Building a vision for a People's BBC

Q4 Social Sciences
Deborah Grayson
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引用次数: 0

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.

打造人民的BBC
MRC认为,最重要的是,我们承认并应对挑战,拥抱当前背景下的机遇,并为该机构如何转型树立积极的愿景。为公共广播和我们的媒体系统更广泛地阐明这一愿景,一直是MRC“BBC和超越”运动的核心工作2021年,我们举办了约3万人参与的公共活动,采访了数十名个人和组织,并举办了研讨会,以了解他们如何想象一个能够面对未来挑战的媒体系统。通过这些对话,我们撰写了一份《人民媒体宣言》,7包含了对“媒体公地”的全面愿景。公共资源是一种共享资源,由一个社区根据他们的规则和规范共同管理——这种做法被称为“公共”一个媒体公地将包含转型后的人民BBC和人民第四频道,以及由重要的新公共资源支持的独立媒体组织蓬勃发展的生态。将媒体公地中所有不同类型的组织联合起来的是它们对核心价值观的承诺——独立、民主、负责任和为每个人服务的价值观——以及实现这些价值观的“共同”实践。这些价值观指引着我们对建设人民BBC的愿景和建议。我们提出的让人民BBC更加民主的建议,首先是要让它比现在更加分散,让节目制作、编辑职能和预算(所有内容,而不仅仅是新闻)基本上由权力下放的国家和英语地区负责。各地区可以集中资源制作更昂贵的节目,比如高端电视剧和复杂的调查性新闻,但决策权将在很大程度上分散。这种权力下放的结构将更有利于制定充分反映全国关切和经验的方案,同时也为公民参与创造新的途径。更广泛的公众对人民BBC的参与将通过公民媒体集会网络进行协调。这些机构可以制定适合其所在地区的做法和程序,监督一系列形式的参与,如地区委员会的选举,选择公民陪审团来监督有争议问题的报道,以及审计委托,例如确保少数群体的人得到代表。更大程度的民主也将在员工队伍中得到促进,通过良心条款赋予记者拒绝不道德任务的权力,媒体工会有强大的发言权,工人在BBC董事会中有代表。普遍主义是公共广播服务的一个关键原则,即媒体机构的建立是为了“为每个人服务”。可以说,在数字时代,最需要重申和重新构想的是公共服务原则,因为它与高度个性化的商业平台的逻辑背道而驰。为证明许可费对个人来说“物有所值”而进行的宣传活动可能无意中强化了这种消费者框架,将投资BBC作为一种集体利益的必要性置于次要地位。一个“人民的BBC”将由累进的家庭税来资助,而不是目前的累退的单一税许可费,而且人们普遍认为,富裕的人应该为这项公共服务支付更多的钱,就像NHS一样。虽然对NHS来说,这种累进形式的税收是通过与收入挂钩的国民保险缴款来实现的,但创建累进家庭税的最直接方式是将其与市政税挂钩。“人民BBC”的资金流将与电视所有权脱钩,而是根据一个家庭是否有互联网连接来征收,因为人们认识到,在未来,这将成为人们获取BBC内容的主要方式——就像电视牌照取代了以前的广播牌照一样。与此同时,将保证向所有家庭提供负担得起的全光纤宽带,以解决数字排斥问题,并确保这些技术能够充分发挥其潜力,促进参与。英国数字合作组织(British Digital Cooperative)将与英国广播公司(BBC)并列,负责创建具有最高无障碍标准的无监控数字平台。12 .公民媒体集会将被用来批判性地询问如何将普遍主义转化为数字环境,例如,通过选择他们希望他们的本地iPlayer有多个性化,以及他们想要突出什么样的内容。
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来源期刊
IPPR Progressive Review
IPPR Progressive Review Social Sciences-Political Science and International Relations
CiteScore
0.50
自引率
0.00%
发文量
43
期刊介绍: The permafrost of no alternatives has cracked; the horizon of political possibilities is expanding. IPPR Progressive Review is a pluralistic space to debate where next for progressives, examine the opportunities and challenges confronting us and ask the big questions facing our politics: transforming a failed economic model, renewing a frayed social contract, building a new relationship with Europe. Publishing the best writing in economics, politics and culture, IPPR Progressive Review explores how we can best build a more equal, humane and prosperous society.
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