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The BBC: From Corporation to Cooperative
Not yet published
Expected 9 Mar 27For over a century, the BBC has been at the heart of British culture and a model for public media around the world. But government encroachment, underfunding, and digital competition have led the corporation to crisis.
Right-wing opponents of public media have long plotted the BBC’s demise. Meanwhile, many of the BBC’s instinctive supporters have lost heart, dismayed by the corporation’s serial breaches of its own public-service principles. Having so often betrayed its friends to appease its foes, the BBC now finds itself isolated while under attack.
In this urgent intervention, three leading media policy experts warn the BBC will not survive its fast-approaching Charter Review unless its popular legitimacy is reinvigorated. Yet the public will only show up for a BBC remade into something worth defending: a democratic institution meaningfully accountable to the citizens who fund it.
With all their faults, public-service media are categorically better than addictive platforms run on opaque algorithms and owned by political extremists—the dominant alternative. But the BBC’s challenges show that professional norms alone cannot prevent political capture while patrician elitism proves vulnerable when commercial rivals come dressed in populist garb.
For the BBC, as for the political culture it underpins, the stark choice is to democratise or die.
Right-wing opponents of public media have long plotted the BBC’s demise. Meanwhile, many of the BBC’s instinctive supporters have lost heart, dismayed by the corporation’s serial breaches of its own public-service principles. Having so often betrayed its friends to appease its foes, the BBC now finds itself isolated while under attack.
In this urgent intervention, three leading media policy experts warn the BBC will not survive its fast-approaching Charter Review unless its popular legitimacy is reinvigorated. Yet the public will only show up for a BBC remade into something worth defending: a democratic institution meaningfully accountable to the citizens who fund it.
With all their faults, public-service media are categorically better than addictive platforms run on opaque algorithms and owned by political extremists—the dominant alternative. But the BBC’s challenges show that professional norms alone cannot prevent political capture while patrician elitism proves vulnerable when commercial rivals come dressed in populist garb.
For the BBC, as for the political culture it underpins, the stark choice is to democratise or die.
250 pages, Paperback
Expected publication March 9, 2027
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