The Report of the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting

Stuart Hall, Director, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Birmingham

THEReport o f the Committee on the Future o f Broadcasting (Command 6753 : inevitably-and hereinafter, Annan) is a critical document. It reviews the present state and makes recommendations for the future of the most powerful, concentrated, technicallyadvanced sectors of what Adorno once called the culture industry. It appears in the wake of an unmistakeable crisis in broadcasting-a decade in which broadcastings role has been subject to wide-ranging and searching criticism on all sides : but also, when the industry itself faces technical developments which are likely to transform its character long before another such Committee will be called into existence. It thus provides us with an opportunity to examine broadcasting at a critical turning-point in the history of its post-war development. Our assessment of Annans performance will depend on a number of different criteria. How profoundly has it grasped the centrality of broadcasting to our social, cultural and political life? How deep is its understanding of the present state of British broadcasting-its strengths and weaknesses, possibilities and limits : its structural tendencies? How cogent is its reasoning about these issues? Is the logic of argument behind its proposals and recommendations convincing? Do these proposals tend to shift broadcasting in the right direction40 they relate to the key problems? What is the likelihood of their being given practical political effect, sometime between now and the 199Os, the period of Annans remit? These questions are framed within certain very distinct limits : some may even regard them as already reflecting a set of reduced or lowered expectations. Where are the large ambitions, the grand sketches, the bold innovative strokes? My view is that they are, in the present context, largely irrelevant. We all have our favoured broadcasting systems, as we have our ideal societies. Indeed, in

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modern industrial societies, the two are deeply intertwined: for we live in societies where it is no longer possible to consider social, economic or cultural life separate from the systems of communication which fundamentally mediate them. The communications networks, like the education systems, are the major life-support systems of such societies. They are the consciousness-making industriessocietys nervous system. Consequently, such societies construct, support and maintain broadcasting systems which are profoundly adapted to their needs, and which mirror, in their structures and relations, the institutional contexts in which they are embedded. It is slightly beside the point to project on to a Report which takes this whole framework for granted the sketch of some quite different ideal system. To design a radically new communications system is to design a new society. This is not the name of the game in which Annan is involved. The more open and libertarian forms of communication which I would like to see emerge, and which are now technically feasible, are unlikely to be legislated for in the era of Mr Callaghan or Mrs Thatcher, or, indeed, in the shadow of Visitations from the IMF team. All we can do is to try to assess Annans tendency. Giving this and taking that-this is the name of Annans game-does it tend to facilitate or hinder the advance of British broadcasting towards the more open and democratic forms which are not only possible but necessary, in the long run? In this more sombre perspective, Annan must be adjudged, in sum, a mixed blessing. Nevertheless, I confess Annan has done better than I either expected or predicted. It has had a peculiar history-constituted, disbanded and reconstituted by successive governments. Given its composition, its ethos and status, plus the notorious capacity of such bodies to smother all controversial issues beneath a bland and consensual Civil Service prose, I expected Annan to take tactical advantage of the distance which separated it from the crisis in broadcasting of the 1960s (its true raison detre): and to assume a position well above the struggle, taking a lofty, judicious, considered or enlarged view. Many controversial positions are, indeed, given the aristocratic coup de grdce in these pages. But some of the important arguments have surfaced in Annans collective consciousness. They are addressed in a vigorous, often personally idiosyncratic, prose; by a Committee well-informed about broadcasting; which has done some instructive viewing of programmes and seems to have understood some of the unorthodox things being said to it, even if in the end it has taken a

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safer view. Indeed, Annans strategy is the classical liberal reforming one of citing the wild extremists, dispatching their excesses w i t h cogent reasoning-which then enables him to adopt some more moderate, but critical, positions while assuming the air of judicious reason and good sense. On the central issue of broadcastings relation to society in its broadest dimensions, Annan has taken over an argument several of us have been advancing for some time: namely, that many of the travails of the past two decades arise from the fragmentation and collapse, under conditions of momentous social change, of that consensus on which broadcasting as a national system was first predicated. Since the whole structure was premised on and rooted in this consensus, its disintegration has dissolved the existing h n tractual relationship between broadcasting and society. Broadcasting has lost a role: it is still in search of an alternative one. Annan, naturally, looks back with regret to the passing of that ideal of middle class culture, so felicitously expressed by Matthew Arnold a century ago, which . . . created a continuum of taste and opinion, and takes a sour view (that, essentially, of the hard-pressed broadcasting managers) of the divisions in society and the politics of perceptual crisis and strain which intervened. The wonder, of course, is not that this Reithean view of the world collapsed but that it persisted so long, and passed so successfully as a national consensus. It was always too narrow a cultural base for a medium with the span and heterogeneity of television or radio. Its collapse has naturally precipitated a loss of moral certainty and direction among the broadcasting mandarins. But Annan fails to observe that the period of its fragmentation-the 1960s-was in fact also the most fertile, creative and challenging one in post-war broadcasting: one in which the BBC abandoned its role as an echo-machine of His Masters Voice, ITV was edged a degree or two away from the philosophy of giving the people what it wants, and television generally-in Richard Hoggarts felicitous phrase-ntered more directly into societys quarrel with itself. This is not, of course, the view of the television managers, who had to deal with the backlash on all sides. And Annan has been persuaded to their view: though it does note that it was against this alternative role that the broadcasters battened down the hatches. It fails, however, to pinpoint what a strategic error, what a failure of nerve, this retreat to a line of least resistance has proved to be. But echoes of it remain in the Report: in the

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criticisms of the BBCS overall performance; in the strong support for more diversity; in the plea for less over-management and greater autonomy to small groups of producers; in its sponsorship of the notion of a publishers role for broadcasting; and above all in its proposal for a new Open Broadcasting Authority as an alternative to a fourth (commercial) channel. But adventurous young producers w i l l read p. 264 of the Report, which describes the relations between television professionals and managers which made That Was The Week That Was possible, with nostalgic regret: it happened then: it could not happen now. Annan did not like my phrase, but that is what I meant by a failure of nerve. The decision not to award the fourth channel to ITV (despite that fact of those buttons on our sets labelled ITV 2 in eager anticipation of a self-fulfilling prophecy) is Annans most radical decision. It witnesses to the effect of the two principal structural features of British broadcasting, which shape and determine its whole logic of development : competition and concentration. Competition between ITV and BBC has had many positive effects-stimulating the iirst and breaking down some of the cosiness of the second. But its overall effect within the present structure remains negative. Annan rightly acknowledges the raising of programme standards in the commercial companies. It notes that competition made Aunty gather up her skirts-if only to enable her to enter into the competitive struggle over ratings and the mass audience with an unexpected degree of will and energy. This was the price of survival in face of the over-riding commercial logic. In the circumstances the BBCS capacity to claw back over half the viewing audience must be counted a success. But this has been at the expense of what I call Halls Law-in straight commercial competitive conditions, more means more-of-the-same. The commercial logic has only been deflected a little: it remains the dominant impulse. Hence, the overall effect has been to strengthen the presence of what Annan calls the monopoly of the duopoly. Annan knows that if this monopoly continues unchanged British broadcasting will die of a double jeopardy : bureaucratic seizure (since intense competition means centralized command and the over-management of the medium) plus blatant populist exploitation. It has therefore tried to tamper with the monopoly of the duopoly without wholly dismantling it. Mr Julian Critchley, Conservative M.P. and the Partys chief architect of its broadcasting policy, found (in a recent Listener

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review of Annan) the phrase an unhappy one. But ugly and compelling facts require infelicitous phrases. The critique of the monopoly of the duopoly must rest, finally, f the two on a judgment of the overall programme performance o main authorities. Here, Annan scores many useful and telling points. The BBC is praised for its positive qualities: its unique and unmistakable ethos, its reputation for integrity, its spectacular successes, its loyalty and quality of staff, its position as arguably the single most important cultural organization in the nation. But the overall tone and thrust of Annans observations are, rightly, critical. A loss of clarity about the objectives of the television service as a whole; the overkill effect of many of its prestige spectaculars; the hardening of the arteries of professionalism in the ranks and managerialism in the hierarchy; feebleness, caution, touchiness, unsteadiness, patchiness, programmes sometimes dull and on occasions superficial to the point of banality . . .. These are harsh, but well-judged terms. A period in which it can be said that consistently ITN has the edge over BBC news and l n current affairs is more adventurous and interesting must be a moment of undisguised crisis for the principal instrument of national broadcasting policy. We detected a number of warning signs, Annan cautiously remarks. You can say that again. For even where the BBC has scored-its great prestige series, its historical dramas and adaptations-it has often been at the expense of precisely that sort of contemporary drama which, a decade ago, touched a contemporary nerve, designed to awaken us from, rather than precipitate us into the deep sleep of historical nostalgia to which, after all, declining imperial powers are all too prone. When we know what has been displaced by these great television moonshots, and why (often, in part, the need to sell abroad to protect revenues and to be successful in the global television stakes), our assessment of even the BBC successes must necessarily be a qualified one. The IBA complex, inevitably, comes off better. In this respect, I am happy that Annan has set the historical record right. For the relative success of ITV is often taken now as evidence that the introduction of commercial competition in television was right, and has proved the capacity of the commercial impulse to deliver the goods. Annan, however, notes that, left to itself, the commercial principle would have continued to deliver the mass audience to the advertisers at roughly three or four points below the existing level of

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popular taste. Though Pilkingtons efforts to break the Gordian knot between programme making and advertising revenues came to nought, Annan is correct to insist that The Pilkington Report transformed the face of ITV: by wakening the Authority a little from its deep slumber, and by mobilizing public opinion against the massive exploitation of the public which was ITVS lucrative role in the 1950s-and thereby giving some elbow room within the companies to good producers to make interesting programmes. It might have added that, without the revelations of that maverick group, Free Communications, at the time of the last distribution of contracts, the scandal of the contracting system might never have seen the light of day. The improvement in ITVS performance, far from proving that the commercial principle in broadcasting delivers the goods, shows that it is only when that principle is harnessed, constrained and subject to constant critical exposure that it is able to meet any but the supermarket requirements in broadcasting. Even so, its successes seem to me more limited than Annan suggests. They are principally in the news, current affairs and documentary areas-where, precisely, the BBC is now crippled by the weight of managerialism, caution and the burden of impartiality. In many areas of light entertainment, ITV still thoroughly deserves its characterization here : settled in well-worn grooves, safe, stereotyped and routine in its production. Of course, smooth, glossy-and eminently successful on the international market. The creaming off of funds raised in the lucrative television market, and their diversification into fresh financial fields and pastures new-leading to the creation of huge leisure conglomerates-is one of the continuing structural features of a television system where the commercial principle dictates the logic, about which Annan is far too reticent. In television, programmes matter: but they are produced by structures. If you dont tamper with structures, you will get, not the particular programmes, but the overall programming logic which the structures dictate. Given its reading of the current situation, what then does Annan propose 7 The most important-and controversial-of its proposals is the denial of the fourth channel to the ITV complex (it would, it correctly says, confirm the duopoly and intensify competition); and its recommendations for an Open Broadcasting Authority instead. This Authority would take programmes from both the BBC and ITV companies, but also from independent producers, and from a

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range of civic, educational and other bodies, including the most important single educational force now visible in British broadcasting, the Open University. Since Annan set its face against any further breaking-up of the BBC (on baby-with-the-bath-water grounds) or any structural changes in the ITV complex (apart from urging it to exploit more fully its regional structure), the Open Broadcasting Authority is the most we could hope for: and deserves support. Annan was rightly critical of the proposal to erect a Broadcasting Commissioii with overall authority right across the board : not because it is an impossible ideal-it could have fostered a far wider degree of diversification on the basis of the existing infrastructure-but because these are not ideal conditions. Given the present climate, this would indeed have spawned yet another, conservative and managerial bureaucracy over what is already the most over-managed television system in the world, harnessing the ainvaves to that conservative consensus which is fast forming up around us. It seemed to give Annan some pleasure to find me, on this score, in the most unlikely company-including the Liberal Party, the Social Morality Council, the Roman Catholic Episcopal Conference, Lord Hill and Sir Hugh Greene! But my view is that, if the broad lines of the present structure are to remain intact, the only modest hope is for the inter-pellation of the widest possible diversity. I am for the television of a hundred flowers-the broadcasting of a thousand mistakes! I believe the Open Broadcasting Authority may make a small contribution to this subversive ideal. I believe it to be a cardinal error-and right against the logic which led them to propose it in the first place-to expose such a channel to the vicissitudes of advertising and sponsorship. Here, Annans left hand did not seem to know what its right hand was about. The same point must be made, with greater strength, about the proposed-also new-Local Broadcasting Authority; where, again, advertising revenue should provide the main source of income for the stations. Annan did confront real dilemmas in this area. Two local radio stations--one BBC, one commercial-are often too much for any but the large urban conurbations: and there are a limited number of frequencies to go round. Yet, undoubtedly, the present arrangement does have the effect of increasing diversity. Not all the BBc-sponsored local stations are good or vigorous: but the best are very good indeed; committed to the notion of mixed programming, where their rivals go resolutely for popular music on-tap; and giving

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a degree of access at local level to voices, groups, points of view and interests which cannot find a niche in the national system elsewhere. I would happily exchange an hour of Radio Leeds, which is in some real connection with its locality, for those hours of pseudo-grass roots phone-in programmes on national BBC radio, where the orthodox voices of the silent majority have become all-too horrendously vocal. Some people, of course, do want good popular music some part of the day: I do : and I presently get it more from the local commercial station, with all its pseudo-personalization and stationloyalty gimmicks, than from my local BBC station. If the problem is to conserve funds and frequencies, and distribute them more evenly across the country, then by all means break the sponsorship over local radio of the BBC and the IBA, where the stations have a somewhat poor-relation status. But if you then found an alternative Authority wholly within the logic of commercial sponsorship, the effect must be a clear loss in diversity and access. It is really not sufficient to suggest that the advertising in these local areas will be of the small, informative and classified variety. The more the access to a city or region is concentrated under a single station, the greater will be the temptation to penetrate it with well-targeted advertising: and the more the programmes will be designed to facilitate this penetration. That is the name of the game. Despite its considerable worldliness, every now and again-at the strategic points-Annan reads as if it had become suddenly distracted by the harmony of the spheres. The Broadcasting Complaints Commission, on the other hand, was written in the stars, and had to come. I view it with mixed feelings. Of course, the authorities are remarkably insulated and remote from many of the real and important currents moving in the society on which they report and comment: there are abuses which never get corrected, people whose privacy has been unnecessarily intruded upon: the public has a right of access to these highly concentrated units of cultural power. It remains to be seen whether the Complaints Commission will be so composed, and develop a sufficientlyiconoclastic style of work as to perform the task required of it. Clearly, Annan was very concerned-and not only in the pages where this proposal is framed-to open further and more consistently the channels between the professionals and the public. But, where this really takes palpable form-an intrusion of the public into public communication, with effect; namely, in the token advance

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of access broadcasting-Annan has been bought off by the professionals. It is lofty, snooty and short-visioned, about access broadcasting. But it is generous about public complaints. However, this-like all the other measures proposed-has to be seen in context. We are in the midst of a profound moral backlash-the slow construction of what can only be called an authoritarian populist consensus. The great debate in education is a good index of who and what is now setting the pace in these critical areas. In that context, the Complaints Commission could easily become the instrument of the organized pressure groups, the moral entrepreneurs-what Richard once called the populist guardians. I foresee an unholy alliance between the commercial and cautious forces within the profession, and the organized populist backlash outside, which could have the effect of strengthening the trend towards safe programming, godliness and the conventional wisdom in all things. If the Broadcasting Commission becomes the means by which this spirit gains ascendancy-and legitimacy-inside broadcasting, then we need a Commission like we need a dose of salts. This question-f safety and orthodoxy, of the dominance of the conventional wisdom in broadcasting-is really the heart of the matter. Annan has acknowledged this by taking it head on. But I am not persuaded by the judicious finding it has made. Indeed, the judicious tone and the careful balancing o f f of positions covers both confusion and hesitancy. Its position was not an enviable one. For every witness like myself, anxious to persuade it of the extremely limited range of experiences and opinions which surface in British television, of its orthodox, conventional management of topics to balance out any disturbing force or statement in the name of due impartiality, there must have been several submitting that broadcasting was failing to reflect and endorse the values to which society should conform. These are the two ends of the consensus-rather, dissensns: with the broadcaster trapped in the gap in the middle. But it really will not do to reaffirm the pure gospel of John Stuart Mill once again, revived in the classic form of the balance between reinforcement and challenge. This is the balance which the broadcasters have been operating in the last decade-with what stultifying effects Annan is, in other sections, only too well aware. The notion that this can be qualified a little, by urging the broadcasters to conceive of themselves as publishers rather than as authors-reflecting on the whole range of contentious issues, groups and points of view,

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without the necessity of feeling themselves directly responsible for everything they broadcast-matters little if this principle is to be applied to the inevitably minority Open Broadcasting Authority channel exclusively. For this precisely leaves the chimera of balance, impartiality and objectivity intact in exactly the areas where it really serves as a strait-jacket on vigorous broadcasting: in the heartland of the system, BBC 1 and ITV. In a conservative social climate, professional broadcasters will always seek the cover of balance and impartiality to legitimate their own cautious practice. Unless and until this strangle-hold-which assumes a consensus on fundamental issues where patently there is none-is broken, broadcasting will remain the timid, conflict-blurring, dream-enhancing force it currently is. But here, at the very centre of the issue, Annans thinking dissolves into pious platitudes. It raises the critical issue of the power of the media to set agendas, and define reality-now really a wellestablished conventional wisdom of broadcasting research-nly to find it unproven. What seems to have persuaded Annan against it was the bewilderment with which the very idea was received by the professional broadcasters! But the concept of agenda setting is a structural concept. It deals with the relationship between a highlyconcentrated system and its professionals (the latter, precisely, insulated from the larger imperatives of the work they perform by the professional ideologies), which reports on and communicates with, but is not operated by the great mass of the public outside who are its consumers. It cannot be reduced to the recognition of this journalist or that. Annan finds-surprisingly-that there is no conspiracy between broadcasters and those who command the power centres of our society. But who spoke of conspiracy? There is a necessary, obvious, perfectly open and plain structural connection between what broadcasters treat of, who they get to comment, what frameworks are taken for granted by them as plausible: and this structure of programming reflects the structure of power and of knowledge outside of broadcasting. This is not a conspiracy: but it exists none the less. Paragraph after paragraph in the Report is nothing but an acknowledgment of the fact that broadcasting exists within a particular social and political structure, and largely takes its coloration from that surrounding terrain. Those of us who make such criticisms did not purport to find a distinct and consistent bias to either the left or to the right of the political spectrum. Indeed,

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we have gone out of our way to transcend the quite inadequate concept of bias in this limited sense. But the fundamental alignment of the broadcasting system to the structure of power in the society is not to be cashed in terms of accusations or denials of bias, any more than the agenda-setting function of the media can be cashed in terms of what journalists think they are doing. These critical issues require a concept of structure. Annan is mired in the thought processes of classical Millian d o c t r i n e i n which, it appears, at strategic moments, it was instructed by the philosophers, Mrs Warnock, Professors Williams and Crick. Unfortunately, there is more here than philosophers dream of. The structure of due impartiality, which is the form through which broadcasting is harnessed, not to society in general, but to the powerful centres of power in society, is whittled away a little, cropped at the edges, hedged round with injunctions to innovation, vitality, boldness, etc. In the margins of the system-the Open Broadcasting Authority-a little erosion of balance as a practice is to be permitted :more publishing, less authorial sponsorship. But at the centre of the communications universe, it remains intact. So long as broadcasting is held responsible for everything which anyone says on its frequencies, its range will have to be narrow, its tread cautious, its heavy management of topics weighty, its relentless search for the disappearing middle-point in every argument pronounced, its structure of access restricted, its displacement from the centre of the argument-societys quarrel with itself-ensured. Annan, by confirming broadcastings central-and centrist-practice, ensures that, despite important modifications, British broadcasting will be very much the same-standing in the same relation to its societypost-Annan as it was pre-Annan. That is not the only structural factor which will stabilize and confirm the present disposition. In his review of Annan, quoted earlier, Mr Julian Critchley pours a lofty disdain on the costly anarchism which led Annan to forbid ITV the second channel, and propose an Open Authority instead. It is perfectly clear that, once returned to power, the Conservatives will complete the logic they initiated in the 1950s, with the inception of a competitive commercial channel, by giving the second channel where that logic dictates: to the commercial interest. The Open Authority is a toy, a device to play with, outside what we must call the logic of capital. It is, I am afraid, destined for the historical scrapheap. It is quite

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unlikely to be rescued from it by the party at present in power, whose commitment to greater open-ness, diversity and flexibility-Annans watchwords-are, if anything, less pronounced than those interests which Mr Critchley represents. There are, then, many incidental benefits which may accrue from Annan: a little more room for programme-makers, the preservation of television archives so that, at last, a history of this medium could be written, perhaps a loop-hole or two in the operation of impartiality, perhaps a little less heavyhandedness in Broadcasting House. Annan has observed the structural logic governing British broadcasting. But it has not managed to reverse or even to deflect it substantially. It leaves us better informed-but, essentially, where we were.