PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING IN THE

UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND

37.5% (audience share)

54.9% (audience share)

7.6% (audience share)

Source: OfCOM, 2014

26.8%

15.3%

4.9%

4.1%

11.5m Subscribers

Flow diagram displaying consolidation of ITV franchises into ITV plc

● 1922 - British Broadcasting Company set up as a solution to the scarcity of airwaves.

● 1923 - Sykes committee rejects advertising as a source of revenue and recommends a simple

licence fee.

● 1925 - Crawford Committee recommends a royal charter for the BBC. The private entity that was

the BBC should be replaced by a “Public Commission operating in the National Interest”

● 1926 - British Broadcasting Company is closed and the British Broadcasting Corporation is

opened.

● 1926 - The General Strike - A national audience is created

● 1955-1956 - Independent Television rolled out across the country

John Reith (1889-1971)

Reith used “the brute force of monopoly to stamp Christian morality on the British people”.

(Taylor, 1965)

“many of the features of broadcasting which are taken for granted today would certainly be absent had anyone else been given the job” (Curran and Seaton, 1985: 125).

“The BBC was founded on a rejection of politics”(Curran and Seaton, 1985: 131)

“the general strike marks the end of the propaganda based on lies and the start of a more subtle tradition of selection and presentation … The BBC emerged from the crisis with an ethic of political neutrality, which was expressed as much in the tone of its broadcasts as in any formal regulations”

(Curran and Seaton, 1985: 138-9)

The BBC fully realize the gravity of its responsibility to all sections of the public and will do its best to discharge it in the most impartial spirit that circumstances permit. In the last issue of the newspapers, allusion is principally made to the possibility of wholesale oscillations [deliberate technical interference with radio reception]. As to that we express no opinion, but we would ask the public to take as serious a view as we do ourselves of the necessity of plain objective news being audible to everybody. . . . We shall do our best to maintain our tradition of fairness, and we ask for fair play in return.

(BBC Archives, cf. Tracey, 2003: 13)

INDEPENDENT TELEVISION: “presenting a series of audacious novelties that blew the stale air of monopoly out of television and sent the invigorating breezes of free enterprise whistling through it” (Black, 1972, cf., Curran and Seaton, 1985).

"The public service remit for Channel 4 is the provision of a broad range of high quality and diverse programming which, in

particular:

● demonstrates innovation, experiment and creativity in the form and content of programmes;

● appeals to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society;

● makes a significant contribution to meeting the need for the licensed public service channels to include programmes of

an educational nature and other programmes of educative value; and

● exhibits a distinctive character."OfCOM, 2003

"Mr James Murdoch, which included his cold assertion that profit not standards was what mattered in the media, underpinned an ever more aggressive News International and BSkyB agenda under his and Mrs Brooks’ leadership that was brutal in its simplicity. Their aim was to cut the BBC licence fee, to force BBC online to charge for its content, for the BBC to sell off its commercial activities, to open up more national sporting events to bids from BSkyB and move them away from the BBC, to open up the cable and satellite infrastructure market, and to reduce the power of their regulator, Ofcom. I rejected those policies."

Gordon Brown, 2011

PSB UNDER ATTACK

“public service was seen as the inefficient self-serving camouflage of groups who wanted to protect their own interests from the correcting force of competition” (Curran and Seaton, 1985: 205)

“Broadcasting was one of those areas—the professions, such as teaching, medicine and the law were others—in which special pleading by powerful interest groups was disguised as high minded commitment to some common good” (Thatcher, 1995: 210)