The BBC’s problems are real — but so is its value

After The European examined the growing pressures facing BBC leadership, reader Daniel Mercer argues that reforming the broadcaster is very different from allowing it to decay beyond repair

Sir,

Your recent piece on the near-impossible task of running the BBC captured the scale of the challenge remarkably well.

Few institutions are now expected to absorb such contradictory pressures while remaining trusted by the public. Political hostility, audience fragmentation, commercial competition and accusations of bias from every direction have created a role few sensible people would, indeed, envy.

Yet despite all of that, the BBC still matters enormously.

There is a growing tendency to treat the corporation’s present difficulties as proof that the entire public-service broadcasting model has failed. I would argue the opposite. The fact that the BBC remains the subject of such fierce argument perhaps says more about its continuing importance than its decline. Truly irrelevant institutions are usually ignored.

The danger is that legitimate criticism gradually hardens into something more destructive, namely a willingness to let one of Britain’s few remaining public-interest institutions simply wither away.

If that happens, the vacuum will not necessarily be filled by calmer or more balanced voices. More likely, it will be dominated by increasingly fragmented commercial media ecosystems driven by outrage, ideology and algorithmic attention.

That would leave public debate poorer, not healthier. For which other broadcaster abides by the Reithian motto to “inform, educate, and entertain”?

Of course the BBC needs reform. Questions around accountability, governance and editorial standards are entirely fair and healthy.

But reform should be aimed at rebuilding trust rather than weakening the institution beyond repair.

I hope that incoming Director-General Matt Brittin is able to turn things around, for should the BBC collapse, we shall have lost something as valuable to Britain as the Crown Jewels or democratic system.

Daniel Mercer