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Meanwhile in Downing Street, Tony Blair adds Andrew Gilligan to his Christmas card list.

Or does he?

The government has got pretty much everything it wants in the wake of the Hutton Enquiry: an apology from the BBC, being cleared of ’sexing up’ the report on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, validation of its reasons for going to war and, perhaps the biggest prize of all - a stick with which to beat the BBC.

Tessa Jowell, overseeing the review of the BBC’s Charter says the outcome of the Hutton Enquiry will impact on the renewal of the BBC’s charter.

That, surely, is good news for every MP.

And a potential disaster for the British media.

It is no secret successive governments have wanted to exert control over the BBC, although they have had little way of doing so because of the way it is run. At a guess, though, I’d think the most likely outcome this time around would be the disbanding of the Board of Governors, which regulates the Corporation’s output, and responsibility for overseeing what the BBC produces being given to Ofcom, the communications regulation body, which has control of everything from mobile phones to national TV and radio stations.

The government has been questioning the BBC’s right to have a web site with arguments that it is so successful it harms the viability of other sites in the UK, but then is that really a reason to can it?

If the BBC is regulated by the same body that oversees independent TV, what would there be to stop them taking the easy way out and forcing it to stick to a very rigid public service remit, closing down its more frivolous services such as BBC Three, and those that question the government of the day (including News 24) and instead fill the schedules with ‘worthy’ informative pieces.

Independent TV, meanwhile, would be forced down a completely opposite route so that they two do not clash with one another.

In both cases, it would be a disaster, and TV in general in the UK would suffer greatly. The same could be said for radio.

Some say it should lose the income it receives from the License fee on account of the fact that they don’t see why they should pay for the License if they themselves don’t watch the BBC’s channels. If they think this is a good reason for the BBC to be regulated by a central body then they clearly don’t understand the damage that would be done to the independent services if they were forced to compete with the BBC for advertising revenues. With the available revenue stream split in two neither would be able to survive on their current scale. The pool of available ad revenue in the UK is barely enough to support the independent channels on their own.

It all comes down to one thing: if the BBC was not so good, so trusted and so successful it would not find itself in the crisis it is weathering just now. Likewise, if it was a private company rather than a public body, there would have been no Hutton Report, and if there was, it would have been unable to do the damage that might be done to the BBC.

No wonder campaigns are already springing up on the web to save an institution of which we should all be proud.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2004 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Media, News, Radio, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.