{"id":978,"date":"2008-05-29T10:27:05","date_gmt":"2008-05-29T09:27:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=978"},"modified":"2008-05-31T21:04:28","modified_gmt":"2008-05-31T20:04:28","slug":"democracy-markets-and-the-bbc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2008\/05\/democracy-markets-and-the-bbc\/","title":{"rendered":"Democracy, markets and the BBC"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BBC\"I<\/span> have frequently found myself talking to reform-minded individuals in the Middle East<\/strong>. Many like the idea of democracy. They admire it. Personally they are liberal, progressive, secular.<\/p>\n

And yet the closer they are to power – or when holding office – the more they concede that the time is not yet ripe. Their work is too important, and the people are too easily led, too poorly educated, too radical, too sectarian.<\/p>\n

Speaking yesterday at the BBC<\/strong>, I had that feeling of Middle Eastern d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu<\/em>. I was talking trust at the College of Journalism<\/strong>, and the Q&A moved into the pulse-racing area of BBC governance.<\/p>\n

I’d argued that the BBC’s polling on trust was symptomatic of its top down, authoritarian governance. Authority framed the questions, people’s opinions were then duly weighed. It was a kind of 19C plebiscitarianism.<\/p>\n

What about contesting some of the things at the heart of the BBC? Wasn’t teaching people to organise, campaign and disagree, one of the ways of sustaining civil society which is enshrined in the current BBC charter?<\/p>\n

Home Affairs ed Mark Easton<\/a><\/strong>, a former colleague, and one of the sharpest BBC journos around, voiced a widely held scepticism about allowing any kind of democratic decision-making into the Beeb. It would destroy it, he said.<\/p>\n

My argument is that the contest is<\/span> the process, and that the BBC could exercise a leadership role in British public life by stepping modestly towards democracy within its governance. An elected trust? Or perhaps even an elected Director-General?<\/p>\n

I had the chance to raise this with BBC Trust<\/strong> chairman Sir Michael Lyons<\/a><\/strong> recently, as he took soundings on the future of the corporation.<\/p>\n

My two cents? I see it going one these ways:<\/p>\n

1) The public<\/strong> gets let in to bring more direct democractic accountability over resources and priorities, and so legitimacy to the licence fee
\n2) Or the market<\/strong> gets let in to share the benefits and make the BBC into a genuine global media leader.<\/p>\n

The Dewey<\/a><\/strong>-eyed romantic in me would like the first to happen. The realist sees the second. Perhaps real innovation would mean having both.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have frequently found myself talking to reform-minded individuals in the Middle East. Many like the idea of democracy. They admire it. Personally they are liberal, progressive, secular. And yet the closer they are to power – or when holding office – the more they concede that the time is not yet ripe. Their work […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}