Book review: The BBC: Myth of a Public Service

One of the pleasures (or pains) of advanced age is the experience of déjà vu. Mills’ book evokes this sensation, for his core proposition that ‘The BBC is neither independent nor impartial’ (p. 1) echoes one of the central preoccupations of UK media studies 40–50 years ago; indeed, it evokes the 1970s orthodoxy about the BBC. For example, Ian Connell (1979) proposed that ‘television journalism is made to appear to be a kind of megaphone by which ruling ideas are amplified and generalised across all sections of the social formation’ (p. 87), and two of the 1970s deservedly highly reputed media scholars stated, ‘many writers have focused their attention on the BBC and have sought explanations for its output in terms of the complex relationship of the corporation to the state’ (Golding and Murdock, 1979: 212).

To be sure, there are differences. In a move characteristic of the C21st media studies orthodoxy, Mills updates the 1970s paradigm by invoking big Jürgen, adopting Habermas’ notion of the media’s (and thus the BBC) normative role as providing a ‘public space to facilitate political deliberation, free from market forces and the state’ (p. 3). Although, after the 2016 Brexit vote, this reads a bit strangely: the majority vote for Brexit reflected the preference of neither the state nor the humans animating what Mills, rather curiously, designates as impersonal market forces. This is one which neo-liberalism (another of Mills’ updating of the 1970s paradigm) didn’t win – or, put differently, the institutions of ‘the City of London, the Bank of England and Treasury’, which are identified by Mills (citing Ingham) as the ‘core institutional nexus of British society’ (p. 249), did not successfully shape the Brexit vote. Furthermore, a different normative framework than Habermas’, one that, for example, identified the media’s role as one of holding power to account, would render, after the Daily Telegraph’s 2009 stories about Members of Parliament’s abuse of the expenses system (a story which the former Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, stated would not have been launched by the BBC), Mills’ comment that ‘private media is (sic) utterly incapable of performing such a role’ (p. 3) unconvincing.

But this veers too close to the reviewer’s usual, and seldom resisted, temptation of reviewing the book he or she would have liked to have been written rather than the one that actually has been written. And this would do Mills an injustice: for his book has outstanding merits. It is clearly written and, while rehearsing familiar arguments and re-traversing some familiar terrain, is distinguished by admirable scholarly rigour – as evidenced by his citation of primary sources, the National and BBC Archives (seldom consulted by his forerunners), documents elicited through the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and so on.

Mills builds his central argument, that the BBC is neither independent nor impartial, and its pendant proposition that power in Britain (including the BBC) resided (and resides) with a public school, Oxbridge, educated elite ¹ through case studies of the BBC and the 1926 General Strike; the BBC and the secret security services; the BBC and the reporting of war; the BBC’s bias towards conservatism and embrace of neo-liberal management; and the BBC’s reporting of economics and labour. Mills builds a very convincing case for his core proposition – albeit one which follows trails blazed earlier – but his secondary proposition carries less conviction.

Characteristically, Mills invocation of an individual’s ‘form’, inhering in education at a fee paying school, and/or the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, membership of a Pall Mall club and so on, as a decisive and irrefutable marker of their values and behaviour both denies agency to the individuals in question and is vulnerable to empirical rebuttal: Jeremy Corbyn, for example, attended a fee paying school. Let’s play a game to reinforce this point (apologies to those readers of the European Journal of Communication who may find this UKanian playfulness irritating: I plead only that if you read about a book on the BBC and its role in UK society, you have to accept a bit of UKanian content in a review). Imagine (if you can, for we media scholars are a sombre and often sober lot) a pub quiz for media academics asking for the common factor linking Clement Attlee, Elizabeth Filkin, Nicholas Goodison, Brenda Hale, Basil Hume, Kim Philby, Bridget Riley and Jimmy Savile.

Here’s the answer: the common factor linking those named in the paragraph above is that all were (or are) members of the Athenaeum Club (which Mills uses in his mention of Nicholas Goodison as sufficient to identify Goodison as a member of the United Kingdom’s ruling elite). Are these people really members of a homogeneous ruling elite? Here, I must out myself: I too am a member of this club. But I regret to report that none of the fairy dust which notionally falls on we Athenians – as members of the Athenaeum Club sometimes name themselves – as, by definition, members of the ruling elite has fallen on me. No share tips; no sinecure in a quango; no quiet and influential whispering in the ears of the powerful; no consultancies; no vice-chancellorship, not even an invitation to the country to ventilate some wildlife. No more benefits, in short, than those which have accrued to me as a member of the Acol Bridge Club or Middlesex County Cricket Club. Moreover, among the current members of the Athenaeum Club are five professors of communications and media studies, all of whom (in varying degrees) have significantly shaped the academic development of the subject in the United Kingdom and few of whom fit Mills’ template of a sanctified member of the United Kingdom’s ruling elite (I will not out my fellow Athenians but identifying them might constitute a question in an advanced media studies pub quiz).

The question to which Mills answers ‘ruling elite’ (or the ‘basic class congruity’ (p. 64)) is what distinguishes UK society and the practice of key institutions such as the BBC: is it conspiracy (‘basic class congruity’) or pluralism? Again this was a hot topic for debate in the 1970s (see, for example Sparks, 1976). ² And although Mills clearly leans towards conspiracy as an answer (notably in his discussion of the relationship between the BBC and the security services), he also, from time to time, gives pluralism a look in. On p 145, for example, Mills states (reasonably enough) that ‘the Corporation is not an independent sphere, standing apart from politics and society. Rather it is itself an area of conflict and contestation between different groups’. But Mills’ dominant motif is to constitute the animation of society as undertaken on the basis of shared values shaped by common formation in elite educational institutions: as Mills states, ‘a largely Oxbridge educated elite retained its decision making powers’ (p. 213).

Certainly this was true of the shaping of the nascent field of media studies in the United Kingdom (true, a few scholarship bearing oiks played their part) but key figures (curiously seldom acknowledging this in their publicly presented CVs) had form, variously, of Marlborough and Cambridge, Winchester and Cambridge, Eton and Oxford, Rugby and Oxford and so on. But what may have worked as an explanatory paradigm in the 1970s is, in the C21st, less powerful a heuristic. For latterly, the route to establishment membership and social power now seems to pass through professionalised politics (SPAD, think tank, party research departments) journalism and other celebrificatory paths.

This shift is particularly striking when the key locus of power: professional politics is considered. The latest (published in 2016 – after Mills’ book was completed) House of Commons Library (2016) account of the social background of MPs (to be precise, Members of the House of Commons) identifies ‘politician or political organiser’ as the largest single occupational background of MPs (rising from 3.4% of MPs in 1979 to 17.1% in 2015). The salience of this professionalisation of politics is underscored by the growth in numbers of those MPs identified as having a ‘white collar’ (trades union organiser, public relations or charity/voluntary sector) occupational background – rising from 1.5% in 1979 to 11.3% in 2015. The greater salience of the ‘white collar’ category reflects the frequent circulation of politicians into and from paid lobbying and public affairs, non-governmental organization (NGO) and trades union activity. The increase in professional and quasi-professional political backgrounds of MPs is mirrored in the fall in the MPs coming from manual work, school teaching and academic backgrounds. And the same study testifies to a similarly striking decline between 1979 and 2015 in the numbers of Conservative and Liberal Democrat (but not Labour) MPs educated at fee paying schools (Labour MPs educated at fee paying schools fell by 2%, whereas the numbers for LibDem and Conservative MPs fell by 42% and 23%, respectively) and at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Private (aka fee paying or independent) education may still undoubtedly positively correlated with entry to elite professions in the United Kingdom, ³ but it has declined markedly when politics is considered.

Despite my carping make no mistake: The BBC Myth of a Public Service is a work of scholarly quality – well researched, about issues of importance beyond the academy and with arguments made clearly enough and well evidenced enough to be worth engaging with seriously (even if one does not concur with the author’s conclusions). Yes, it evokes a feeling of déjà vu all over again but would our work in the 1970s have displayed so consistently the scholarly merits of Mills’ work.