Opinion - News Analysis   

The BBC empire has grown too big

When the BBC’s director-general was the subject of a story recently, requests for interviews came from one Sky reporter, one Independent Television News reporter and 37 BBC reporters, each from a different programme. “And I am not making that figure up,” said Mark Thompson at a private meeting last week. He was clearly fed up.

Mr. Thompson is not running a modern media corporation but an outpost of the Natural History Museum. As he wanders his mighty domain, he keeps bumping into cobwebbed dinosaurs left by his predecessors, John Birt and Greg Dyke.

He sees managers who manage nothing, producers who produce nothing, skeletons and deputy skeletons attending “meetings” in corporate palaces under constant reconstruction where nothing ever happens.

Round his feet scurry near-extinct species from before the digital deluge, such as trustees, trade unions and management consultants. They have the smell of death about them.

Those of us who love, admire and sometimes work for the BBC know well its hyper-sensitivity. It accepts criticism with all the grace of Wales or the state of Israel. But this week has been ridiculous. Any normal organisation should be able to reduce its establishment by 8 per cent without treating it — and reporting it — as the demise of the British empire.

The BBC is handling the consequence of its crazy expansion in the 1990s. Fattened on an above-inflation licence fee (the BBC is funded by a licence fee paid by every household in the United Kingdom with a television), the corporation spawned new channels and websites, and moved into commercial activities such as events, magazines and merchandising, much of it in state-backed competition with the private sector. As recently as this month, it bought out the Lonely Planet guides. BBC bidding sent the price of sports events, entertainers and presenters soaring. Its London property estate was in perpetual turmoil.

The new charter and financial settlement in 2006 were widely derided as a government capitulation to BBC greed, despite the licence fee being capped at below inflation. From that moment, the corporation found itself losing public and political support, just when new technology was challenging the concept of a monolithic media monopoly.

Mr. Thompson rightly perceives that his news and documentary departments have duplicated each other beyond reason and are no longer “purposed for a multi-platformed digital age.” News feature programmes are run like separate magazines, each with their own producers and reporters. Lavish treatment of in-house employees is financed by extreme stinginess to contract and freelance staff.

Streamlining this makes sense, as does the plan to sell surplus buildings, rather than kill the new radio and television channels. More radical is the decision to attack the BBC’s core ethic by admitting advertising on to the new BBC.com. If advertisements are tolerable on the web, why not on BBC1 and BBC2 TV channels? Whose ethical fastidiousness are fee-payers expected to subsidise?

Less justifiable is the manner of this reform. When the new BBC Trust was set up a year ago, I predicted that Mr. Thompson would eat it for breakfast. So he has, leaving the trustees to let him turn a supposed vision of broadcasting in the 21st century into a pavement punch-up with trade unions over 1,800 job cuts.

Mr. Thompson seems to have committed basic management error No. 1: if you have to cut jobs, never roll them into a massive total. Keep the vision thing separate. Slice salami-style. Never give the enemy “thousands of job losses” on which to grip — and never communicate through PowerPoint.

The corporation will get over this latest of managerial spats. But each one weakens its case for special treatment from a British establishment that has long indulged its extravagance in return for invitations to the flagship political TV show ‘Question Time.’ Like the Royal Navy, Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the Church of England, the BBC has been led to imagine that it can join the 21st century by thinking of ever cleverer ways of staying in the 20th.

The need for a national public broadcasting service is acknowledged the world over. Even America has not quite shrugged off its PBS. But the major premise of this case — the value of outlets independent of government and commerce — is weakening before the genuinely “public” broadcasting of the internet. Even countries such as Iran and China have found it hard to censor.

New media technology is rendering that status obsolete. The BBC is no longer more than the sum of its parts, and some of them are clearly unjustified. Nobody scanning the digital channels can see what distinguishes, for instance, BBC sport and light entertainment from their commercial rivals. Nor can they see why a licence fee (rather than subscription) is needed to support them. When BBC World and Online behave like any other media company, why should the rest of the BBC be different?

The truth of this upheaval is that the BBC has simply grown too big. Big organisations rot. The U.K.’s state-funded National Health Service is rotting. The U.K. Ministry of Defence is rotting. British Petroleum is, or was, rotting. The distance from hand to brain is too far and ever more resources must go into travelling up and down it. Grow or die becomes the watchword, but the reality is grow and die.

Even yesterday it was a government decision to cap the licence fee — itself a sign of the BBC’s waning potency — that forced Mr. Thompson to slim his empire. Ahead must lie much more such slimming. The BBC, like government, expands with ease but contracts with pain. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Dangerous time for Benazir
A global challenge
A war without frontiers
Any slowdown in the IT industry can have a cascading effect: Lakshmi Narayanan
The BBC empire has grown too big
Corrections and clarifications
Now, a leisure revolution
Pakistan blasts
Rural poverty
Sensex fluctuations

Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu