Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-x5cpj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-30T07:38:57.670Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Freedom in Broadcasting

from The James MacTaggart Lectures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2013

Bob Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Get access

Summary

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Television Policy
The MacTaggart Lectures
, pp. 131 - 138
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×