Billett Lambasts White Paper As Produced By “A Bunch Of Inept Broadcasting Advisory Cronies”
The contents of the recent Communications White Paper began the discussion at MediaTel’s Question Time event last night with the panel reacting to culture secretary Chris Smith’s assertion that the media industry has broadly welcomed its proposals. Speaking to MediaTel last week, Smith said: “I think with the broad direction in which we are going and the broad principles which we’ve set in place … there is a general agreement that we’re on the right lines.”
The strongest rejection of this came from John Billett of the Billett Consultancy. “The White Paper is a disgrace,” he said. “It completely ducks the whole issue … When are we going to get some leadership out of this bunch of inept broadcasting advisory cronies? It is time we took the situation in hand and tried to write a White Paper for a Government which seems to be unable to do so.”
The most pressing question for most of the panel was the role of the BBC in the digital age. Chris Smith defended the White Paper’s proposals, which will allow the Corporation’s Board of governors to remain intact, albeit under closer scrutiny under Ofcom.
For Smith, this method achieves the right balance between commercial and state broadcasting. “I think [the proposals] achieve as level a playing field as it’s possible to do when you’re talking of very diverse organisations and diverse remits,” he said. He also believes that the BBC licence fee would remain for the foreseeable future as the “bedrock of funding for the BBC.”
Emily Bell, assistant editor of the Guardian and editor in chief of the Guardian Unlimited web network, agreed that the BBC should retain its current status and told the commercial sector to stop whinging. “Much as I would love BBC Online to be shut down tomorrow, actually it does exactly what it should be doing, which is providing a very good service for which we all pay. You should have one regulator for commercial and one for public service broadcasters and ITV should grow up and get over it,” she told the BBC Radio Theatre audience.
Capital Radio chief, David Mansfield, was worried about the effect on his own sector. He is optimistic about the legislation which will eventually come in but called for a definition of the role of state broadcasting. “The biggest issue affecting the commercial sector is the behaviour of the BBC, which is nothing short of outrageous … The commercial radio industry is micro-managed in terms of the records they can play and defining formats and people get fined if they stray. When [Matthew] Bannister came along [he said] ‘We don’t want play the records that commercial radio stations play.’ That’s exactly what they did; and when the charter was renewed they went back to being a top 40 station – just look at Radio 2. That couldn’t happen in the commercial sector and that’s the part of the playing field we feel is not really level.”
For the rest of the panel, however there were more important issues to deal with. Jim Hytner, director of marketing and communications at Channel 5, said the threat of one ITV is far worse. “We’re lobbying to ensure that ITV shouldn’t consolidate and if it does [we are lobbying] for a limit of 50% of NAR on sales houses and for London not to be a joint sell,” he said.