Who hates the BBC?

 Imagine a world without the BBC. None of those TV channels, radio programmes, podcasts, top reporting, imaginative takes on topics, off-centre approaches …

 But it’s just what certain parties are aiming for. The BBC-haters of late seem to comprise Rupert Murdoch, the Johnson government, and the Royal family, in the wake of the fuss over Martin Bashir and the famous Diana interview of 1995.

 

Granted that Bashir used some trickery to get access to the Princess, but the story is much more complex than “and the interview led to her death”. That is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who observed the events of those years and Diana’s desperately unhappy and dreadfully public marriage. Television veteran Esther Rantzen told Andrew Marr that it could hardly be argued that Princess Diana had not wanted a famous opportunity to tell her side of the story to a sympathetic public via a respectful interviewer. “She said what she wanted to say.”And it is reported that the Princess, before her death, personally wrote a note to a contemporary post-interview inquiry stating that nothing Bashir showed her to persuade her to agree was news to her. She knew or strongly suspected what was going on in this dirty war between royals.

 

But the Bashir case is worrying because it is giving the Johnson government’s plans to defenestrate the Beeb a fillip. It’s an artificial and exaggerated one, but a boost still the same. The prospect of Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail stable running Ofcom, the British broadcasting regulator, is satire come to grim life. Dacre is an old enemy of the BBC.

 

The BBC faces two main enemies at the moment, Boris and the Royals, but the third is the might of Rupert Murdoch’s News empire, fractured but powerful still. Various News Corp spokesmen have been whining about the role of the BBC for years, not out of any pious respect for the intellectual input the world needs, but the advantage over a mere commercial undertaking (Newscorp assets $15 billion, revenue $8 bn) that the corporation enjoys.

 

Disclosure, I did work for the BBC at one point, but it was back in the days when the big stories were Indira Gandhi’s assassination and Margaret Thatcher’s near-assassination. I don’t have skin in the game – except for the fabulous output that I enjoy, and you can too, just about anywhere in the world. 

 

In Australia the ABC is under similar attack. These public-service broadcasters have made mistakes, and sometimes, rarely, they produce rubbish. But without them we would be at the mercy of those who just want money and power from our tastes and weaknesses. Murdoch himself said he is in the entertainment business. A public service broadcaster also must inform and educate. We need no more dumbing down.

 

 

 

 

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