Building a vision for a People's BBC

Abstract

The MRC believes that it is paramount that we acknowledge and address the challenges, embrace the opportunities of the current context and campaign for a positive vision of how the institution could be transformed. Articulating this vision for public broadcasting, and for our media system more generally, has been the central work of the MRC's ‘BBC and Beyond’ campaign.6 We spent 2021 running public events that engaged around 30,000 people, doing interviews and holding workshops with dozens of individuals and organisations, to understand how they imagined a media system that could face the challenges of the future.

Out of these conversations we wrote a Manifesto for a People's Media,7 containing a comprehensive vision of a ‘media commons’. Commons are a shared resource, governed collectively by a community according to their rules and norms – practices known as ‘commoning’.8 A media commons would contain a transformed People's BBC and People's Channel 4, as well as a thriving ecology of independent media organisations, supported by significant new public resources. What would unite all of the different kinds of organisations in the media commons would be their commitment to core values – values of being independent, democratic, accountable and for everyone – and ‘commoning’ practices for living these out. These values inform our vision and proposals for building a People's BBC.

Our proposals to make a People's BBC more democratic are premised first and foremost on it being significantly more decentralised than today, with programme making, editorial functions and budgeting (for all content, not just news) largely sitting with the devolved nations and English regions. Regions could pool resources to create more expensive kinds of programming, like high-end dramas and complex investigative journalism, but decisionmaking would be largely decentralised. This devolved structure would be better placed to make programmes that fully represented the concerns and experiences of the whole country, while also creating new avenues for citizens to participate.

Participation in a People's BBC by the wider public would be coordinated through a network of citizen media assemblies. These could develop practices and procedures suitable for their areas, overseeing a range of forms of participation such as elections for regional boards, selecting citizens’ juries to monitor coverage of controversial issues and auditing commissioning, for example to ensure that people from minority groups are represented. Greater democracy would also be facilitated among the workforce, with journalists empowered through a conscience clause to refuse unethical assignments, a strong voice for media unions and worker representation on BBC boards.

Universalism – such that media institutions are set up to be ‘for everyone’ – is a key tenet of public service broadcasting. Arguably it is the public service principle that is most in need of being reaffirmed and reimagined for a digital age, as it runs so counter to the logic of highly personalised commercial platforms. Campaigns to justify the licence fee as ‘good value for money’ to individuals may have inadvertently reinforced this consumer framing, sidelining arguments about the need to invest in the BBC as a collective good. A People's BBC would be funded by a progressive household levy rather than the current regressive flat-tax licence fee, and it would be generally accepted that wealthier people should pay more for this public service, as with the NHS. While for the NHS this progressive form of taxation is through national insurance contributions linked to earnings, the most straightforward way to create a progressive household levy would be to link it to council tax bands.

This funding stream for a People's BBC would be decoupled from ownership of a television and instead levied according to whether a house has an internet connection, in recognition of the fact that in the future this will become the dominant way in which people access BBC content – just as the television licence replaced the previous radio licence. At the same time, affordable full-fibre broadband would be guaranteed to all homes, to address digital exclusion and ensure that these technologies can be used to their full potential to facilitate participation. A British Digital Cooperative would sit alongside the BBC, and be responsible for creating surveillance-free digital platforms with the highest accessibility standards.12

Citizen media assemblies would be used to critically interrogate how to translate universalism to a digital context, for example by making choices about how personalised they want their local iPlayer to be, and what kinds of content they want to give prominence to. The Welsh citizen media assembly, for example, could decide for a time to prioritise programmes made by the Northern Irish BBC, and to collaborate on a series of joint programmes, if it felt it was in the interests of citizens to learn more about that part of the UK. This would allow citizens across the UK to develop deeper connections and understanding between different regions and nations, rather than the ‘national’ conversation being constantly dominated by elites in London.