The Price of Plurality - Stakeholders - Ofcom

1 The Purpose of Plurality15• if Channel 4’s cross-subsidy model broke down and it eithertook a share of the BBC’s public funding or was privatised?• if the BBC alone made children’s programmes?Alternatively, it may be more productive to ask the question not fromthe perspective of the producers but from the consumer and citizen.What would they judge to be the impact on their future lives:• if television no longer provided salient popular culturalreference points, shared moments to talk about?• if there were no longer programmes that attracted asviewers a range of people, of different social and culturalbackgrounds, who would never otherwise interact?• if there was a diminution of trust in the news andinformation on which they based decisions in their lives,individually and collectively?• if people living in the Nations of Britain and the regions ofEngland believed that they were not adequately served withinformation and news about their lives that impacted directlyon where they lived, close to home?• if one’s children no longer watched programmes locatedin the landscape and neighbourhoods they see about themas they grow up, but only the youth culture of the UnitedStates?• if there were, to use an unfashionable phrase, a loss ofcultural patronage ; no longer leaps of editorial faith thatin the past have fostered new talent, new writers, newcomedians, new actors, new presenters of history, science anddocumentaries, regardless of the risk of commercial return?More radically, what would Britain feel like:• if, at a time of political decision – a General Election forexample – in a fragmented, multicultural, multilingual society,reliant for its information on an indiscriminate plurality ofdiscrete online sources, there was no longer a common publicservice meeting point where the political agenda, the pointsof decision, could be focused?• if there were not an alternative publicly motivated,non-conformist counter-culture challenging authorisedconventional wisdom?One question lies at the heart of all these. In the converged worldof the internet, does one believe that television broadcasting will stillsomehow represent something ‘special’? Will there still be the will tolay out broadcasters’ public purposes as past Acts of Parliament havedone, investing television with an air of civic importance that makesit still intrinsically different in expectation to the wealth of informationon the internet? In the years of digital switchover, we will encounter arapidly advancing internet future but a long-living television past. Thejudgement that policy-makers must make is in essence to understandhow to the balance the two and ensure the continuities betweenthem. PSB has always been strong on principles, but its effectivenessdepends on deciding upon a series of diffi cult trade-offs.