Any attempt to change the remit of the 92-year-old public broadcaster provokes a fierce reaction in Britain, where it commands a special status through its role showing national affairs such as royal weddings, sporting events and the weather.
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The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has published a green paper ahead of a public consultation on BBC’s charter review, which will set out how the corporation is run in future.
But Labour’s shadow culture secretary, Chris Bryant, hit out at Whittingdale and accused the government of leaking details of the agreement to the press. The promise in return of an index-linked licence fee is hooked to conditions about the broadcaster’s future shape. I believe that the BBC should continue to make programmes for all our audiences.
On Wednesday, several celebrities, including JK Rowling, Stephen Fry, Daniel Craig and Richard Curtis signed an open letter calling for “a strong BBC at the centre of British life”.
Ms Hyslop, said: “This week’s annual report from the BBC showed that it is now failing to meet the expectations of the people of Scotland”.
The green paper, the BBC said, “would appear to herald a much diminished, less popular, BBC”.
Whittingdale commented: “We need to ask some hard questions during this Charter Review”.
On the funding of the BBC, he told MPs a subscription model for paying for the BBC “could well be an option in the longer term” but the technology was not yet widely available in homes.
Most of Britain’s newspapers are on the right and support the Conservatives and have complained about the BBC’s move into nonbroadcast news reporting.
“I’m not sure if I should tell you this, but the BBC did do a thing… they wanted to know what the public appetite was for the licence fee, so they did a deprivations test”.
But Mr Whittingdale rejected this saying there was scope for the BBC to be more “precisely targeted”.
Whittingdale criticized the licence fee as “regressive” and said a full subscription system should be considered as a long-term replacement. But Hall argued that it made the corporation 226.5 million pounds previous year.
And of course this follows a licence fee deal once again rushed through behind closed doors with significant extra costs imposed on the BBC under the threat of worse if it didn’t agree. The current license fee, which has been frozen for seven years, is 145.50 pounds for a color TV. Just two weeks. No internet, no radio, no TV.
The BBC’s funding has already been squeezed as part of Cameron’s drive to reduce public spending and ministers have indicated they want to scale back some of its services, including the globally popular BBC website. The largest public service broadcaster in the world, the BBC has nine TV channels, ten national radio stations and a major online presence.
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Whittingdale said the review would look at three options for reforming governance, including reforming the existing BBC Trust, creating a new stand-alone oversight body or moving regulation to Ofcom, each of which he said had “pros and cons”. They pay for us, so it is their voice that will matter most in this debate. “With no significant competitors to the BBC in the creation of United Kingdom content, any changes to the structure and funding of the Corporation will have fundamental impact on the provision of United Kingdom content for United Kingdom kids – much more so than any other genre of programming”, the CMF said.
