Page 127 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 117
Corporation’s general allocative policies. In surveying the BBC’s relationship to
its operating environment, however, recent commentators have tended to gloss this
over and to concentrate instead on the ‘special relationship’ between the
corporation and the government of the day, although, here again, some aspects
have received more attention than others. Recent work has focused particularly
on instances of political interference in programme making (see Tracey, chaps. 8–
10, and Briggs chap. 4) and on the growth of internal controls on production as a
mechanism for forestalling further intervention. Rather less attention has been
given to the government’s potential influence over policy through its control of
the compulsory licence fee which finances the corporation’s activities.
However, the level of the licence fee only sets the limit points to allocative
decision making. Within these parameters the options for resource allocation and
overall programme policy are crucially influenced by the BBC’s involvement in
markets where the terms of the competition are set by the large corporations.
They determine the general level of production costs, both directly through their
role as suppliers of equipment, raw materials and programmes, and indirectly by
fixing the market price for creative labour and technical expertise. Hence the
BBC is locked in a constant competition for talent in which the dynamics of
inflation put it at a permanent disadvantage since unlike the commercial
companies it cannot pass on increases in costs by raising the price of its services.
On the other hand, it cannot cut production costs significantly since it is
competing for audiences.
In order to sustain its claim to the compulsory licence fee and justify requests
for increases, the BBC cannot let its total share of the audience slip below 50 per
cent for any length of time, and so it is drawn into a battle with the commercial
companies in which it has to offer comparable products. Consequently, the
heartland of its popular programming (BBC 1 and Radio 1) is increasingly
commandeered by the same sorts of formats and content as dominate the
commercial sector, while the public-service function is increasingly concentrated
in the minority sectors such as adult education and Radio 3. Nor is the BBC an
isolated example. Public broadcasting in France and Italy is already under
similar pressures from the newly introduced commercial sector, and West
Germany seems set to follow suit in the near future.
The increasing reach and power of the large communications corporations
gives a new urgency to the long-standing arguments about who controls them
and whose interests they serve. As we shall see, a good deal of this debate has
centred around the changing relationship between share ownership and control of
corporate activity, and it is this central issue that I want to concentrate on here.
Unfortunately however, discussions in this area have been dogged by loose
definition so, before we examine the main strands in the debate, we need to
clarify the two main terms: ‘control’ and ‘ownership’.