Events | 2009.08.30
BBC's Robert Peston in row with James Murdoch
News Corp chief James Murdoch\'s speech attacking BBC sparked war of words with corporation\'s business editor Peston over \'patrician broadcasting\'
The BBC\'s business editor, Robert Peston, was involved in an astonishing slanging match with James Murdoch following the News Corporation chief\'s speech to television executives in Edinburgh where he accused the BBC of mounting a "land grab".
Peston, like other BBC executives, was critical of Murdoch\'s MacTaggart lecture to the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International TV festival on Friday, in which the News Corp chairman and chief executive in Europe and Asia described the size and ambitions of the BBC as "chilling".
Murdoch also heavily criticised the media industry regulator, Ofcom, calling for regulation to be scaled down, and accused the government of "dithering" and failing to protect British companies from the consequences of online piracy.
At an official dinner following the speech, Murdoch and Peston – who were sitting with the Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark and the BBC chairman, Sir Michael Lyons – became involved in a discussion about banking deregulation which progressed to the flashpoint of whether or not the BBC was patrician, according to those who were there.
Murdoch apparently banged the table and shouted: "How dare you?" with Peston shouting back: "If you think you can get fucking angry, I can get fucking angry."
A source close to Murdoch, who oversees BSkyB as well as newspapers including the Sun and the Times, described the incident as a "vigorous exchange of views".
In his own speech to the festival yesterday, Peston asked whether there was any "rational basis for believing that withdrawing all regulation and subsidy from the news market would be any less costly to our way of life".
Lyons said British broadcasting was admired around the world "because of its diversity of broadcasters and variety of funding methods. The public tell us that they... trust the BBC and value the wide range of services we provide. The BBC Trust... is here to strengthen the BBC for the benefit of licence fee payers, not to emasculate it on behalf of commercial interests."
BBC1 controller Jay Hunt, a former editor of the channel\'s Six O\'Clock News, also batted away Murdoch\'s critique that the BBC\'s news operation was "throttling" the market, preventing its competitors from launching or expanding their own services, particularly online.
"I think we can be pretty confident about what we do," she said.
"Do I think the BBC is fundamentally distorting the market? I don\'t see any evidence for that. We are required to deliver news on as many platforms as possible."
BBC director of vision Jana Bennett added: "Given the way the audience and the public want to trust their news, I think it would be a regrettable step to go for patrician news as if that is really going to help public debate and civil society."
Industry commentators said that despite the BBC\'s criticism, others within the industry shared Murdoch\'s concerns about the corporation, if not his other arguments. "If you strip out the rhetoric and ideology, he is not alone in thinking the BBC is too big and potentially a threat to paid-for journalism," said media expert Steve Hewlett, presenter of Radio 4\'s The Media Show.
ITV\'s director of television, channels and online, Peter Fincham, said: "It was one of those speeches where it is possible to agree violently with half of it and disagree with the other half." He declined to say which half he agreed with.
Channel Five chief executive Dawn Airey, who previously worked at Sky, said the arguments in the speech were to be expected, although she added: "The one thing he didn\'t talk about was the dominance of Sky [in the pay TV market]."
In a further question and answer session yesterday, Murdoch repeated his call for the BBC to be reined in, saying it should have its funding reduced by government so that it becomes "much, much smaller".
Murdoch said the corporation\'s 24-hour news channels and website were inhibiting the ability of commercial competitors to invest in news. "The news operation is creating enormous problems for the independent news business and it has to be dealt with," he said.
He also repeated his assertion that the media industry was "suffocating" under the burden of too much regulation, with Ofcom currently conducting an investigation into BSkyB\'s grip on the pay TV market.
But Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards defended the regulator, saying regulation was a "much more subtle set of issues. We are a million miles from the kind of intervention and micromanagement that is sometimes described."
However, Richards said he agreed with Murdoch when it came to the BBC.
"It is one of the big issues of the day where I very much agree with James," he said. "When the BBC started it could get on with it, such as launch BBC1 and BBC2, and there was no market impact. It would be completely different now, we have to accept that."
Sources close to Murdoch said they believed he had emerged with "credibility" following the speech. "People have said he was deliberately provocative, but he made that speech to provoke a debate because he genuinely believes it. He did get people thinking. The overwhelming majority of people support his view on the dimunition of regulation.
"He has emerged with credibility. Even if a lot of people didn\'t agree with all of his argument, they agreed with some of it."
Murdoch made his Edinburgh speech 20 years after his father Rupert\'s lecture, which lambasted the "anti-commercial attitudes" of the British broadcasting establishment, particularly the BBC.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/30/robert-peston-james-murdoch-bbc
