Page 163 - Culture Society and the Media

NEGOTIATION OF CONTROL IN THE MEDIA 153
Broadcasting Company, and later the first DirectorGeneral of the British
Broadcasting Corporation. Reith saw the ‘brute force of monopoly’ as one of four
fundamentals necessary to the development of a particular type of broadcasting—
the other three being the motive of public service, a sense of moral obligation,
and assured finance. Reith’s version of the public role of broadcasting was, in
Raymond Williams’ definition, an ‘authoritarian system with a conscience’
(Williams, 1962):

There was to hand a mighty instrument to instruct and fashion public
opinion; to banish ignorance and misery; to contribute richly and in many
ways to the sum total of human well-being. The present concern of those to
whom the stewardship had, by accident, been committed was that those
basic ideals should be sealed and safeguarded, so that broadcasting might
play its destined part…. (Reith, 1949, p. 103)
So the responsibility at the outset conceived, and despite all
discouragements pursued, was to carry into the greatest number of homes
everything that was best in every department of human knowledge,
endeavour and achievement; and to avoid whatever was or might be
hurtful. In the earliest years accused of setting out to give the public not
what it wanted but what it needed, the answer was that few knew what they
wanted, fewer what they needed. (Ibid., 101)

Since its inception, then, the type of programming broadcast by the BBC was
inextricably bound up with, indeed consciously dictated by, the nature of the
organization itself, its system of internal control and its relationship to external
controls. Anthony Smith has described the Reithian ‘idea of serving a public by
forcing it to confront the frontiers of its own taste’ as a powerful, political measure,
which ensured the success of Reith’s enterprise, and was to have a lasting
influence on the ways in which the BBC would address its audience (Smith,
1974).
The ‘public service monopoly’ in Britain lasted for almost thirty years until
the advent of commercial television in the 1950s. During that time the BBC had
expanded from a service which barely filled a single radio channel to one which
had three national radio programmes, extensive regional and overseas services
and a television channel. To what extent can the persistence of monopolistic
paternalism in British broadcasting be ascribed to the prevailing dynamic
influence of Reith alone? To what extent was it the result of the convergence of
interests of certain dominant institutional forces in society? Peter Eckersley, the
BBC’s Chief Engineer, adhered strongly to the importance of Reith’s personal
influence, seeing it as ‘one man’s conception of the role of broadcasting in a
modern democracy’ (Eckersley, 1942, p. 55). R.L.Coase, in his study of
monopoly in British broadcasting, also subscribed to the power of the Reithian
influence but saw it—along with that of the political parties, the Press and the Post