The new chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies (see Davies Announced As New BBC Chairman), has dimissed the calls being made by commercial rivals for a level playing field as “bogus”, adding that he has yet to meet anyone who would give up the BBC for the sake of the licence fee.
In an interview with the FT’s Creative Business today, Davies, who is taking on the task of keeping the BBC in its current healthy financial state while facing the challenges of the digital revolution and the impending changes to media regulation, defended the organisation’s position in the UK media.
The recent launch of two new digital children’s channels and plans for digital entertainment channel BBC3 have prompted accusations of unfair trading from several sources, along with calls for the BBC to submit to regulation and financial transparency under the proposed new super-regulator, Ofcom. In his interview, Davies insists that, since Ofcom will, when it comes to the BBC, oversee financial regulation, have full powers over taste and decency issues and decide national and regional programming quotas, the corporation has not “escaped Scot-free from the Ofcom process.”
Furthermore, he argues that “The playing field is enormously more level than it has ever been before” and insists that the BBC’s commercial competitors are trying to marginalise it and “push it into a smaller corner of the broadcasting environment.”
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