KEEPING CLEAN THE AIR-WAVES
The media: Paul Johnson
welcomes the Rees-Mogg appointment but only as a stop-gap
THAT television is a 'hot' medium, which generates extraordinary passions and pre- judices, has again been demonstrated by the verbal violence which has greeted the appointment of Sir William Rees-Mogg to chair the proposed Broadcasting Standards Council. Since the Left effectively controls a large slice of television — including most of current affairs, documentary and drama — it regards any attempt to supervise the medium as censorship of the most reaction- ary kind. So Rees-Mogg, a perfectly harm- less fellow, indeed too harmless in my view, has been subjected to a good deal of Ill-informed abuse. According to the editor of Marxism Today he 'obviously views himself as the moral guardian of the nation' and as such 'deserves (and re- ceives) a fair degree of ridicule'. The New Statesman called him 'a small-minded prude'. The Observer published a profile of him which was a compendium of every petty smear it could scavenge — a pitiful haul despite all its efforts, and presented in so confused and ill-written a shape as to damage itself rather than Sir William.
The truth is Rees-Mogg cannot fill the bogey role assigned him by the Left as a political Lord Chamberlain, because the facts do not fit. He is not small-minded but rather broad-minded, as his record as editor of the Times proves. He is not a prude; the word for him is eccentric or perhaps egregious. He certainly doesn't see himself as moral guardian of the nation — he leaves that vainglorious notion to the editors of This Week, Panorama and the like — but as someone charged with the difficult task of finding out what standards the public wants for broadcasting and whether they can be enforced in practice. His manner is patrician but his instincts, unlike those of the television establish- ment, are often demotic. He is certainly a brave man, but whether he is a wise one in taking on such a job remains to be seen. With his accumulated record as BBC gov- ernor and Arts Council Chairman, he is in danger of appearing a caricature quango- monger, a mini Lord Goodman.
Moreover, it is perfectly true that the Government, as its critics assert, is ambiva- lent about broadcasting. There is a funda- mental contradiction between its desire for a free market in broadcasting, with the maximum number of channels and the minimum of monopoly privilege, and its fear, which most of us share, of the unblinking basilisk eye of the television set which peers balefully into our living- rooms. There is also a conflict of attitudes between Number Ten, where both Mrs Thatcher herself and her adviser Professor Brian Griffiths favour fundamental change, and the Home Office, where Douglas Hurd wants to preserve as much of the old BBC-ITV duopoly as he can. Of course if Mrs Thatcher had been clear in her own mind exactly what kind of new system she wanted, we would have had it already. But while detesting the present television set-up, she does not yet know how to replace it. It is a sign of her uncertainty that, in trying to shape broad- casting policy she has behaved very un- characteristically. As a rule she rightly believes government should take decisions, rather than appoint committees and quan- gos. But so nervous was she about the BBC that she behaved like Harold Wilson and set up the Peacock Committee, which allowed itself — as might have been predicted — to be bamboozled by the moguls of the television and advertising industries into endorsing both the BBC license fee and the ITV monopoly of advertising, a disastrous verdict. Mean- while the quangos have proliferated. In addition to existing bodies such as the BBC governors, the IBA and the Cable Author- ity, Douglas Hurd is creating a regulatory authority for radio, as well as Rees-Mogg's BSC. All this is very un-Thatcherite.
However it should be said in Mrs Thatcher's defence that there are inherent and formidable difficulties in deciding broadcasting policy. The technology is changing so fast that it is difficult for governments to keep up. Any legislation is bound to puff and pant behind the gadget- ry. Even the entrepreneurs and engineers of the industry cannot see more than a few years ahead. As a member of the Cable Authority, I have watched alternating waves of excitment and pessimism, and learned how easy it is for elaborate statu- tory frameworks to be rendered irrelevant and obsolete. Moreover, the wish to com- bine the widest possible market in broad- casting with the recognition that it is a dangerous medium which must be effect- ively supervised, contradictory though it may be, is one Mrs Thatcher shares with the vast majority of the British people.
Ideally broadcasting should be seen as electronic publishing and subjected to no more direct supervision than the printed word. Originally printed material required the imprimatur ('let it be printed') of the Church; the licensing authority in the London area was the Bishop of London, one reason why the earliest publishing houses grew up around St Paul's cathedral, then spread down Ludgate Hill into Fleet Street. When the authority of the Church was removed, printing became subject to the sanctions of ordinary law. That is as it should be. We should strive to place electronic publishing in the same position if possible. Because of the nature of broad- casting, which involves the allocation of wavelengths and franchises, some kind of direct public intervention is inevitable. But it should be kept to the absolute minimum. There should be one, small-sized supervis- ory body for the whole of broadcasting television and radio, cable and satellite operating under a statute which regulates with a light hand but includes a safety clause allowing rapid action to cope with unforeseen technical change. Such a body should award and withhold franchises but should not run property, like transmitters, nor interfere in editorial policy. Any prop- erty should be privatised and editorial misdemeanours should be left to the courts.
For all these reasons it would be best to regard Rees-Mogg's Broadcasting Stan- dards Council as a temporary arrangement to bridge an awkward gap between the old paternalist duopoly system and the new free market one regulated by simple sta- tute. The days when boards of the great and the good decide what is right for us are drawing to a close. Instead we shall have a more democratic procedure in which Par- liament lays down the rules and a judge and jury interpret them. Reluctantly or not, the Government is moving inexorably towards a general statute regulating media conduct, which will include its long-term broadcasting plans. This will make such bodies as the Press Council and the BSC unnecessary. But in the meantime Rees- Mogg has an important job to do in achieving some kind of public consensus on a broadcasting code, which can be made the basis for future legislation, and I wish him well.
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