Privatisation Call For BBC Radio Stations
A new report has questioned whether Terry Wogan and some of his fellow BBC broadcasters can really be deemed “a public service”, one reason why the media think-tank European Media Forum (EMF) has advised the selling off of Radio 1 and Radio 2.
To justify its licence fee, the BBC must provide a public service, but critics say wall-to-wall pop music and middle-of-the-road easy-listening counts as entertainment not information.
The EMF report, published today, adds that the ploughing of £450 million annually into BBC radio means BBC stations have a huge unfair advantage over their commercial rivals, compromising growth in the commercial sector.
Indeed, the BBC commands 60% of the radio audience, with Mr Wogan’s show drawing the greatest number of listeners across all BBC radio programmes. But, says the report, with their huge listener base, Radios 1 and 2 could survive easily in the market place and a sell off could raise over £500 million.
The 40% of audience left to commercial stations means advertisers are growing increasingly hard to come by. Underlining the problem, the report comes on a day when Chrysalis, owner of commercial stations Heart 106 and Galaxy, announced a catastrophic fall in profits to £2.1 million in the past six months from £3.9 million in the same period last year.
Speaking on the Today Programme on Radio 4 this morning, Chrysalis CEO Richard Huntingford said that Radios 1 and 2 were distorting the market and should either be privatised or fulfil their public-service role properly. He said: “They earn their public service brownie points with specialist shows in off-peak hours, allowing them to be pretty much pure entertainment services during the day. If they don’t provide a public service, why should they be licence-fee funded?”
The BBC has an additional advantage in being able to promote its various stations on its other media, and to subsidise across different platforms. In fact, this morning the Today Programme itself was running plugs for the BBC2 serialisation of Booker-Prize-winner The Line Of Beauty.
The BBC has hit back at the report, defending the stations’ public service role by saying they provide a “diverse” range of music as well as current affairs content “that could not be found in the commercial sector”.
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