James Murdoch launches attack on the BBCBy Ian Burrell, Media Editor
James Murdoch, the heir to his father Rupert’s global News Corporation empire, tonight accused the BBC of undertaking a “chilling” land-grab of the media that posed a “serious and imminent” threat to the future provision of news in Britain.
Murdoch junior, who is News Corp’s chairman and chief executive for Europe and Asia, warned that the dominance of the BBC risked creating the type of news media which George Orwell described in the novel 1984. “As Orwell foretold, to let the state enjoy a near-monopoly of information is to guarantee manipulation and distortion,” he said.
Delivering the prestigious MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival, James railed against the “authoritarianism” of the Government and its watchdog Ofcom in regulating the broadcasting industry. He criticised rules designed to uphold impartiality in broadcast news and advocated the system of self-regulation which applies to the press.
The speech, which caused genuine shock among the television industry executives who made up his audience, echoed the sentiments of his father, who had made a similarly outspoken attack on the British broadcasting establishment in the same venue two decades earlier.
Whereas Rupert Murdoch’s MacTaggart Lecture of 1989 had predicted the digital future, James Murdoch talked of the “digital present” and compared the media industry’s conservatives to the creationists who rejected Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
In powerful language, he remonstrated against the growth of the BBC’s news provision on the internet. “Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet,” he said. “We seem to have decided as a society to let independence and plurality wither. To let the BBC throttle the news market and then get bigger to compensate.”
The criticisms reflected his father’s comments earlier this month that News Corp’s newspapers must begin charging for their online content, a strategy that is undermined by the presence in the market of the BBC website as a vast source of free news. “It is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it,” James Murdoch said tonight. He claimed that “the threat to independent news provision is serious and imminent”.
The corporation’s governing body, The BBC Trust, had an “abysmal record” in overseeing the organisation’s activities and cited a series of examples of the BBC’s expansionism. “The scale and scope of its current activities and future ambitions is chilling,” he said. “Being funded by a universal hypothecated tax, the BBC feels empowered and obliged to try and offer something for everyone, even in areas well served by the market.”
The growth of BBC Radio 2, he said, had damaged the radio industry in general by taking listeners that were already well-served by the commercial sector. “Performers like Jonathan Ross were recruited on salaries no commercial competitor could afford, and audiences for Radio 2 have grown steadily as a result,” he said. “No doubt the BBC celebrates the fact that it now has well over half of all radio listening. But the consequent impoverishment of the once-successful commercial sector is testament to the corporation’s inability to distinguish between what is good for it and what is good for the country.”
He also criticised the BBC’s “nationalisation” of the Lonely Planet travel guide, which the corporation bought, as “a particularly egregious example of the expansion of the state into providing magazines and websites on a commercial basis.” The BBC Trust had shown a “total failure” to “ask tough questions about what [the BBC’s] management was up to”.
The broadcasting industry, Murdoch complained, was constrained by an “authoritarian” degree of intervention by the media regulator Ofcom, with the result that while the BBC was “dominant”, other terrestrial television networks “are struggling”. He compared British media regulation unfavourably with systems in Germany, India and France. “The problem with the UK is that it is unhappy in every way: it is the Addams Family of world media.”
He pointedly contrasted the system of regulation in broadcasting with the self-regulation of the press, praising British newspapers for being “fearless and independent” and suggesting that the aim of achieving impartiality in broadcast news by balancing opinions was unattainable. “The mere selection of stories and their place in the running order is itself a process full of unacknowledged partiality.”
Murdoch, 36, is non-executive chairman of BSkyB, whose Sky News service is subject to tight controls on impartiality, unlike the unashamedly right-wing American channel, Fox News, which is also part of the News Corp portfolio.
He claimed that authoritarian control had “always been a part” of the British media and even questioned whether the BBC had been founded as a force for good. “The early years of British broadcasting were dominated by concern about the potential of the new technology for creating social disruption. To deal with that perceived threat, there were two responses: to nationalise broadcasting through the BBC, and to ensure that any other provider was closely controlled and appropriately incentivised.”
Murdoch also warned that the recent demise of local news media should not be allowed to become an opportunity for state-supported journalism. “I saw recently an article in which the editor of The Guardian (Alan Rusbridger) suggested that the government should fund local news coverage of court proceedings and council meetings, a profoundly undemocratic and ruinous idea.”
Twenty years ago, Rupert Murdoch’s MacTaggart Lecture was characterised by his claim that television was a business and should not be the preserve of a publicly-supported duopoly of the BBC and ITV. Yesterday his son, ended his own speech with a similar homage to capitalism in the media. “There is an inescapable conclusion that we must reach if we are to have a better society,” he said. “The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.”
Independent
