The BBC AND THE future ofPublic Service Broadcasting

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• Stephen Fry
• Sir David Attenborough

Words count. Take a word like public. This is a word handed down to us from Greece and Rome – a world beyond the private that every citizen holds in common. Thus the Athenian public square and public debate. So today a public footpath and a public library. And for the purpose of this lecture, a public service broadcaster.

We don’t do noble in these iconoclastic times, but for me the idea of public qualifies above any other. This conception of the public realm is at the heart of our western civilisation. The great gift of the European Enlightenment was to revive the classical tradition and insist that there was a space held in common beyond church, monarch or state in which ideas and expression were permitted free currency – submitting themselves to independent scrutiny and examination by a plurality of diverse others and only of value if they survived it. Immanuel Kant famously summed up the spirit of the Enlightenment by calling on individuals to dare to know, but one can only dare to know if there is a public space that permits me – and you – access to information and knowledge that gives us the material to base some daring on. Information will inevitably be doctored by censors, spin doctors, thought manipulators, power brokers and influence peddlers. The powerful in both the private and public sectors want us to believe their truth. Our only recourse is an independent public space which allows us to compensate by freely challenging and testing these partial truths – and sometimes actual lies – so that we can arrive at the truth. Parliament, courts and universities are part of this public space, but so, crucially, is an independent media.

Public and state are thus two very different ideas – and it is vital to be clear about the distinction. We don’t talk about state footpaths or state libraries. To be public is to be independently available to every citizen, to offer fairness to all, and to be transparent and accountable. Thus a public footpath. Thus a public law. The state, in a liberal democracy where parties compete for power in regular elections, is also plainly part of the public realm – but necessarily it is a protagonist of the particular ideology of the governing party. And at the limit it has the power to coerce. Even a democratic state has to be checked, balanced and held to account – and that requires it to be scrutinised in turn by the wider public realm, of which the media is a crucial component.

In my view this distinction between state and public is the alpha and omega of any discussion of public service broadcasting in which the BBC is often called a state broadcaster. It is not. It is the institution above any other in the country that is consecrated to embodying this quality of “publicness” in television, radio and the internet – the Enlightenment public space supplying us the opportunity as citizens to establish the truth of the matter in a world of competing truths and views. It is paid for by every citizen who owns a television or radio contributing the licence fee – not a regressive tax as is sometimes described but the universal fee that maintains this public space. And equally it has continually to engage with its public to ensure it is doing its job and so sustain its legitimacy.

Most of us – maybe all of us – would go along with the argument so far. But now the hard questions begin. Should just one institution, the BBC, have a monopoly of this licence fee? Wouldn’t it be better to distribute the fee to all those many broadcasters in a digital age that want to support the public realm in particular programmes, say through an arts council of the air? In particular shouldn’t Channel 4, our other public service broadcaster, be eligible for some licence fee to support it as advertising revenues dwindle in a multi-channel, digital future? In which case, perhaps the BBC should be much smaller in size. And whether on today’s scale or smaller, are the mechanisms by which the BBC daily verifies its own publicness robust enough?

My answer is that an institution to embody public service broadcasting across the gamut of programmes and potential audience subsets, so achieving critical mass, is a first order necessity. The BBC, despite its occasional falls from grace, still justifies the trust we give it in discharging this role. We need it because public service values do not come out of thin air; they have to be grounded in the daily reality of actually making programmes day in and day out for the universe of citizens – and our being able to judge whether the standard is being met. There are two wins. We guarantee sustained PSB and thus a crucial part of the public realm; and we have a benchmark to judge the efforts of others. Any discussion about how and if there should be further public support for Channel 4 can only start once we are certain there is a strong BBC – and that we don’t end up weakening one to help the other.