11:43am Thursday 2nd September 2010
By Julian Cole
IT’S always nice when the boss speaks up for you. So BBC staff must have felt buoyed when Mark Thompson, the BBC director general, used a prominent speech to praise what the corporation does, while at the same time offering a pretty straightforward rebuff to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
Mr Thompson was delivering the annual MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival. This event causes greater excitement among media types than it does for more sensible people, but I hope you will pardon my interest in this matter. After all, the BBC is to an extent owned by us all.
Last year, the lecture was delivered by James Murdoch, chairman of BSkyB, who used his slot to lambast the BBC and berate what he saw, in an oddly worded phrase, as its “chilling ambition”.
In his long-awaited riposte, Mr Thompson made a forceful case for the continued importance and relevancy of the BBC, as is to be expected. The sorrow in some ways is that he hasn’t said such things before – or, if he has made such utterances, they have, as far as I can tell, evaporated into the ether and left barely a trace.
There were a number of salient points in what Mr Thompson said, but two of the most pertinent were, to paraphrase a little, that Murdoch’s News Corp empire was too big and too powerful; and that, in broadcasting terms, Sky does not invest in British programming nearly as much as it should.
Let’s look at his first point.
News Corp, as has been pointed out in this column down the years, is in effect a Murdoch family fiefdom with unprecedented power and influence within the UK. As well as owning 39 per cent of Sky – which it is now trying to buy outright – News Corp is dominant in British newspapers, and has a weighty presence in publishing, too.
Add these interests to extensive broadcasting, newspaper and internet operations around the globe, and you can see that News Corp is extremely powerful.
In Britain, only the BBC, for all its faults, has the heft to stand up to the Murdoch machine. Without the Corporation, or with an emasculated, public-service-only BBC of the sort the Murdoch boys would love to see, News Corp could easily end up as the pre-eminent media player in the country. And that should worry us.
Now let’s look at Mr Thompson’s second point.
Sky is an extremely successful business, and it does spend a decent proportion of its £4.8 billion subscription revenues on sport and news. But what it doesn’t do is make anywhere near enough programmes. Its marketing budget, as Mr Thompson pointed out, is equal to ITV1’s entire programme budget. How unbalanced is that?
As you would imagine, the BBC boss’s speech went down a bomb in the next day’s newspapers. Mr Thompson always gets a hostile national press, so he would not have been surprised to read that he “still hasn’t got the message” (The Daily Telegraph), that he has a “licence to overspend” (the Daily Mail) or that “Beeb boobies” were talking down Britain (The Sun).
Actually, he might have been surprised by that last one, as it is more than usually daft.
• CRICKET isn’t usually the sort of topic that gets me buzzing, but the Pakistani betting row is hard to avoid. My, there is nothing like a sport scandal to over-excite the media.
I must confess to having a difficulty with this story. Once again, the News Of The World has set someone up and then exposed their alleged shortcomings in an instant-verdict trial at which the defendants are always assumed to be guilty.
These stings are dressed up as investigations, but are no such thing. A true investigation would sniff out some wrong, and investigate it – not stitch people up with a suitcase full of cash.
Maybe I am alone here, and maybe I am profaning a branch of my profession (if that’s what it is), but it seems like shoddy journalism to me.
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