Look back at the MGEITF
In his latest weekly column, Raymond Snoddy looks back at the weekend’s MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, where Murdoch Jr gave both barrells to the BBC and Ofcom and various rumours turned out to have a bit of weight.
Often by now the festival would be a fading memory. The MacTaggart Memorial lecturer would have made his pitch for a new job, or produced some outlandish plan for a total restructuring of the television industry that would be debated in the bar and quickly forgotten.
Not this time. There are real issues to discuss going forward and gossip and intrigue that will keep everyone amused for the rest of the year. And this time what happened off the pitch in the bars and coffee stops was every bit as interesting as what happened on it.
At first glance, MacTaggart lecturer James Murdoch seemed to conform to all the stereotypes, apart from looking for a job. He has already got one of those. But with naked self-interest and bare-faced cheek the young Murdoch called for rampant dismantling of current regulation – which represents analogue attitudes in a digital age, creationism as opposed to Darwinism.
He then reloads and fires again this time calling for a far, far smaller BBC, or as he termed it, state sponsored information.
Who precisely would benefit from such a situation if it ever happened, one might wonder.
Then in his last sentence Murdoch took another final, fatal step too far by arguing: “The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.”
Newsnight‘s Kirsty Wark punctured that one straight away by inquiring whether he would take BBC programmes off his Asian satellite service to appease the Chinese as his father had done. Answer came there very little.
And in the best fringe battle of the festival, the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston enraged the News Corp executive by inquiring whether massive deregulation of the media was such a good idea when the same process applied to banking had nearly brought the world economy to its knees. Mr Murdoch’s angry reaction suggests he is rather unused to having his views vigorously challenged.
James Murdoch made it far too easy to dismiss his arguments by using red-neck, pejorative American terminology such as state-sponsored information. Does he really think the Today programme is state-sponsored information or Channel 4 News?
Or indeed that the BBC should be prevented from offering a “free” online service given the fact that it has been paid for already through the licence fee?
It was all a bit unfortunate because Murdoch the younger had many valid points to make. He is undoubtedly right that there is far too much micro-managed regulation and it does smack of the analogue rather than the digital world.
The enormous financial fire-power of the BBC has been mainly thrown into sharp relief by the effects of the recession on the commercial sector. But it is difficult to argue that the BBC has not been politically insensitive, to say the least, by seeking to expand into so many areas. The purchase of the Lonely Planet guides always looked like a step too far, for example, even though there was nothing legally to prevent it.
James Murdoch will probably be content in the knowledge that he is likely to get at least some of his way if, as seems increasingly inevitable, David Cameron becomes the next Prime Minister of this country.
Cameron is on record as saying that the activities of regulators such as Ofcom have to be reined in and although he is a resolute supporter of the BBC it is clear that he has a smaller BBC in mind.
Off-stage, apart from the Murdoch v Peston verbal fisticuffs, the place was rife with top quality rumours which had the unusual merit of almost certainly being true.
Channel 4 chief executive Andy Duncan could only manage non-denial denials of his imminent departure from the channel – which could open up a new career opportunity for ITV’s Peter Fincham.
Edinburgh was also rife with reports that former BSkyB chief-executive Tony Ball, the radical outsider for ITV chief-exec, was now very much the front-runner. Front-runner certainly but the deal has not yet been done and dusted and if it is judged that ITV’s fortunes are on the turn for the better, the internal steady-as-she goes candidate John Cresswell could make a late challenge.
Such important matters and the feisty Murdoch performance tended to obscure the Worldview lecture given by Gerhard Zeiler. This was unfortunate because Zeiler, an unreconstructed supporter of public service broadcasting, whatever James Murdoch thinks, had a lot of interesting things to say.
Like Murdoch, he called for a relaxation of product placement rules. As a free to air broadcaster Zeiler argued that it was now vital to identify programming that audiences would pay for. “If the ad-industry doesn’t pay every single bill any more then the consumer – directly or indirectly – will have to step up,” Zeiler argued.
In a hopeful note in difficult times, the RTL chief executive also argued that although costs might have to be cut by up to 20%, there was growing evidence that this need not affect ratings.
All in all plenty to think about as livers start to recover from the Edinburgh weekend.
Do you agree with Raymond? Send us your opinion – news@mediatel.co.uk