The BBC row shows just how fragile Britain’s sovereignty has become

Ben Wildsmith

This week’s controversy over the BBC illustrates how precarious UK sovereignty has become since Brexit.

Whatever our views on the Beeb’s honesty and competence, it is a national institution – one of the dwindling number of our assets that hasn’t been sold from under us over the last few decades.

Like any large organisation, it has rogue employees, makes collective errors, and is prone to ideological fads. For all those drawbacks, however, its public status means that its editorial line can’t be bought for money.

Many of the attacks that have taken place this week have come from people who think that it should.

As long ago as 1973, the video artists Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman noted that, ‘The product of television, commercial television, is the audience.’

This observation has gained currency in the internet age, in which ostensibly free offerings from social media are, in reality, bait for our data. ‘If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold,’ as internet entrepreneur Andrew Lewis had it.

That is the context in which calls to defund the BBC should be viewed. Critics portray the licence fee as the imposition of an overpowerful government. When private companies offer media for free, why should private citizens be forced to pay for a product they may not want nor trust?

The answer is accountability, and it is more important now than it has ever been. In a media landscape where information can be transmitted around the world in bulk and at speed, our perception of reality is dependent on the quality and reliability of the information we receive.

If you are paying a private company for your content, then its producers need only to please you and your fellow audience members to succeed. The perspectives of people outside the paying audience are irrelevant other than as fodder with which to disagree. If you are receiving content for free, then its producers owe you nothing at all. You might consider why they are bothering, especially when, like Talk TV and GB News, their operations are losing money hand over fist.

Public service media

Only the public service media model requires producers to make content that balances off the needs of the entire viewing and listening public. The BBC frequently, too frequently, fails to achieve that balance. The broadcaster is routinely targeted by disgruntled politicians from Nigel Farage to Jeremy Corbyn and all points in between. Barely a month goes by when it doesn’t have to apologise for a misstep.

That, however, is not proof of the Beeb’s unique bias, but of the ongoing and constant accountability that our democracy rightly demands of it. The licence fee buys us democratic levers to keep the BBC in check. No such levers exist for any other source of information we have.

So, let’s get real. Those calling for the disestablishment of the BBC began their latest assault because a Panorama documentary spliced together two parts of a Donald Trunp speech. The accusation is that the splice gave the impression that Trump incited the January 6th Capitol riots when he did not.

I don’t know about you, but Trump’s pardoning of 1256 of the rioters out of a total of 1270 tends to vindicate the thrust of Panorama’s piece, if not the means by which the point was made.

Acquiescence

Heads should roll at Panorama; investigations should be carried out and changes made. It is a hell of a jump from there, however, to the removal of the Director General.

The Labour government’s acquiescence to Trump’s wishes shows us all how vulnerable the UK has become on the world stage.

The government’s weakness has been seized upon by Trump’s supporters in the UK to suggest the BBC should be dismantled altogether.

Self-styled ‘patriots’, festooned in flags and poppies, cannot wait to euthanise a public British institution in favour of private news organisations funded from who knows where, and by God knows whom.

The BBC is meant to annoy you. Its mission to serve us all means that it will often stray from what you, or I, think is acceptable. When we allow our discontent to be weaponised against it to the point of hostility, however, we are being used.

If the BBC falls to foreign interference, the same arguments will be employed against our universities, the NHS, and even the judiciary.

Our Senedd is next on their list and for the same reason: it belongs to us, not those who seek to own us.