Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND DEMOCRACY
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Krishan Kumar (1977) has described the BBC’s autonomy from commercial
and political controls as ‘holding the middle ground’, a position which has
certainly contributed to the ‘quite unusual cultural importance that attaches to
the BBC in Britain’ (p. 234) and that has attracted and been bolstered by the entry
into broadcasting of many talented people instilled with a public service outlook
and sceptical of the ‘moving wallpaper’ mode predominant in out-and-out
commercial broadcasting systems (most notably in the United States). ‘State and
commerce: around one or other of these poles are gathered the vast majority of
the broadcasting systems of the world’, but the ‘BBC has, in certain important
ways, been able to resist these two forms of identification’ (Kumar, 1977, p. 234)
and has managed to achieve a distinctive raison d’être, institutional flavour and
pattern of behaviour (Burns, 1977).
In addition, the public service ethos of the BBC has had a marked influence
on commercial broadcasting in Britain. Thus independent television, launched
here in the mid-1950s following an intensive lobby, has from its outset had public
service clauses injected into many of its activities. As James Curran and Jean
Seaton (1988) observe, it ‘was carefully modelled on the BBC [and the] traditions
of public service were inherited by the new authority’ (p. 179). This is reflected
in its Charter demanding that it strives for impartiality in coverage, in the structure
of its news services which are formally independent of the rest of its
commercial activities, clauses in its contracts such as the requirement to show
at least two 30-minute current affairs programmes per week in peak time, and
the financing of Channel 4, which puts it at arm’s length from advertisers in order
to protect its mission of reaching different audiences from previously established
channels. American historian Burton Paulu (1981) aptly recounts that from its
inception it was ‘the duty of the [Independent Broadcasting] Authority “to provide
. . . television and local sound broadcasting services as a public service for
disseminating information, education and entertainment”’ (p. 66).
If broadcasting’s public service roles set it to some degree apart from
commercial imperatives (which are drawn to the cheap and popular for obvious
‘bottom line’ reasons), then it is important to say that this does not mean it has
been aloof from outside pressures, able to operate, as it were, in the capacity of
dispassionate and free-floating information provider. It could not do so since it
is part of a society in which commerce is a powerful force, and at the same time
the BBC (and to a considerable degree Independent Television, too) was an institution
created by the state and therefore susceptible to pressures that could be
brought to bear by and on the state. Further, the recruitment of BBC personnel
especially has come predominantly from a restricted social type (Oxbridge arts
graduates), something that has advanced values and orientations that are scarcely
representative of the diverse British public. Inevitably, such pressures and constituents
as these and the priorities they endeavour to establish have influenced
broadcasting’s evolution.
However, this is not to say – as a good many left- and right-wing critics have
alleged – that broadcasting is some sort of conduit for the powerful (the ‘ruling
class’ for the Left, the quasi-aristocratic ‘Establishment’ for the Right). It has a
distinctive autonomy from business and politics that has been constructed over
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