still seen as impartial, would it still attract the same audience in a fragmented cultural and media landscape?

Do we still want a common national culture, controlled through a centralised media organisation? Is there still a ‘patriotic case’ for the BBC? Is it right that when trust has been lost in the organisation, British people are still legally obliged to pay the licence fee? Can the BBC build back trust from the British public, and can it ever really be impartial?