The BBC, The AngloSphere and the Future of Content
Posted on July 21, 2006
Filed Under For Argument's Sake, Error and bias |
Guess when this came out?
The BBC’s Director-General Mark Thompson today outlined a new vision for programmes and content focused on ‘excellence’, plus radical plans for funding the ideas and transforming the BBC into a simpler, more agile and creative digital broadcaster.
BBC - Press Office - Mark Thompson unveils plans to transform BBC
Yes, nearly two years ago, though this week Mark Thompson tried again to sell the world a plan for the reorganisation of the largest and richest broadcaster in the English language.
What happens to the BBC is important for a number of reasons. It has perhaps the largest collection of historical film in the world, from all over the world. In voice terms it can still be heard everywhere.
It dominates our worldview in the same way Hollywood does. It is a key guardian of the Anglosphere, the idea that the English-speaking world has a unique purchase on democratic virtue.
And it does not have to compete. Every ten years it gets a further uplift in the billions it has to pursue its missions. Unlike any other media organisation it is invulnerable. When todays Web 2.0 comapnesi go up in a bubble, the BBC will still be there offering services that compete with theirs, that rail in audiences that people are chasing while risking their livelihood. It is a market distorter that can never be factored out. It therefore has a higher duty to the rest of the industry, one it has never acknowledged or explored.
What Thompson shows no awareness of is, and here is a list:
That the BBC has contributed to the moral decline of the west. It treats all politicians and the political process with contempt. Some politicians deserve it but the political process breaks down if all politicians are treated with the same disregard.
The BBC cow-tows to an imagined morality of its audiences and influencers. It has tried for the past decade to revive its paternalist role in society. It tries to appease the notion that its role is to be a good parent and to be a cheer leader for its kin. It’s problems are moral rather than creative.
The last film I made at the BBC I was faced with an appalling requirement to leave the audience feeling good about itself. The process was one bad compromise.
The BBC no longer knows how to assess the truth value of evidence because it is busy appeasing an imagined audience need. Its executives have no worldview other than a BBC view.
The BBC also creates a situation whre its suppliers join in the process of truth evasion because they make the comemrcial judgement that to challenge is to die.
Right now what the Anglosphere needs is a ruthless reassment of its recent history, to lay to rest the assumptions we make about anglospheric superiority, and to recast those in a way more of our societies will find defensible.
Mark Thomspon also misses a few points about the digital world: that there are no agenda setting companies any more; that the creative net does not rely on the patronage of a commissioner and a producer; or that the creative flux can pronounce organisastions irrelevant.
What he also fails to understand is that to change the BBC he needs to change himself. In his speech this week he warned staff he would fire those who could not change and adapt to the BBC’s value.
Today’s values are flux, diversity, truculence, oppositional stances, collaboration, new ideololges, broadly cast creative nets, instant change, empowerment, a sense that all is possible. It’s no time for prescribing, proscribing or threatening.
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I am in total agreement with you on this one - keep up the good work;)