Rupert Murdoch offers a highly contentious and critical assessment of public service broadcasting, denouncing it as an ideology deployed by ‘propagandists’ to protect the interests of a narrow broadcasting elite, but with debilitating consequences for British broadcasting. Most significantly, public service broadcasting and its ‘guardians’ militate against the prospects for viewer freedom and choice. Such restrictions ‘are not compatible with a mature democracy’.

This ideology of public service broadcasting is a form of ‘special pleading’ which misrepresents an economically inefficient, paternalistic and unaccountable broadcasting system, as the only organisational structure capable of delivering quality programmes and encouraging creative risk-taking in programme-making. Murdoch's argument rests on a ‘simple principle’. Namely, ‘in every area of economic activity in which competition is attainable, it is much to be prefered to monopoly’.

By contrast public service broadcasting is nowhere clearly defined, although Murdoch redresses this problem by suggesting that ‘anybody who, within the law of the land, provides a service which the public wants at a price it can afford is providing a public service’ (subsequent MacTaggart lecturers have contested this definition). Consequently ‘if in the years ahead we can make a success of Sky Television, that will be as much a public service as ITV’. Murdoch offers a number of examples to illustrate his argument that the market-led American system has been substantially more successful in creating greater quality and diversity of programming than British television informed by the principles of public service broadcasting.