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Stupid headline, I know. But I was struck by BSkyB’s results statement yesterday - here’s the Lovelace Media coverage:
BSkyB announces first-half pre-tax profits of £356m, down from £390m a year earlier, including losses of £66m in Sky Broadband and Easynet. Revenues up 10% to £2.2bn, with Q2 net customer growth of 183,000 to 8.441m. Sky establishes lead in HD market with subscribers reaching 184,000, while broadband network roll-out is ahead of plan, with 771 exchanges unbundled. The company blames decision to phase out viewing package discounts for increase in churn to 11.9%, with an estimated 27,000 customers leaving the platform. Strategy for H2 focused on increasing broadband take-up, with target of 700,000 customers by end of June. Chief executive James Murdoch says BSkyB has “achieved a number of important milestones”, with Sky+ boxes reaching 2.13m, and will now “continue to drive towards our goal of being the leader in entertainment and communications in the UK and Ireland”.
The standout number for me was that 2.13 million figure. According to Ofcom, there were 18.5 million digital TV homes in Britain at the end of Q3 2006. That’s three out of four of all TV homes. So there timeshift television - genuinely timeshift television - is now probably in more than 10% of all TV homes - I don’t know the number of installations of PVRs and other bits of tech, but I’m assuming it’s enough to take the total number of digital timeshift-equipped homes over 2.5 million.
So, can we perhaps argue that 10% of TV homes have now effectively stopped watching TV advertising? If my home is anything to go by, yes. Once your entire schedule is on the Sky+ box, you have effectively seceded from the official TV schedules - and you merrily fast forward through the ads. Interesting times.
Consider this the official launch of the Four Bellies Trailwalker Project. In July this year four of us are doing the Oxfam Trailwalk - 60 miles from Petersfield to Brighton in under 30 hours, natch. Meet the team at the blog but, more importantly, go and start giving us money at our Justgiving site. Now! Please! Money for Oxfam! Now! Britney Spears (chucked in for the Google robot)! Money for Oxfam!
Following a tip in The Word, just downloaded Rodrigo y Gabriela from emusic. So far, I’ve listen to six of the nine tracks, and they’ve all been four-starrers. It’s extraordinary, and the music is exactly what you’d expect two flamenco players who met in a thrash metal band (which they did). Honestly, I keep expecting Ronnie James Dio to jump in and start singing about wenches and wizards. Is this the most modern music there is, I ask myself?
To the Ritzy on Saturday night to see The Last King of Scotland. And….hmmmm. Don’t know, really. Forest Whitaker was toweringly good, but the story was paper-thin, the climax actually a bit silly, and although photography and locations were amazing, I wasn’t sure Kevin Macdonald successfully made the leap from documentaries to movies. I just didn’t believe in a lot of the stuff onscreen.
I was trying to work out for a while what the movie was actually for. I mean, it displayed Amin as a monster, but we knew that already, didn’t we? And the film certainly didn’t provide any deep clues as to motivation (interestingly, one of the best bits was when Amin described being a cleaner in the British Army and being treated poorly). I came to the conclusion that this was a rites-of-passage movie, in which a feckless young Scottish doctor finds out that life’s about a lot more than shagging. Which, when we think about the canvas on which this was painted (genocide, torture, the real desperate reality of Africa) is just over on the wrong side of good taste.
But Kerry Washington is officially the best thing since sliced bread. Wow.
OK, let’s have some fun with Mr Dacre and his speech, and use him as a compass of our moral values - ie, Dacre is the South Pole, and we’ll point north, thanks very much. Here we go:
How often do you hear, on the Today programme or Newsnight, contemptuous references to the tabloid or popular press as if it was some disembodied monster rather than the very embodiment of the views of the great majority of the British people?
Not that often, actually. I’ve heard the tabloid press condemned for telling lies. For intimidating its subjects. For subjecting women. For acting essentially unpleasantly. Happens all the time, as far as I can see. But then, I suppose a great number of British people tell lies, intimidate people, and subject women. I just don’t hang around with those people.
Fair enough. The tabloid press - and it’s getting confusing here, because the Times and the Independent are, of course, tabloids now, and the Mail has more quality readers than most of the so-called quality papers put together - is big enough to look after itself. Except I don’t think it is fair, because this ignores the ever-burgeoning influence of the most powerful media organisation in the world: the hugely subsidised BBC. And it’s my contention that the BBC monolith is distorting Britain’s media market, crushing journalistic pluralism and imposing a monoculture that is inimical to healthy democratic debate.
Right, that’s your contention. Let’s see you back that up.
Now before the liberal commentators reach for their vitriol - and, my goodness, how they demonise anyone who disagrees with them - let me say that I would die in a ditch defending the BBC as a great civilising force. Indeed I for one would pay the licence fee just for Radio 4. But the corporation is simply too big. For instance, it employs more journalists and their support staff -3,500 - and spends more on them - £500m - than do all the national daily newspapers put together.
Interesting that the editor of the Daily Mail should have a problem with other people displaying “vitriol” and impatience with those who disagree with them. It sort of implies that the Daily Mail itself is always willing to see the other point of view. And in what way does “too big” equate to “imposing a monoculture”?
Where there was once just a handful of channels, the BBC now has an awesome stranglehold on the airwaves, reaching into every home every hour of the day - adding ever more channels and even considering launching over 60 local TV news stations across the UK.
The BBC owns fewer (far fewer) channels than Sky. Is Sky imposing a monoculture? Oh no, of course not, you can only have one monoculture. And the BBC has always reached into every home every hour of the day - at least since they launched daytime TV in the 1980s.
No wonder Britain’s hard-pressed provincial press complains it can’t compete, our ailing commercial radio sector is furious that the market is rigged against it, our nascent internet firms rage that they’re not competing on a level playing field, and ITN, aided and abetted by some pretty incompetent management, is reeling on the ropes.
Actually, Dacre’s got a point here, and it’s a point the government is recognising. Just this week the BBC stopped adding new features to its homework revision site while its commercial impact was investigated. So work in progress here. And nice dig at ITN, Mr Dacre.
But it’s not the BBC’s ubiquity, so much greater than Fleet Street’s, that is worrying, but its power to impose - under the figleaf of impartiality - its own worldview. Forget the fact that the BBC has, until recently, been institutionally anti-Tory. The sorry fact is that there is not a single Labour scandal - Ecclestone, Mittal, Mandelson and the Hindujas, Cheriegate, Tessa Jowell, and Prescott and Anshutz - on which the BBC has shown the slightest journalistic alacrity.
Ah, now we’re at the rub. It’s not the size of the BBC that matters. It’s what the BBC does. And you can’t just assert that the BBC has been “anti-Tory” without some back-up of your position. And Dacre conveniently ignores the biggest Labour scandal of them all - the 45 minute missile claim and the suicide of Dr David Kelly. That was a story essentially baked and served by the BBC. So there.
No, what really disturbs me is that the BBC is, in every corpuscle of its corporate body, against the values of conservatism, with a small “c”, which, I would argue, just happens to be the values held by millions of Britons. Thus it exercises a kind of “cultural Marxism” in which it tries to undermine that conservative society by turning all its values on their heads.
Again, simple and unsupported assertion. Nice alliteration on “c” to ram the point home here. And what does “cultural Marxism” mean? A re-examination of culture from the point of view of historial economic development? Er, no. It just means “cultural tyranny”. And here’s the whole point. The BBC is big. And powerful. And it has an enormous impact on day-to-day life. The BBC chooses, for instance, to actively encourage black and female faces in its children’s programming. It chooses not to demonise minority groups in its dramas. It chooses not to allow racist language in its news broadcasts. These are all liberal with a small “l” instincts. But they are also the only possible decisions that can be made by an institution as powerful as the BBC. Can you imagine the BBC taking any position similar to the Daily Mail on, say, the position of women in society or immigration? No, of course not. It would be moronic. The BBC is remarkable because it has accrued power and influence to itself while remaining unbelievably popular (witness the fact that it is the most trusted institution in the country - newspapers, Mr Dacre, are among the least trusted). It is popular because it has adopted a socio-cultural position - tolerant, enveloping, safe - which is essentially Benthamite. It pisses off the fewest people the least of the time. Ergo, its default position is liberal. Deal with it.
Of course, there is the odd dissenting voice, but by and large BBC journalism starts from the premise of leftwing ideology: it is hostile to conservatism and the traditional right, Britain’s past and British values, America, Ulster unionism, Euroscepticism, capitalism and big business, the countryside, Christianity and family values. Conversely, it is sympathetic to Labour, European federalism, the state and state spending, mass immigration, minority rights, multiculturalism, alternative lifestyles, abortion, and progressiveness in the education and the justice systems.
And your evidence for this is? In what way does the BBC express “hostility”, out of interest? By ignoring something? So is Dacre arguing that the BBC does not provide information on British history, on Christianity, on family values, on Unionism? Does he ever watch it.
Now you may sympathise with all or some of these views. I may even sympathise with some of them. But what on earth gives the BBC the right to assume they are the only values of any merit?
They have no such right. But you still have provided no evidence for this view.
Over Europe, for instance, the BBC has always treated anyone who doesn’t share its federalism - which just happens to be the great majority of the British population - as if they were demented xenophobes. In very telling words, the ex-cabinet secretary Lord Wilson blamed the BBC’s “institutional mindset” over Europe on a “homogenous professional recruitment base” and “a dislike for conservative ideas”.
Ah, a citation at last. But wait. The citation is itself an assertion. Please, tell me when the BBC has ever treated anyone as a “demented xenophobe” - unless, of course, they were a demented xenophobe. Gordon Brown is quite Eurosceptic. I don’t remember the demented xenophobe treatment happening to him.
Again, until recently, anyone who questioned, however gently, multiculturalism or mass immigration was treated like a piece of dirt - effectively enabling the BBC to all but close down debate on the biggest demographic change to this island in its history.
A piece of dirt? Pray tell - again - how does the BBC “treat someone like a piece of dirt”? How does this manifest itself? You’re really going to have to try harder, you know.
Above all, the BBC is statist. To its functionaries, insulated from the vulgar demands of the real world, there is no problem great or small - and this is one of the factors in Britain’s soaring victim culture - that cannot be blamed on a lack of state spending, and any politician daring to argue that taxes should be cut is accused of “lurching to the right”.
Wow, a whole series of assertions. Let’s just take the last one. Does Dacre not remember the 1980s, when anyone who suggested an increase in spending was “lurching to the left”, when Patten demonised the Labour spending plans in the 1992 election and won Major an election he clearly didn’t deserve? The national debate has moved on, and the BBC is reflecting it.
Thus BBC journalism is presented through a leftwing prism that affects everything - the choice of stories, the way they are angled, the choice of interviewees and, most pertinently, the way those interviewees are treated. The BBC’s journalists, protected from real competition, believe that only their worldview constitutes moderate, sensible and decent opinion. Any dissenting views - particularly those held by popular papers - are therefore considered, by definition, to be extreme and morally beyond the pale.
Thus? Thus, as in, “this is my argument, so therefore this applies”? But you haven’t backed up a single assertion you’ve made. And why is good journalism the result of “competition”? Surely competition stifles good journalism, forcing newspapers to be more and more sensationalist to attract jaded buyers, and the truth be hanged?
But then, the BBC is consumed by the kind of political correctness that is actually patronisingly contemptuous of what it describes as ordinary people. Having started as an admirable philosophy of tolerance, that political correctness has become an intolerant creed, enabling a self-appointed elite to impose its minority values on the great majority. Anything popular is dismissed as being populist - which is sneering shorthand for being of the lowest possible taste.
Again, show me something being dismissed as “populist”. Explain to me how this elitist organisation made Strictly Come Dancing. And please, the names of this self-appointed elite, please. I’d like to write to them.
The right to disagree was axiomatic to classical liberalism, but the BBC’s political correctness is, in fact, an ideology of rigid self-righteousness in which those who do not conform are ignored, silenced, or vilified as sexist, racist, fascist or judgmental. Thus, with this assault on reason, are whole areas of legitimate debate - in education, health, race relations and law and order - shut down, and the corporation, which glories in being open-minded, has become a closed-thought system operating a kind of Orwellian Newspeak.
Um, wow. This is quite mad, isn’t it? Is he feeling OK? Has anyone at the BBC ever called you a fascist? I’ve met quite a few of them, and they’ve always been very polite.
This is perverting political discourse and disenfranchising countless millions who don’t subscribe to the BBC’s worldview; one of the reasons, I would suggest, for the current apathy over politics.
Well, yes, I can see how it would.
How instructive to compare all this with what is happening in America. There, the liberal smugness of a terminally worthy, monopolistic press has, together with deregulation, triggered both the explosive growth of rightwing radio broadcasting that now dominates the airwaves and the extraordinary rise of Murdoch’s rightwing Fox TV News service. Democracy needs a healthy tension between left and right, and nature abhors a vacuum. If the BBC continues skewing the political debate, there will be a backlash and I predict that what has happened in America will eventually take place in Britain.
Brilliant. So the answer is Fox News. So much for truth in journalism. What people on the right really want is something which tells them everything they believe is right. Whether it’s actually true doesn’t really matter.
Now, there’s been much talk recently of the need for more civic journalism in Britain, the very thing the BBC prides itself on. But let’s pose this question: what if a civic BBC finds itself dealing with an administration that does not behave in a civic way? An administration that manipulates news organisations and the news agenda, that packs ministry press offices with its supporters, that chooses good days to bury bad news, that favours news bodies that give it positive coverage and penalises those who don’t, that fabricates health and education figures, and concocts dodgy dossiers - an administration that, in Campbell and Mandelson, thought nothing of engaging in systematic falsehood.
Right. Systematic falsehood. Mr Dacre, has your newspaper ever printed anything which you knew, at the time of printing, to be substantially untrue? And can you prove that the BBC has ever done the same?
Is the BBC’s civic journalism - too often credulously trusting, lacking scepticism, rarely proactive in the sense of breaking stories itself - up to dealing with a political class that too often set out to dissemble and to deceive? The bitter irony, of course, is that when, for once, the BBC was proactive in its journalism and did stand up to the Labour party by breaking a genuine story, the corporation and its craven governors all but imploded under pressure from a rabid Campbell.
Yes, they did. And you can only comment on that if you acknowledge that the BBC is a publicly-funded body, so being “proactive in its journalism” carries a dramatically heavier weight of responsibility than putting something in a privately owned newspaper does. The governors did implode under government pressure. And I think if you spoke to anyone in the BBC they’d look at this as a dark hour.
And what is interesting is that this contrasted with the ruthless support for the Iraq war that Rupert Murdoch imposed on his papers and their equally ruthless suppression of any criticism of the invasion whether it involved the attorney general’s malfeasance, virtually ignored in the Times, or Dr Kelly, all but hung drawn and quartered by the Sun.
I’m struggling to follow the argument here, but I think this is a criticism of the News Corp newspapers for following an editorial line. Which is something all newspapers do. Particularly the Daily Mail.
Indeed, I would suggest that the intimacy and power-brokering between these two papers and No 10, and the question of whether Mr Blair would have got away with his falsehoods and misjudgments over Iraq - indeed, whether Britain would have gone to war at all - without the support of the Murdoch empire, is a brilliant doctoral thesis for some future media studies student.
So now Murdoch is the monoculture. I say again: you can only have one monoculture, Mr Dacre.
Yes, the BBC is, in many ways, a wonderful organisation. But the fact remains that it depends for its licence fee on the British population as a whole, yet only reflects the views of a tiny metropolitan minority. If it continues with this abuse of trust, then the British people will withdraw their consent and the corporation will fall into discredit. And that would be a very great pity.
And yet, I say again: the BBC is more trusted than any other institution, and newspapers are among the least trusted. So the single data point we have - a poll of what people actually think - directly contradicts your assertion Mr Dacre.
In summary: the accusations made by Dacre are serious. Even apocalyptic. But the standard of evidence provided - ie, none - would not make it through a GCSE media studies essay. And the sneering, sarcastic tone in which the assertions are made is hugely unpleasant. And that’s enough for now.
