| Debating the Contours of Public Space |
Public Event |
| Cyfrwng Conference: Convergence of New Platforms , National Library of Wales Aberystwyth , May 6, 2008 |
The subject of public space- its boundaries, its contours, its defence- is a theme that runs throughout Cyfrwng/ Cydgyfeiriant. Justin Lewis of the University of Cardiff draws attention to a speech in April to the British Television Society by Peter Bazalguette. The proposals he floats include the selling of Radio 1, Radio 2, BBC Worldwide and Channel 4. They may be forced to abide by some public service aims but ITV and Five should be released from public service obligations. He proposes charging them for spectrum following the digital switchover. The £150m currently being used by the BBC to fund digital switchover he calls “excess license fees.” In a true blurring of categories Bazalguette asks "Why shouldn't Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre commission and distribute video drama? Why shouldn't Nicholas Serota at the Tate make art programmes? Why shouldn't the Imperial War Museum produce history documentaries? At last some genuine plurality in the supply of PSB programming, with the added bonus of a search engine to market it all." The question asked is why we should not enter an era of borderless cultural free-for-all? For the answer, read the Peter Hall Diaries or Richard Eyre’s “National Service.” The production of world-standard theatre is a fulltime job without its degradation into a kind of cultural slurry. In fact, as evidenced by the stage production “The History Boys” multi-media has in any case moved significantly into theatre. The subject of public space has a theorist and champion in David Marquand, policy advisor turned MP turned academic. His 2004 book “The Decline of the Public: the Hollowing-out of Citizenship” tracks, in his view, the thirty-year assault both intellectually and practically on the public domain by a mixture of neo-liberals, marketisers and commercial interests. “There is nothing natural about the public domain. It is a gift of history and fairly recent history at that. It is literally a priceless gift. The goods of the public domain cannot be valued by market criteria, but no less precious for that.” A plain speaker Marquand sees public service broadcasting’s travails in this context. “The question of whether or not Andrew Gilligan” he writes on www.opendemocracy.net “was subject to adequate editorial control, is a red herring. The real point is that a professional, public-service broadcasting organisation, with an overriding duty to pursue the public interest by maintaining scrupulous accuracy in its news output while steadfastly holding the ring for free comment, had no business employing Gilligan in the first place. “Gilligan was a scoop-hunter, the journalistic equivalent of a pig hunting for truffles in the clammy soil of south-west France. When he had a scoop (or apparent scoop) to masticate, nothing else mattered – not the long-term reputation and standing of the BBC, still less loyalty to his source. The only thing that counted was to hit the headlines. Scoop-hunting à la Gilligan is not an ornament of a free press, as a depressingly large number of journalistic commentators seem to think. It is a cancer gnawing at its entrails. And it is utterly at variance with the public service ethic that the BBC is supposed to embody.” “Gilligan and Campbell deserve each other – are in fact mirror images of each other. They are both symptoms of the same sickness: products of a malaise which is steadily eroding the values and practices of citizenship, on which the public realm depends. The BBC hired Gilligan, the obsessive scoop-hunter, because it put ratings ahead of meticulous public service.” The scope of television’s public space is under scrutiny. The Conservative party is toying with the notion of "top slicing" the licence fee to pay for public service content from the BBC's rivals. Culture Secretary Andy Burnham has floated a number of possibilities, including allowing rival broadcasters access to the BBC's facilities in the regions. If the delegates in Aberystwyth are out in force in the defence of public space it is probably because its determined shrinkers were out there plotting it. “Top-slicing” is one of those greasy metaphors that slide into public discourse without being properly examined. As a speaker mordantly put it the circling hawks put him in mind of the knitters around the foot of the guillotine. Now that was an age that really knew about “top-slicing”. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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