Industry | 2010.03.09
The BBC must stop trying to do everything | Mark Thompson
This is not a blueprint for a small corporation, in retreat from digital – but sometimes we must leave space for others
The BBC has one mission: to inform, educate and entertain audiences with programmes and services of high quality, originality and value. It strives to fulfil this mission not to further any political or commercial interest, but because the British public believe that universal access to ideas and cultural experiences of merit and ambition is a good in itself. The BBC is a part of public space because the public themselves have put it there.
Public space is an open and enriching environment. There are no paywalls in public space. While commercial media companies have to assign different values to different target audiences – favouring the affluent, for example, or the young – in public space everyone is as important and as valuable as everyone else.
There is no place in it for censorship or bias. Citizens have the right to receive impartial and accurate news, to encounter and engage with the full range of opinion. Government and state perspectives are there to be explored and scrutinised like everything else, and do not enjoy special privileges or vetoes.
The digital age should be a golden age for public space. The means of creating and disseminating content of every kind have been democratised – every day people reach thousands of others with their ideas and opinions. But public space is being disrupted too. Fragmentation of audiences and usage is weakening traditional media\'s ability to support quality content, from international newsgathering to indigenous drama and comedy.
Nor is the global democratisation of opinion and argument as straightforward as it appears. Above the blogosphere, professional media power may actually concentrate in fewer hands. Societies around the world could be left with fewer reliable sources of professionally validated news. The risk of bias and misinformation, and in some countries of state control, may grow.
So, what should the BBC\'s role be?
First, the BBC should act as one of the main guarantors of public space. It should use its public purposes and the privilege of the licence fee to ensure an uninterrupted flow of investment into high-quality content and into the development and success of the best British talent. It should ensure that the combination of its resources and its values means that audiences have access to news and information they can trust. Its programmes and services must reach as broad an audience as possible, creating value for all sections of society and serving all licence-fee payers.
The BBC should also help guarantee access. While technology and distribution must always be means and not ends for the BBC, it has a special role to develop and back open platforms and standards. It should defend the public\'s right to choose rather than to have choices made for them, and we should therefore continue to invest in open broadcast platforms.
Second, the BBC should concentrate more than ever on being a creator of quality. It should focus even more than it does today on forms of content that most clearly build public value and that are most at risk of being ignored or facing underinvestment. It should take significant further steps towards building the distinctiveness and uniqueness of its programmes and services. It should make the universal availability of its programme library a key objective over the next 10 years – connecting audiences with the best of everything the BBC has ever made.
Third, the BBC is uniquely placed to help other institutions reach the public, and to help the public find and get the most out of those institutions themselves. Partnerships with other cultural and civic institutions should no longer be ad hoc, but strategic and central to the BBC. The recent collaboration between the BBC, the British Museum and hundreds of other museums across the UK to create A History of the World in 100 Objects shows the way forward.
But the BBC can only achieve these goals if it becomes much clearer about its own limits within public space. Given the convergence of technologies, the BBC\'s limits need to be demonstrably based on its public purposes and to be spelled out. Clearly the BBC needs the space to evolve as audiences and technologies develop, but it must be far more explicit than in the past about what it will not do. Its commercial activity should help fund and actively support the BBC\'s public mission, and never distort or supplant that mission.
Where actual or potential market impact outweighs public value, the BBC should leave space clear for others. The BBC should not attempt to do everything. It must listen to legitimate concerns from commercial media players more carefully than it has in the past, and act sooner to meet them. It needs the confidence and clarity to stop as well as to start doing things.
The proposed changes we are announcing tomorrow are not a piece of politics – they are rooted in a clear vision of what the BBC exists to do. It is also not a blueprint for a small BBC, or a BBC that is in retreat from digital. That is the last thing the British public want. They want – and I want – a BBC that has the confidence to concentrate on what it does best: which is to deliver services of outstanding quality and originality and to be a beacon of creativity and excellence for audiences everywhere.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]must-stop-trying-do-everything
