What exactly is Stephen Glover admitting to in his attack on the BBC in the Independent today?

The Indie’s media columnist complains the BBC suffocates newspaper publishers’ ability to charge for online content.

He says: “I find it difficult to see how most titles can successfully apply even a modest charge as long as the BBC offers so much content online free of charge. In effect, the publicly-funded broadcaster is pointing a dagger at the heart of the free Press.”

But I would hope that, like the rest of us, Glover pays £142.50 a year to watch, read and listen to the BBC. Doesn’t he?

Often criticisms of the corporation – as fashionable now as ever in the wake of recent ‘scandals‘ and with the impending general election – take as their target its most valuable asset, the public subsidy.

Which is why it jars to hear, as I have more than once, otherwise passionate and articulate speeches by BBC workers begin with: “No one likes paying the licence fee, but…”

Thankfully they always go on to explain that for less than the price of a serious daily newspaper we get BBCs One to Four, the BBC News channel, two children’s channels, BBC Parliament, and interactive services, 10 national or digital radio channels, radio stations for Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and 39 English regions, and the BBC website and iPlayer.

Bloody good value the BBC may be; free it isn’t. So Glover is perhaps conveniently mistaken, but his line of attack is no less bogus and illogical.

His criticisms – a kind of second string to the anti-licence fee brigade – are not against the fee itself, but boil down to the fact that the BBC is too good, too professional, too well staffed, provides content of a quality that no one can possibly compete with, and so on.

At the very least, we should be demanding that the BBC operates to these standards. When it does, we should celebrate it; when it doesn’t, we should hold it to account.

He cites Financial Times editor Lionel Barber’s prediction that “almost all” news organisations will be charging for online content within a year.

Of course the FT is something of a special case. But Barber knows readers will seek out expert analysis and information, and this is the important point.

Whatever the timescale, newspaper publishers will be charging for certain online content in the future and people will pay for it. Given previous failed attempts, however, it will clearly require some thought.

They won’t need to run sites on a buy all of it or none of it basis like they do with their print versions.

It might mean they have to up their game in some areas – investigations for example. It might also mean putting more resources behind newsgathering and production, as well as making more effective use of the symbiotic roles of online and print.

None of these would be such a bad thing. Recent cuts in the industry have undermined the ability of providers – local, regional and national – to deliver quality, diverse news, analysis and opinion.

His claim that the BBC is now publishing a de facto newspaper online is interesting semantically, but it’s diversionary. What it does, like most media organisations, is provide content in a range of formats.

It’s not only wrong to say the BBC does what it does for nothing, it’s dangerous to criticise it when it does it well.

Undermining the BBC for doing a quality job with our money won’t raise the standard of journalism in this country – it’ll lower it.

Posted by Rich Simcox

Tags: BBC, BBC licence fee, journalism, public service, Stephen Glover