The hollowing out of public service media: a constructivist institutionalist analysis of the commercialisation of BBC’s in-house production (original) (raw)
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Journal of Information Policy, 2018
As publicly funded organizations operating in a sector characterized by ever-greater private-sector provision, public service broadcasters need to build a robust case for their continuing legitimacy. This article examines the discursive strategies of the BBC in the United Kingdom in the context of the last three Royal Charter reviews. It shows that since the early 2000s, and particularly during the most recent Charter review, the BBC has deployed influential policy ideas on the creative economy to build a case that in keeping with the times emphasizes its economic contribution as well as its more traditional role in fostering political and cultural citizenship
Journal of Information Policy, 2018
As publicly funded organizations operating in a sector characterized by evergreater private-sector provision, public service broadcasters need to build a robust case for their continuing legitimacy. This article examines the discursive strategies of the BBC in the United Kingdom in the context of the last three Royal Charter reviews. It shows that since the early 2000s, and particularly during the most recent Charter review, the BBC has deployed influential policy ideas on the creative economy to build a case that in keeping with the times emphasizes its economic contribution as well as its more traditional role in fostering political and cultural citizenship.
Uncertain vision. Birt, Dyke and the reinvention of the BBC
Georgina Born's epic ethnographic study of the BBC opens a new window onto the practical dynamics of public service broadcasting. Despite the fact that the book deals with the tumultuous departure of Dyke and Davies from the BBC, Uncertain Vision is primarily about the BBC under Birt. It contends that a decline in creative culture at the BBC was detrimental to programmes and therefore also to the BBC's ability to deliver its public service mission, and argues that, by the end of the 1990s, changes at the BBC contributed to 'a risk-averse broadcast culture in which imitation, populism and sensationalism have become rife' (p. 11). One of the great values of this book lies in the way it exposes the connections between management practice and the impact it has on a creative community. Having set the scene thoroughly in terms of the political and regulatory context, the book traces in considerable detail changes that were initiated during the late 1990s and early 2000s in commissioning, production and employment at the BBC. We see how the changing management climate and the BBC's response to trends across public services during the period affected the BBC's creative culture, and then how the relative health of that culture was expressed through the programmes produced. In this way Uncertain Vision forensically examines the workings of the BBC in a way certainly not seen since Burns's 1977 study of the organization. 1 The book is structured around extensive extracts of research interviews and contemporary accounts by key staff and commentators, many of which make fascinating and amusing reading and which are often thoroughly illuminating, even for someone already familiar with the organization. The book also includes
Re-defining ‘Public Value’: the BBC’s real worth
“Everywhere I go, the BBC is the envy of the world, until I return here and we discuss what’s to be done about the BBC”, says ex-Director-General Greg Dyke. This paper draws on a research project exploring the public valuation of the BBC, finding its true estimation poorly reflected in other UK media, and in important ways by the BBC itself. Drawing not just on interviews with leading figures from across the creative industries, but a wide spectrum of those whose work is inextricably linked to and reflected by the public broadcaster, from politicians and public servants to scientists and sportsmen, the study reveals that they take the BBC for granted and imagine it as inviolable as they thought the NHS. The paper questions these assumptions and goes on to critically interrogate the political economic context in which they have become established, Dealing with a licence free freeze, ongoing cuts and commercial intentions, the BBC is committed to “Delivering Quality First”, a gnomic phrase requiring unpicking. The BBC Trust subjects its services to a ‘Public Value Test’, where they must “outweigh any potentially damaging impact on the market”. This emphasis on market ideology, which has seized the public sphere largely unchallenged, is neither supported by economic fact nor the greater part of the BBC’s audience, who must pay three times the licence fee for the most limited BSkyB entertainment package. 97% of the UK adult audience in 2011 still consumed at least 15 minutes of BBC output a week, with the average being over 19 hours. The paper offers a critique of the notion of public value in neoliberal times.
Reflexivity and Ambivalence: Culture, Creativity and Government in the BBC (2002)
Cultural Values: Journal of Cultural Research, issue on Culture & Governance, v. 6, n. 1-2, pp. 65-90.
The BBC is an exemplary institution in the government of culture. In the context of the neo-liberalism of the 1990s it became also a key experimental site for the development of a new culture of government, one in which notions of markets, effi ciency, accountability and audit were translated into the public sector. The focus of this paper is an analysis, based on ethnographic research, of the BBC's culture of markets, accountability and audit in the mid to late nineties. Indebted in part to the Foucauldian concern with the relations between forms of political rationality and specifi c technologies of government, the paper charts the substance and the anti-creative effects of these techniques. But it stresses also their contestability and negotiability, how they evoke ambivalence and coexist with diverse forms of resistance. In particular, through the case of the BBC, the paper sketches the contours of a sociology of refl exivity based on a more differentiated account of refl exivity than is found in the speculative, often normativelydirected writings of Beck, Giddens and Lash. It points to the layering of refl exivities in and around the contemporary BBC, and to the competing and antagonistic refl exivities that may inhabit any social space.
The UK independent sector has been an important economic success story in UK plc. But it has also added a great deal of cultural value through the shared commitment to, and understanding of, public service broadcasting (PSB) that runs across independent television and digital media companies (Indies). In turn, this investment in PSB has driven economic growth in the sector. In this report, produced as part of a two-year Arts & Humanities Research Council project (AH-H0185622-2) on ‘multiplatform public service broadcasting’, focusing on factual/specialist factual as a case study, we detail the role Indies play in PSB. We set out how PSB informs the production cultures of independent companies, the tensions that are experienced between profit and public service and the impact multiplatform commissioning and production practices have had on the sector. Our conclusion is that a fragile ‘compact’ between the PSBs and the independent sector underpins much of the cultural and economic success of the UK’s television and multiplatform industries. This compact is built on the balancing of economic reward with the cultural commitment to the purposes, characteristics and production modes of PSB found across the independent sector, which provides benefits to UK audiences, the working lives of producers in the sector, and UK plc as a whole.
2004
This thesis examines the developing role of television channels in the delivery of public service broadcasting in Britain, 1996 - 2002. Starting from a hypothesis that channels are distinct television products in their own right and increasingly important in organising how broadcasters think about their audiences, it argues that channels have identities expressed through their schedules and determined by their relationship to genre and target audience. Based on research at the BBC (from 1998 - 2002), involving interviews with key staff and the analysis of BBC documents, this study examines the television broadcasting functions of commissioning, scheduling, marketing and audience research. It illustrates how these activities created specific identities for television channels and how these identities shaped the programming that reached television screens. It reveals how channels became increasingly important in the television landscape as buyers in a more demand-led commissioning economy and acted as a focus for the creation of media brands. It then discusses how the evolution of a channel portfolio enabled each channel to play a specific role in fulfilling public service obligations and looks at how different models of audience emerged in relation to the different public service television channels, charting the decline of the mass audience and the emergence of the visualisation of audiences in a more individualised way. The thesis concludes by addressing some implications of these developments. It looks at how the different models of audience in circulation affect debates about quality television, and how changing ideas about the construction of public service channels may impact on the regulation of broadcasting. Finally, it explores the effect of multiple channels, each targeted at specific audiences, on the concept of a unitary public sphere and speculates that c
Public Policy and Independent Television Production In the U.K
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 16522354 2008 11073473, 2015
The structure and performance of the independent television production sector in the UK have been strongly affected by public policy interventions. Such interventions have introduced more competition and have generally sought to strengthen the position of 'indies' by, for example, raising levels of demand for their output amongst domestic vertically integrated broadcasters. However, the efficacy of such policies in terms of developing a thriving and economically successful independent television production sector is open to question. This article provides an analysis of the effects of recent policy initiatives on the creative work environments and on the business circumstances and behaviors of UK independent program-makers.
Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies, 2013
, Channel 4 celebrated its thirtieth birthday. Although a handful of independent production companies existed before Channel 4, the date also effectively marked the thirtieth anniversary of the UK's independent television production sector. In the last decade, this sector has expanded to include a growing number of digital agencies and seen the rise of a number of integrated television and digital media production companies. The papers in 'In Debate' stem from a conference held at the British Film Institute, London, to mark that anniversary. Speakers from both the industry and academia gathered to reflect on what role independent companies-'Indies'-have played in public service broadcasting (PSB) over those 30 years-and will play in its future. Prior to Channel 4's launch, as a series of trailers for the new broadcaster playfully pointed out, viewers had more buttons on their television sets than they knew what to do with. As audiences began tuning in to Channel 4's signal, they found the new broadcaster offered up programming choices from a diverse array of voices. Whilst, as John Ellis argues here, the programming forms remained largely the same, the radical nature of Channel 4 lay in its publisher-broadcaster model. Channel 4 gave birth to an eclectic array of companies-from the small, to the niche, such as the gay and lesbian production company Abseil, through to a range of companies that would eventually become very large. Since Channel 4's launch, the independent sector has flourished. Initially almost solely reliant on the new publisher-broadcaster, a '25 per cent campaign' by producers saw the 1990 Broadcasting Act introduce a requirement for the BBC to source at least 25 per cent from Indies. Indies therefore became responsible for supplying a quarter of PSB content on BBC1 and BBC2 (excluding News)putting them at the heart of PSB: a role that has only grown. 2006's Window of Creative Competition (WOCC) at the BBC extended this role, ensuring a further 25 per cent of BBC television content is contestable by the Independent sector. Moreover, Indies' role in PSB reached far beyond television in the last decade.