CJC -- Papers -- v24 n1 -
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Published on: 6/25/2002
Last Visited: 3/2/2003
So while it may have been eminently sensible for the then Director General, Michael Checkland, to talk in the late 1980s of the BBC as "a billion pound business," perhaps that moment had passed by the early 1990s, and another more public-service-oriented discourse would have been appropriate.Furthermore, the zeal for cost cutting and reorganization does appear to have acquired a life of its own, or at the very least to have produced a "change overload" situation.
It has to be acknowledged, nonetheless, that some of the critics of John Birt's regime have had rather mixed motives, and some have been unwilling to acknowledge that the Corporation under his management may not be the happiest of organizations, but it is still in business and its market share has held up well in the face of competition from three other terrestrial channels as well as satellite and cable services -- in mid-1998 its two channels attracted just over 40% of all viewing.It remains the dominant radio broadcaster, with 5 national services, 5 regional services, and 40 local ones securing just under half of all listening in the country, despite having to compete with around 200 commercial stations, most of these regional and local, but 3 of them national.8 The BBC has won its battle to survive and has done so principally by making it extremely difficult for the politicians with whom it was dealing to level the kind of charges against it which they would have been most likely to make.The question which will continue to be asked, however, is whether the price that has been paid is higher than was necessary, and so high that there could be substantial damage to the long-term health of the Corporation and public service broadcasting as a whole in Britain.9
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