Page 107 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Britain: the BBC and the loss of the disciplined audience 95
Just as a speaker who wants to keep the attention of his audience will have
a remark for each sector or opinion, will quote each view, so the BBC
balances the requirements of each constitutent part of its whole audience.
There is a bit of intellectualism, a bit of pseudo-intellectualism, and…a
good deal of anti-intellectualism. There is extreme vulgarity…and there is
a more lofty side.
(Morgan 1986:27)

If this modern emphasis on diversity (as a reflection in the mirror of society which the
BBC strives to be) seems to be an adequate response to the heterogeneous profile of late-
twentieth-century social and cultural life, it also makes the public service institution’s
relationship to the audience more problematic. In Reith’s normative model, the place
assigned to the audience was at least clear: on the ship (or, to use Reith’s other metaphor,
in the church). But what is the audience supposed to do with the multiperspectival
mirror? Look into it and pass it by? In other words, what happens to the assumption of a
disciplined audience in this new philosophy?
For one thing, the metaphor of the mirror—as well as that of related metaphors such as
‘forum’—is premised upon the deceptive idea of value-neutrality: the ideological aspect
of representation (i.e. the fact that a completely true-to-life mirror is impossible due to the
inevitably selective and constructive nature of programming practice) is suppressed in
favour of a primarily technical conception of the task of the public service broadcaster:
his or her job is confined to that of holding the mirror in front of the already existing
diversity of voices, visions and tastes in society.
This ideologically-unspecific conception of public service broadcasting has marked
consequences for the values the BBC as an institution has come to live by. If it is no
longer supposed to defend and promote specific cultural values, as Reith had envisioned,
then it needs other guidelines to give direction to its activities. These guidelines were
provided by the adoption of ‘professionalism’ as a value in its own right within
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broadcasting practice. As Briggs (1985:324) has noted, ‘by 1960 there was as much talk
[within the BBC] of professional standards of the producer and of the teams of people
who worked with him as there was of the “social purposes” of broadcasting’. And it was
professionalism which was seen as the means to prevent television from becoming a
‘distorting mirror’. Writing in 1977, Kumar noted that

more than ever before the BBC cannot afford to be identified with any
sectional interest in the society—even something as indefinite as ‘high
culture’. It must, to some extent, go as the wind blows it. But a rudderless
ship soon ends on the rocks. What keeps it on an even keel, increasingly,
is the ‘management’ function performed by the professional broadcasters.
(Kumar 1977:247)

According to Kumar, the professional attitude is most visibly articulated in the style of
presentation adopted by the BBC’s newscasters, announcers and other presenters—a style
which is ‘compounded equally of aggressiveness, scepticism, irony and detachment’
(ibid.: 248), in other words, a style which stresses non-partisan, trustworthy expertise
rather than well-bred aloofness, as in the earlier days. It is, indeed, the style of the