When Labour talks about "radically modernising" broadcasting, it means handing it over to big business. Last week, the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom held a conference in central London about a threat to broadcasting that few people know about. Most of the participants were academics. Dorothy Byrne, the current affairs editor of Channel 4, came. There was no one from the BBC and no national press.
The aim of the conference was to alert the public to thegovernment's white paper on the media, A New Future for Communications, which was announced in December by the Culture Secretary Chris Smith and the Trade Secretary Stephen Byers with these words: "Rules governing all British broadcasting and communications industries will be radically modernised to ensure that citizens, consumers and the media industry are to be winners in the new communications revolution." There was the need, they said, to give broadcasters "lighter touch regulation so that they have the freedom to operate effectively".
It was a brilliant new Labour policy statement. Almost all of it was
the diametric opposite of the truth. Legislation rushed through parliament, probably in the autumn, will begin the conversion of British broadcasting to the ultra-commercial American model, which has long ceased to be a medium of free expression. The BBC will be forced into direct competition with huge commercial interests, "creating for the first time", say the ministers, "a level playing field for British broadcasting".