{"title":"The people's broadcasters","authors":"Christopher Day","doi":"10.1111/newe.12298","DOIUrl":"10.1111/newe.12298","url":null,"abstract":"<p>People use the PSBs in different ways, with some watching television (either live or on demand), others listening to radio and podcasts, and still others relying on the BBC's website and social media feed for updates. We consume media in increasingly personalised and fragmented ways and, as a result, some have argued that the era of public service broadcasting is over.2</p><p>Now compare this with <i>Small Axe</i>, a series of films that premiered on BBC One in 2020 and whose focus on West Indian immigrants to London firmly places it within a particular time and location. It tells us something about our own country, and the people who live here. We gain a greater understanding of our fellow citizens from watching it. The same could be said about <i>Derry Girls</i>, Channel 4's sitcom evoking the final years of the Troubles in a Catholic community in Northern Ireland. Now on its third series and popular with the public and critics alike (it even received a coveted reference in <i>The Simpsons</i>), it has introduced new audiences to a complex historical conflict that has continuing political resonances today. Would any broadcaster without a public service remit have dared to take on a programme about a period in British history that is still so highly contentious?</p><p>We could talk about many other programmes that needed our PSBs to be made – the BBC's <i>Hollow Crown</i> series of Shakespeare history plays, for example, or <i>It's A Sin</i>, which has won numerous awards since it was broadcast in early 2021 and was rejected by several broadcasters before being commissioned by Channel 4. One function of PSBs is to produce the content about Britain that other broadcasters won't; they are able to take risks, which means accepting some programmes will be failures but enables others to succeed wonderfully.</p><p>The PSB ecosystem, within the wider range of broadcasting outlets, is set up in a way that incentivises producing the best possible programmes. As David Hendy, the official historian of the BBC, puts it, “public service broadcasting is always, in the most fundamental way, <i>for</i> us”.3 It is not for shareholders and it is not about maximising profits. It is about delivering the best for viewers and listeners, and that means programmes that are culturally distinctive and develop Britons’ understanding of the society in which they live.</p><p>Only PSBs provide meaningful investment in these programmes that reflect Britain. In 2019, they spent £2.8 billion on original UK TV content, compared with £727 million by UK-based commercial providers (such as Sky) and streaming services.4 Each year, PSBs show around 32,000 hours of first-run original UK content; this compares with the paltry 182 hours of similar content from the US-based streamers in 2019.5 Without the windows into our own society provided by PSBs programming, our understanding of our country and our shared sense of community would be diminished.</p><p>As well as broadcasting the ","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/newe.12298","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44168523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Three lessons for the future of public service broadcasting","authors":"Precious Chatterje-Doody, Rhys Crilley","doi":"10.1111/newe.12296","DOIUrl":"10.1111/newe.12296","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the context of the war in Ukraine, and as significant social and political debates continue to rage inside the UK, the BBC has had to tread a fine line between its commitment to providing due impartiality on topics of political contention and the dangers of implying false equivalence between evidenced and non-evidenced viewpoints in the name of balance.4 However, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has brought to the fore not only the importance of the constant striving towards impartial coverage, but also some of the broader reasons why this continues to matter. The war in Ukraine reveals three key issues about the future of public service broadcasting at times of global crisis.</p><p>Politicians and journalists are two of the least trusted professions in UK society.5 Although this reflects long-term social trends over time, the issue of trust has become even more marked online: across the globe, nearly 60 per cent of people are concerned about how to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake on the internet.6</p><p>Indeed, since the 1990s, Russia has gradually refined its approach to combining media and military operations.13 A catastrophic media free-for-all in the first Chechen campaign prompted restrictions on media access in the second. Foreign PR firms were employed during the Georgian war of 2018; blatant lies accompanied the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russian troops; and a myriad of conspiracy theories and disinformation were spread around the 2018 Skripal poisonings.14</p><p>Russia clearly intended to apply its lessons learned from years of information campaigns to this year's invasion of Ukraine too, but after being on the back foot in recent years, political and media institutions in the West have begun to push back. As Russian troops congregated around Ukraine's borders, US and UK intelligence agencies leaked information to the media, pre-emptively and repeatedly debunking Russian denials of an imminent invasion. Once Russia did invade Ukraine, few in the West were convinced that anyone other than Russia was to blame for the war.</p><p>Russia's invasion of Ukraine comes at a time of widespread global smartphone and social media access. In this media ecology, a variety of news outlets, brands, individuals, influencers and institutions vie for our time on our personalised news feeds; it takes something special to go viral and grab our attention. Although Russian state-funded international broadcasters like RT and Sputnik had previously built up a reputation for being effective viral influencers, when Russia has most needed to convince foreign audiences that Putin's actions are legitimate, they have proven singularly ineffective – even before the various bans and blocks.</p><p>One of the key reasons for this has been the effectiveness of Ukraine's leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his communications team in touching people's hearts across the globe. As a former actor and comedian, Zelenskyy clearly understands how to engag","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/newe.12296","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49164203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Building a vision for a People's BBC","authors":"Deborah Grayson","doi":"10.1111/newe.12291","DOIUrl":"10.1111/newe.12291","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p><p>Out of these conversations we wrote a <i>Manifesto for a People's Media</i>,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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 an","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/newe.12291","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49420028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The role of the state and the market in delivering net zero","authors":"MP Sir Bernard Jenkin","doi":"10.1111/newe.12285","DOIUrl":"10.1111/newe.12285","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/newe.12285","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45735316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Delivering net zero","authors":"Emily Shuckburgh","doi":"10.1111/newe.12276","DOIUrl":"10.1111/newe.12276","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The 2021 Glasgow Climate Pact rightly expressed “alarm and utmost concern” at the impacts of climate change that are already being felt around the world, following repeated instances of death and destruction brought by extreme heat, floods and wildfires.1 It explicitly recognised that further impacts will be much lower at a 1.5C temperature increase than at 2C, and it stated that this means almost halving global carbon dioxide emissions this decade and reaching net zero around mid-century.</p><p>More needs to be done to close the considerable gap between the ambition to limit climate change and the promised emission reductions. Pledges made by countries in Glasgow on issues such as deforestation, electric vehicles and methane need to be translated into real policy and action, accountability mechanisms need to be strengthened, and international climate finance needs to be bolstered. Nevertheless, a clear commitment to a global net-zero future has been made by global governments, mirrored throughout much of the private sector, and the principal challenge now is one of delivery on an accelerated timeframe.</p><p>With the alarm bell still ringing from Glasgow, the single most important thing is that pledges are translated into accelerated whole-economy action so that this vision and the ambition of net zero rapidly become a global reality.</p>","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/newe.12276","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47366047","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Climate action after COP26","authors":"MP The Rt Hon Alok Sharma","doi":"10.1111/newe.12286","DOIUrl":"10.1111/newe.12286","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":37420,"journal":{"name":"IPPR Progressive Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/newe.12286","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45281407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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