The B.B.C. and its Critics
Fr HE little breeze over the B.B.C.'s New Year's Eve broadcast has died down, but it has brought the whole position of the B.B.C. as a privileged monopoly into question. That is no bad thing. An established institution, such as the B.B.C. has already become, tends rapidly to be taken for granted and it is as well for the extent, and the limits, of the liberty accorded it to be reconsidered from time to time. From the outset this country decided, for better or worse, to put broad- casting on a basis radically different from that favoured by the United States and more Continental countries. There wireless is almost wholly commercial. Listeners have no licence to pay for, and time on the air is bought by advertisers just as advertisement space is bought in the columns of a newspaper. That system was definitely rejected here in favour of a monopoly under indirect public control. It was a bold experiment, for the few existing public utility undertakings of the kind, such as the Port of London Authority, were local in the scope of their operations and provided no real precedent for the application of that method to an institution whose voice was soon to be speaking in half the homes in the country.
After ten years there can be no question that the experiment has abundantly justified itself. If it be asked whether the B.B.C. gives universal satisfaction the answer, of course, is that it does not, and never will and never can. It has to cater for a vast diversity of tastes, and whereas the newspaper-reader can turn at once to the items that interest him and cut the rest, the wireless listener, apart from the oppOrtunity which alternative programmes offer, has either to listen to a good deal that he finds distasteful or dull or put his set out of action till the items that do interest him are due. Devotees of vaudeville are no mare likely to appreciate lectures on philosophy than philosophers are to patronize vaudeville, but the 'B.B.C. must clearly cater for both. These, however, are mere incidental difficulties, which cause no serious trouble and provoke no real dissatisfaction. They are, indeed, an evidence of a catholicity which the B.B.C. could not fail to practise without falling short of the fulfilment of its function as the single purveyor of wireless instruction and entertainment to the people of this country. And minor complaints, of which there will always be plenty, do not shake the conclusion that the B.B.C. has in its first decade developed along sound, enterprising and broadly salutary lines. The services it renders are an indispensable feature in the national life and individual lives are consistently stimulated and enlarged by the programmes it carries into every home.
The very magnitude of the influence such an institution can exercise over human thought and human ideas makes it necessary that its operations should be kept under some ultimate but effective control. But it must be a control that does not involve constant restraint. It is of the essence of the B.B.C. that it should have freedom to develop and to experiment in all directions. Anything like official control would be disastrous. A broadcasting corporation put formally under a Govern- ment department would be working in shackles, with fatal results. The arrangement actually adopted, whereby the Government appoints a board of five directors, ultimate and final responsibility for the Corporation's activities resting (through the Postmaster-General) with Parliament, has worked admirably and stands in no need of revision. There is no doubt in some quarters a tendency to look on the B.B.C. as a dangerous institution that needs to be held in check. Mr. Churchill attacks it because it does not accept his offer to make a broadcast speech on publiC affairs. Mr. Lansbury attacks it because he considers it is unfair to the Labour Party. And there are, of course, occasional little contretemps, like the New Year's Eve reference to Poland, which serve as an opportune reminder that the B.B.C., with its position as a semi-official monopoly, must be like a newspaper without an editorial column, providing a platform for all and sundry, but committing itself to no expressions of opinion of its own.
That, of course, does not end the matter. It would be possible enough for the B.B.C., by its selection of speakers and subjects, to influence opinion deliberately in particular directions. Within definite limits, indeed, it quite properly may. There are certain causes, for example peace and international understanding, so generally approved that the B.B.C. is perfectly justified in doing all it can to further them, though there will always be a small minority of critics to complain that its zeal carries it too far in that direction. And admittedly it is only within a very limited field that programmes can be rightly shaped towards a definite end. In the main the B.B.C. must be simply objective, and in the main it is. The critics who occasionally complain that they hear too much opinion, sometimes controversial opinion, over the wireless would be surprised if they knew with what meticulous care the B.B.C. scrutinizes every speaker's manuscript in advance to make sure that nothing that can give reasonable offence in any quarter has crept in. That involves an obvious danger of making contributions colourless, but most unbiassed judges will agree that that danger has been avoided with remarkable success.
To revert to the episode that has brought the B.B.C. particularly into discussion in the past fortnight, there are some signs of a desire to make Parliamentary control over the corporation rather more of a reality than it has been in the past. Certain questions, for example, have been put on the pages regarding coming items in the B.B.C. programmes. There must be no confusion of mind between Parliamentary control and Parliamentary interference. The former refers only to large matters of policy, or conceivably to lesser lapses becoming so numerous that their cumulative effect made it necessary to take account of them. If it had to be exercised with any frequency it would be a sign that the whole broad- casting system needed overhauling. It must exist in the background, for the monopoly of broadcasting is too tremendous a power to be exercised without control, and the control can be nothing less than that of Parliament.
But nothing could be more unfortunate than the development of a habit of Parliamentary interference calculated to tie the hands of the actual directors of broadcasting or to encourage the idea that they were not enjoying public confidence. Half the problem of broad- casting in this country in its early days has been to combine .enterprise and initiative- at the centre -with a certain inevitable measure of control. That compromise has been achieved with astonishing success. Semi-official monopoly though it be, a corporation with neither soul to be saved nor body to be kicked, the B.B.C. has given evidence of remarkable virility and originality, and non: committal though it must be fundamentally, it has in fact developed something very like a personality of its own. Already an educational force of vast importance, it stands actually only on the threshold of its work. The general instruction to it from its millions of clients, who are at the same time ultimately its masters, must be to go on as it is going, assured against factious interferenco from any source.