BBC licence fee deal - the FT v the Times, Sun and Daily Mail
|
Version 0 of 1. The deal that will result in the BBC funding free television licences for people aged over 75 is wrong, says the Financial Times. It says of the requirement for the BBC to pick up the £650m-a-year bill for providing the free TV licences to the elderly: “The government should not load the cost of its social policies on to the broadcaster. It may be legitimate to ask the BBC to cut the amount it charges the public in general. But it should not have to subsidise benefits to specific voters the government is seeking to propitiate.” The newspaper is unimpressed with “the ingenuity” of chancellor George Osborne in forcing the corporation to shoulder the expense, aguing that it will cut the BBC’s total revenue by some 13% a year. There are “serious defects” with the plan, says the FT, not least because “it could saddle the broadcaster with a far heavier burden than Mr Osborne might suggest. “The number of Britons over 75 is going up – from 8% of the population to an estimated 13% by 2037. Doling out free licences will place an ever growing burden on the BBC’s finances.” The paper accepts that Osborne had offered a quid pro quo by agreeing to change the law in order to oblige the BBC’s online viewers to pay for the service. And it thinks Osborne was right to criticise the “imperial” ambitions of the BBC’s news website. But it concludes: “Mr Osborne’s television licence wheeze is crude and compromises the BBC’s independence. If the state wants to offer perks to pensioners, it should direct and pay for them itself.” The Times argues that Osborne is right to take steps against the BBC’s so-called website imperialism. He has foreseen the day, it says, when all newspapers will be digital, which will then erase much of the distinction between them and the BBC website. “The thrust of Mr Osborne’s argument is timely and acute,” says the Times. “The BBC website must be tamed.” Why? Because “unchecked, such a behemoth could muscle out of the market any commercial rivals, including some that have been part of the fabric of British life for much longer than the BBC”, (meaning, of course, the Times, which was founded in 1785. The BBC, by contrast, came into being in 1922). Back to the Times’s argument about the BBC being “in the grip of a prolonged bout of mission creep”. The BBC “now dominates radio, television and online information in Britain … to a greater extent than any other public service broadcaster in an advanced democracy. “Nowhere is this dominance less warranted than online, where the array of alternative sources is dazzling. Hitherto this newspaper has fought back largely on behalf of local and regional commercial news outlets which are in an unequal battle for market share with the BBC’s 58 local websites. Mr Osborne notes that the corporation’s online presence is a direct threat to national newspapers, and that is true too. The fact that we have an obvious interest in the matter does not make it less wrong. Having an overwhelmingly dominant state-funded news organisation is inimical to the genuine and robust diversity of views on which a true democracy depends.” Rupert Murdoch’s other newspaper mouthpiece, the Sun, can barely conceal its delight in a “news story” headlined BBC done. It casts the deal in a wholly negative light by suggesting viewers are to suffer a triple blow: the TV licence fee will rise; iPlayer users will have to pay up; and the over-75s “could lose their free licences after 2020”. If you’re seeking an example of spin, then that interpretation of the deal hammered out between Osborne and the BBC’s director-general, Tony Hall, is a classic. The Sun is not alone, however. Step forward the Daily Mail with a claim that the BBC “could force more OAPs to pay licence fee” (I thought the OAP designation had fallen into disuse – evidently not). Its story states: “Middle-class pensioners may have to start paying for their television licence within five years, under new government plans.” The Mail says “millions of middle-class families” could be hit because the BBC “will be allowed to change the rules from 2020”. Sir Christopher Bland, a former chairman of the BBC’s board of governors, argues in the Independent that Osborne “has effectively pre-empted a proper debate about the size of the BBC and its funding in the run-up to charter renewal in 2016”. And he accuses the chancellor of doing it “by the worst kind of dodgy Whitehall accounting, worthy of an Enron finance director at the height of the dotcom bubble”. He believes the BBC has “accepted a totally inappropriate transfer of these costs in exchange for some very doubtful gains”. Bland dislikes the free licence fee for over-75s anyway. “Rather than transfer the cost to the BBC, he [Osborne] should abolish this entirely inappropriate bribe to the elderly in his budget.” He also lays into the BBC itself for losing sight of its principles “in an unseemly eagerness to do a deal”. He concludes: “The BBC is at its worst when it behaves like a nation state and when its senior management starts to negotiate like politicians. The chancellor is right to suggest that the BBC cannot be exempt from the normal pressures on public expenditure, and he is right to ignore the inevitable shroud waving. But to pre-empt a serious debate about the funding of the BBC in the run-up to charter renewal through this pre-emptive strike is an error of judgement on an industrial scale. It is ironic that the chancellor should cite the BBC’s online services as an example of its excessive ambitions. In fact it was the BBC that first grasped the importance of online services.” How easy it is to forget that last point. When too many newspaper owners and editors were playing digital ostrich, the BBC was leading the way. |