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- The Observer,
- Sunday September 9, 2001
The 2001 General Election will scarcely be counted as memorable, but it was a reminder that public services matter to voters. People were prepared to care about public affairs when faced with decisions involving the services they saw as underpinning their private lives.
This was a real shift. It challenged the conventional wisdom that a modern society is concerned only with maximising individual freedom in a market. It reasserted the communal desire for efficient, trusted public provision. After nearly two decades of government treating citizens as consumers, consumers wanted to be considered as citizens.
The verdict of voters jolted the politicians but should have shaken up the media elite as well. They have mostly sought to focus the imminent Communications Bill on the deregulation of markets - ignoring the social value of the quality of content.
In all the manoeuvring before the election, much of the media, old and new, had done its best to ignore the role of broadcasting as a public service. Too often, the broadcasters themselves fought shy of mentioning it. Commercial broadcasters, concerned about their share price in a world of rapid consolidation, invariably saw public services as merely the price of entry into the market. The BBC, for its part, sought to make public services whatever might be serviceable to the BBC.
The public has demonstrated that it takes public services seriously. Government and broadcasters alike have now to decide whether they believe that there is any valid connection between the public provision of social goods such as health and education and the provision of broadcasting. Are programmes social and cultural goods, or just commodities?
Public service in broadcasting depends on a system of regulation that has the self-confidence to ascribe value in qualitative - not just quantitative - terms. However, in the debate over the Bill, there has been little examination of the quality of programmes and content that the new regime ought to deliver. The emphasis has been on the deregulation of distribution systems, and the lightening of the burden of publicly imposed editorial responsibilities. But it is the quality of content that goes to the heart of the contract between broadcaster and viewer.
The old justification for regulation was spectrum scarcity. The digital revolution means that has disappeared: choice of channels now seems effectively unlimited. So do we now have conditions where the market can deliver the diversity which, in a world of constrained choice, regulation was there to ensure?
To date, there is not much sign of it. Sadly, the communications industry pays little attention to what it communicates. In heralding a world of limitless options, it pays little attention to what satisfaction you get from the individual choice once taken. With the notable exception of sport and films - and one or two successes such as E4, BBC Knowledge and Discovery Europe - the explosion of digital channels has not led to an explosion of fresh content. Multi-channel television is leading not to diversity but to the commodification of content. What is it about the nature of the television market that causes this to happen?
First, this market sells audiences to advertisers, not programmes to viewers. This involves maximising revenues per slot, which in turn leads to channels cannibalising past success and not risking innovation. Because viewers do not have the freedom to express direct preferences, their choices are aggregated, which in a purely commercial system narrows choice. The experience of pay-per-view or subscription platforms, where there is a more direct market relationship, does not suggest that this yet offers creative diversity. It has been dominated by football, boxing and films.
Second, television programmes, compared with other media, have high production costs and are supremely perishable. To maximise profitability, a single programme has to reach a maximum number of viewers as soon as possible, and then, if the format is successful, has to be repeated as often as possible. As a result, commercial broadcasters are impelled to maximise their revenue in every slot. There is little imperative in the current market to extend choice and take risks with innovation, when future reward can be more assuredly achieved through cannibalising past success.
In the UK, despite the rapid acceleration of total cable and satellite market share, the enduring and fundamental difference between terrestrial public service television and the new entrants can be defined by the vastly different proportion of original material screened. More than 66 per cent of Channel 4's programmes - and more than 80 per cent of its peak time programmes - are original productions made in this country. On Sky 1, the most established digital channel, the figure is 25 per cent.
A quick surf through the smaller channels shows the paucity of content. Invariably, with repeats of classic programmes, recycled syndicated US content, feature films and format game shows, the new channels huddle around the familiarity of the old, or limit themselves to a single repeatable proposition. To put it more bluntly, digital television is too often like one of those laminated menus at a chain restaurant, with innumerable dishes microwaveable to order, but not one you actually feel like eating.
Even in a mature cable market such as the US, the economic logic leads to the limiting of diversity and range in the interests of guaranteed returns and dependable audiences. Though the market can deliver good programmes, fresh ideas still tend to come from broadcasters free from the imperative to maximise shareholder value. But the case for public service in the digital world has to rest on more than its responsibility to redress market failure or to be the market's catalyst. The argument relates to the second memorable issue of the 2001 election campaign - the increasing alienation of society from our system of representative democracy. This is why the structure of the Bill is a matter not just of regulated markets but of political will.
Broadcasting has been the primary tool of democratic accountability. It has helped to make Britain a freer and more democratic society. It has, unlike any other media, been obliged to create a culture of impartiality. In future, the struggle over whether broadcasting will be a public service or a commodity provided by the market goes to the heart of the challenge to modern government: can a modern democracy in a global market economy retain the necessary cohesion still to work as a civil society?
Social cohesion requires social inclusion. The public have a fundamentally deeper trust in broadcast media than in print, but the public good that derives from impartiality of content depends, in a multi-platform world, on impartiality of access. The dependable place of public service factual programmes, universally available, will underpin the basic right of the citizen to independent trustworthy information about how we are governed and how our society works. Without it, we will live in walled gardens of selected information controlled by global converged conglomerates over which we will have no democratic say.
Broadcasting enshrines four basic civil rights: to impartial information; to access to learning beyond formal education; to respect in a tolerant society; and to nonconformity. These rights may be delivered by the market, but are not the market's concerns. If public service television is to champion these rights, it must be able to do so across all platforms.
The underlying right to a diversity of opinion has been underpinned by the creation of the independent production sector. Insofar as we have, in the past 20 years, become a more tolerant society, tolerant of racial difference, sexual preference, and cultural and personal self- assertion, it is in some measure thanks to the vision of a generation of independent producers. Freed from the conformity of institutional broadcasters, they helped to break down the barrier between the mainstream and minorities.
Yet, even as the digital revolution and the internet seem to be the culmination of such freedom of expression, it may in fact become harder for those individual voices to find a wide audience. The media landscape of 2010 could resemble in some way that of the Seventies: gigantic institutional producer-distributors, now on a multi-platform global scale, squeezing independent, creative ideas into the single-minded message of the corporate brand. Protecting the non- conformist voice from being marginalised or obscured will be the democratic test of the digital age.
So the Bill must reconcile the economic need to allow for fair competition in the market with the ability of public service values to be represented in that market. Clearly public sector providers must answer to the demands for clear transparency in their accounting and investments. They must also provide an account of how they are being true to their editorial ambitions. That is why there needs to be a single regulator including the BBC within its scope.
But public service, as the electorate clearly signalled, has enduring value. Public service television offers society a connected sense of itself. The greatest influence on the way we reach independent, individual judgments is overwhelmingly the broadcast media. This is why the future of public service broadcasting is fundamental to judgments about the value of individual freedom in a global market economy.
The electorate of June 2001 judged that there was, to coin a phrase, such a thing as society. Whether the Communications Act will in turn reflect that judgment will in part determine whether the new social settlement between public and private provision can be achieved.
This is an abridged version of an article from an Independent Television Commission book, 'Culture and Communications', to be published on Wednesday.
