Cover Story

Reform the BBC, don't kill it

20 September 2003

The BBC is biased, and much of its programming is coarse and crude, but, says Peter Hitchens, it would be profoundly unconservative to privatise it

In this confusing world, 'By their enemies shall ye know them' is often a better guide to an institution's virtue than finding out who its friends are. The BBC now faces the intolerant fury of the Blair government, which regards anything short of cow-eyed devotion as raging hostility. This is surely to the Corporation's credit, whatever it may have done in the past. For years it has also been the target of Rupert Murdoch, whose interest in the subject is so obvious that it is almost enjoyable. Yet, confusingly, it is also loathed by people who would normally prefer to gulp down a large draught of hemlock than to be found in the same bunker as Anthony Blair or Mr Murdoch.

Downing Street's blustering pretence that it is deeply offended and hurt by the Today programme looks suspiciously like the pretext for some seriously anti-BBC legislation at the first available opportunity. It is strange to find Charles Moore, editor of the Daily Telegraph, aiding this suspect cause. True, his paper's proprietor, Lord Black of Crossharbour, can see no good in the BBC because of a justified impatience with its hostility towards Israel and a less justified scorn for its doubts about the Iraq war. But the Telegraph's editor knows that there are many strands of conservatism that disagree with Lord Black.

Mr Moore was mocked this week by the Guardian for his new campaign against the licence fee. They pointed out that commercial radio and satellite TV were unlikely to be heard or seen very much in the cultured and elevated Moore household, and they were partly right to do so – but only partly. Much of the BBC's programming is as coarse and crude as anything on the commercial channels. Very little of the Corporation's television output these days is designed for educated people of any class, and that is mostly confined to BBC 4, a fig-leaf channel available only through the sort of technology that its target audience generally does not have. A depressing amount of BBC radio is no better. Can there be any justification for the programmes of Ms Sara Cox being financed by a poll-tax on the homes of the honest poor? Even the good stations, Radios Three and Four, are pervaded by a smug liberal ethos so strong that thousands of listeners frequently find themselves shouting at their radios in impotent rage. In a new and disturbing development, Radio Four seems to be quietly changing its aural typeface, as familiar voices depart and are replaced by newsreaders and announcers who speak in distracting regional accents, or mysteriously flatten their a's even though they are plainly not from the North. The change looks like a cultural cringe to the New Britain.