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Friday 5 September 2008

BBC at it again

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From the Guardian:

BBC Hires CBS veteran to target US.

The BBC has hired the executive producer behind the controversial relaunch of US network CBS's Evening News with daytime anchor Katie Couric to oversee a nightly bulletin aimed at US audiences.

Rome Hartman, who is also a former producer on long-running CBS current affairs show 60 Minutes, will develop and serve as executive producer of the 60-minute nightly BBC World News programme, which will air on BBC America and the global BBC World channel.

The BBC said the new US-anchored show was a "major initiative" and would "showcase the best of BBC journalism for American audiences".

Yes. But WHY?

Isn't this just so typical of the BBC's fundamental problem - that it behaves as if it's raison d'etre is to be a global media giant, and to take on commercial media conglomerates?

Commercial success ought to be entirely irrelevant to the BBC. The only case for a subsidised broadcaster is to provide that which the market does not. For myself, I can think of no such market failure. There is literally nothing which the BBC provides which could not be done without public subsidy - and, in the case of its news output, would not be done a lot better if it was denied an income guarantee to carry on with its biased assumptions.

But let's assume for the sake of argument that BBC news is entirely unbiased (unlike, according to this - ludicrous - argument, commercial channels) and that no other channels provide serious documentaries and such like. It is entirely because they are uncommercial that the reason for a subsidy exists. So the idea of a commercially successful BBC undercuts ab initio the case for public funding (the same argument applies, in spades, to Channel Four).

There is one - and one alone - argument for the BBC to divert its attention to BBC America and BBC World - propaganda. That, as with Radio Free Europe or Voice of America in the Cold War, such broadcasting is a vital plank in the war to defend Western civilisation. So I can see the argument for a publicly finded Arab-language news service (although not, Lord help us, run by the Western self-hating BBC).

But in that context, if there is one country and one audience we - and thus the BBC - do not need to target is it the US.

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