The Benefits of the BBC

“Ladies and gentlemen, if we cannot debate that which troubles our society and more importantly troubles our government, then we cannot in all honesty, call ourselves a democracy.”

                       Freddie Lyon – The Hour, Season 1.

So the BBC has hit some bumps in the road of late, what with the Saville investigation and now the Newsnight debacle leading to the resignation of its Director General George Entwhistle after just fifty four days in the job. Not that it was ever going to be an easy job. Now the new DG, whoever he or she is, as well as the BBC Trust, are going to have the job of rebuilding the public’s trust in the BBC. Of restoring it to the national symbol that it is.

Whenever something like this happens, a few naysayers always pop up out of the woodwork to attack the BBC and its supposedly biased nature. And maybe it is biased slightly, but only in the way that all forms of media are in some way biased. If there’s anything I’ve learnt over the last year and a bit as a journalism student, it’s that everyone has an angle and everyone is trying to sell it. There’s no such thing as unbiased reporting.

But the most important thing about the BBC is not only that it produces brilliant and at times thought provoking, entertaining and enlightening programmes, but that it allows for the point encapsulated in the quote at the beginning of this blog. It allows us to debate that which troubles our society and gives fair and equal weight to all sides. Whatever it’s supposed bias, it allows everyone, on all sides of an argument, the chance to say their piece. That’s the point of Question Time, or the Andrew Marr Show, or Daily Politics. The BBC may disagree with someone’s view, but it doesn’t stop them from airing it.

In order to see what life would be like without the BBC we need only to look across the Atlantic to the US. They have numerous news networks, but all of them are privately funded and obviously biased. You have MSNBC and CNN on the liberal side of the aisle and Murdoch’s pet Fox News on the conservative side,(though some would argue that Fox is not so much a news program as the propaganda arm of the Republican party, with its blatant disregard for truth and facts).  They report what their viewers want to see, and what their investors tell them to report. It has reached a point where if you want proper unbiased analysis of the news, it would be better for you to turn over to Comedy Central and Jon Stewart’s Daily Show than watch any of the main news stations.

The BBC on the other hand, is publically funded. The only people it is responsible and accountable to are the licence payers. This frees it up to report freely and honestly, taking the time to weigh up and display both sides of a story. It is a vital tool of our democracy and we would be lost without it.

Yes it has hit some bumps in the road of late. But it will get over them. Because without it, Britain just wouldn’t be Britain any more.