The BBC operates under a royal charter, which is updated every 10 years or so, and says it must be “independent in all matters.” “But everyone knows that it’s more complicated than that,” samknightwrites.
For all the control craved by its managers and political masters, the BBC has always contained enough cracks for specialized knowledge and beautiful things to occur. During the Second World War, E. H. Gombrich, later a celebrated art historian, worked for the BBC, monitoring German civilian radio day after day from a country estate in Worcestershire.
“Birtian” is still something of an insult among BBC staff , but Birt is probably the reason that the broadcaster wasn’t completely upended by the digital era. In its centenary year, the BBC has reported that it’s on track to reach a global audience of five hundred million people. BBC Online, its news Web site, has nineteen million readers a week. The iPlayer, which launched in 2007, helped inspire streamers everywhere. The BBC’s reach in the United Kingdom is total and alive.
The British right has always been doubtful about the BBC’s true purpose. It intuits, correctly, “something disturbingly” about the entire corporation, Hendy writes. British political culture tends to swing between two poles: are we building a new Jerusalem or unleashing sacred freedoms? Churchill never got over his distrust of Auntie, as the broadcaster was known. “It is run by reds,” he used to say.
“To which one is tempted to add: what is not ever thus?” Hendy writes. But the outlook for the BBC’s second century is depressing. In “The War Against the BBC: How an Unprecedented Combination of Hostile Forces Is Destroying Britain’s Greatest Cultural Institution . . . and Why You Should Care” , Patrick Barwise, a professor at London Business School, and Peter York, a cultural commentator, argue that the corporation is now in existential danger.