This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org. License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l. ------------------------ The UK government is right, the BBC is broken. Here’s how we fix it By: [] Date: 2022-01 The widespread debate following the UK government’s decision to freeze the BBC licence fee has exposed just how many friends have deserted the institution in recent years. While its defenders claim, against the odds, that the BBC is a beacon for impartiality and high journalistic standards, the clamour of the past few days has revealed a great deal of deep-seated dissatisfaction. This comes in many forms: those saying the BBC is irrelevant in the Netflix era; those who think it pushes an unpatriotic woke agenda; those who generally don’t like anything publicly funded; and those who see it is far too close to government and incapable of holding power to account. What is clear is that the BBC is losing public support, just as it is facing the most hostile government it has ever encountered. The BBC is a deeply flawed institution and its political coverage – always overly aligned with powerful interests – has become increasingly indefensible. But it also plays a crucial role in UK public life, providing a range of cultural programming, children’s content, educational resources and support for minority languages that would never be provided by the market. And in the current environment, a less powerful or even non-existent BBC would only place more power in the hands of Rupert Murdoch, Mark Zuckerberg and GB News. How this plays out over the next few years will depend, in part, on whether we are able to articulate and fight for a positive vision of a different kind of BBC – a ‘People’s BBC’ that is truly democratic and accountable to the public it serves. Articulating this vision for public broadcasting, and for our media system more generally, has been the central work of The BBC and Beyond, the campaign I have been coordinating for the past year as part of the Media Reform Coalition. We spent 2021 running public events (attended by around 30,000 people) and holding conversations and workshops with dozens of individuals and organisations to understand how they imagined a media system that could face the challenges of the future. Get our free Daily Email Get one whole story, direct to your inbox every weekday. Sign up now From these conversations, we wrote a Manifesto for a People’s Media, containing a comprehensive vision of a ‘media commons’ – a system with the public interest, community empowerment and collective care at its heart. This media commons would contain a transformed People’s BBC and Channel 4, as well as a thriving ecology of independent media organisations supported by significant new public resources. What would unite all of the different kinds of organisations in the media commons would be their commitment to core values – values of being independent, democratic, accountable and for everyone. [END] [1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/bbc-tv-licence-fee-freeze-uk-government-nations-regions/ [2] url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ OpenDemocracy via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/