BBC, John Birt, Anne Nelson - CJR, Nov/Dec 1998

November/December 1998 | Contents

Britain
The Battleship That Turned on a Dime
How the BBC Woke Up

by Anne Nelson
Nelson is the director of the international division of the columbia graduate School of Journalism. She has previously contributed to news and documentary programming for PBS, the CBC, and the BBC.

Director-General John Birt

A little more than a decade ago, BBC News headquarters in London was shrouded in gloom. Cutbacks had devastated the corporation. Audiences were drifting towards competing terrestrial channels, with cable and satellite growth poised to plunder still more. Worse, the prime minister was on the warpath. Offended by critical stories, Margaret Thatcher set her sights on the license fee, the $100-plus tax on every TV set owned in Britain, which now provides the BBC with more than $3 billion a year, more than 90 percent of its budget. Without that money the British Broadcasting Corporation would sink -- and with it the leading international news broadcasting operation in the world.

* On September 18 the BBC launched its digital broadcasting service in Britain, adding channels, improving picture quality, and paving the way for an array of new media possibilities. The BBC beat the official digital launch of Rupert Murdoch's Sky TV by a week.

* On November 1, BBC Television News was scheduled to begin broadcasting in the U.S., reaching a potential audience of 36 million homes via selected PBS stations.

* The BBC's magazine group has launched more than twenty new titles in recent years, from Gardener's World to Teletubbies.

* BBC Online (www.bbc.co.uk), which started in 1997, has grown into the largest news-media Web site in the U.K. It offers more than 140,000 pages of content, of which 61,000 are devoted to news, the rest to entertainment and other BBC fare.

So the venerable Beeb has transformed itself into a modern media conglomerate, but with a difference: the BBC has initiated its new enterprises, including the frankly commercial ones, as a means to defend and expand its tradition of public service. This means enhancing news and documentary operations, not gutting them. The new enterprises are designed to attract new audiences, develop an independent financial base, and create revenue streams that will leave the BBC prepared for the day when the license fee, its economic lifeline, could cease to exist. Long regarded as a patrician institution that moved at its own stately pace, the BBC is the battleship that turned on a dime.

There is no American parallel to the BBC. Created and licensed by the British government, it is not of the government, and it has produced more critical reporting on government policies than most "independent" broadcasters in other countries. Its editorial autonomy is defended by a board of governors, whose twelve members represent a narrow slice of the country's elite -- it includes four knights, a dame, and one Lord Cocks of Hartcliffe. The board has always defended news, and it can usually hold its own in its dealings with the government. As Terry Marsh, a former BBC newswoman, says, "It's almost a government-to-government relationship."

License-fee financing is another pillar of strength. Tony Blair's Labor government is kindly disposed towards the BBC, and the fee is expected to be extended when it comes up for renewal in 2001. Nonetheless, the shocks of the late 1980s convinced Director-General John Birt, 54, that drastic measures were necessary to guarantee the BBC's survival. "I don't think you can ever take [the license fee] for granted," says Richard Sambrook, head of BBC Newsgathering. "It's a glorious anomaly."

But it's an anomaly that allows the BBC to pursue strategies based on long-range planning -- with news as the centerpiece of international expansion -- rather than on ratings, stock price, and corporate mergers.

The British public has a strong allegiance to news, and that is reflected in the BBC's numbers. In a country with a population of 58 million, a popular documentary can draw an audience of 10 to 11 million. Yet the BBC has not always been above dumbing down some programs to get crowd-pleasing results. The big documentary ratings have corresponded to a relatively new phenomenon called "docusoaps" -- series that reveal the real-life soap operas that unfold in British institutions like shopping malls and veterinary clinics. One recent hit, Driving School, came under fire from critics recently for including a reenactment of a factual event. At the same time, drama series like this season's Cops rely on cinema vérité techniques that intentionally blur the line between fact and fiction. The distinction between "docudrama" and "docusoap" is shrinking perilously.