With Ofcom’s review underway, and with the usual calls for the BBC’s cash to be spread a bit thinner, with “top-slicing” and the like, commentators are often keen for the UK to adopt a model similar to public television in the US. There, cash is raised by subscribers pledging money directly. Relatively little state and federal funding is actually received by broadcasters – something in the region of $500m or so for radio and television. So pledge drives are required to get viewers and listeners to support stations, and corporate sponsors are sought out to provide cash.
That’s the future some would like to see the BBC have. But in retaliation I’d say look at the dismal state of US broadcast news. ABC, CBS and NBC broadcast their nightly news programmes at 6.30pm and that’s it for most of the country. The programmes are relatively parochial, because the networks have cut back on their overseas bureaux. There was even talk recently about third placed (in news terms) CBS doing a deal with CNN to buy in their news, thus ending a news provider that famously once had Edward R Murrow broadcasting from the London rooftops during the Blitz.
There’s no word yet whether or not this will come to pass, but that does bring us to the US cable news channels. You’ve got CNN (CNN International, the service we get to see on this side of the pond, is a different beast), Fox News and MSNBC. Again, these services tend to concentrate on domestic news to a large extent, and are made up of a series of personality-led programmes (see the current fight between MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly). While I’m sure Murdoch would love the ratings that Fox News brings in the US in place of the rather more restrained and truly balanced Sky News, brings, I’m not sure that this would help us in our understanding of events around the world.
PBS, of course, has The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer – a significantly more measured and reliable news programme. But this programme is struggling because it’s lost one of its major corporate sponsors, and is unable to make up the shortfall of cash.
“Not only are corporations cutting back on all forms of advertising during the current economic slowdown, but public television’s model – soliciting long-term commitments – is also increasingly out of step with the changing needs of corporations, which no longer sponsor public television programs for purely philanthropic reasons.”
No wonder so Americans are finding themselves left with, well, the BBC on either BBC America where a US-oriented service has recently launched, or on PBS (although that’s not without it’s problems).
Is that really a future that we want in the UK?