Indulge me for a few seconds and close your eyes. Now, imagine a world without the BBC. What’s it like in the darkness? No EastEnders or RuPaul’s Drag Race. No Newsnight or Question Time. No Snog, Marry, Avoid? or Ten O’Clock News. No Glow Up or Strictly, no Proms, no Radio 4 or 3 or iPlayer. No World Service, no Line of Duty or Peaky Blinders, no Attenborough and Planet Earth and, heaven forbid, no Mastermind!What kind of a world is it for you? For many, it would be a pretty poor one. Others would disagree. Their reasoning might be based on a deeply held belief that the BBC is full of lefties, especially in its news division. Hooray, they’d say, no more woke news and pernicious identity politics. No more wokey blokeys, telling me I can’t sing Rule, Britannia! at the Last Night of the Proms. No more banging on about the Lionesses having no black players!Others might cheer the demise of the BBC for exactly the opposite reason. They might argue that at last there’s an end to all the rightwing propaganda. No more pandering to reactionary forces, caving in to government pressure at every turn. It’s a BBC that’s cowed, they say, by the powerful, an institution that’s lost its nerve and refuses to call out the bleedin’ obvious. It’s a broadcaster ill equipped to tackle a post truth world of populists and liars.We seem to live in an age of individual truths and opinion, where what constitutes the truth on any given topic is in the eye of the beholder. To strive for an objective truth is somehow old-fashioned, even boring. It’s messy too. Impartiality is an analogue concept in a digital world. It sounds technical, bureaucratic… very BBC! So I’m going to use a different word – fairness. Impartiality is simply what’s fair.The public wants the BBC to stand for something, and surely that must be fairness. Opinion is one side of an argument, and putting one side of an argument isn’t honest, some might argue it isn’t decent, or morally acceptable in news and current affairs. I would argue that it certainly isn’t fair.The quest for a reality that we can all trust regardless of who we are, is vital to a proper understanding of our world, and crucial to the smooth running of any democracy. For a public service broadcaster, crucially one funded by a universal levy – the licence fee – it is stark staringly obvious that facts and objective truths must be paramount to maintain the universality of the BBC. It’s an organisation that doesn’t belong to the government or a board of managers. It belongs to many millions of licence fee payers who have all kinds of opinions and beliefs. Facts are the holy grail, speaking objective truth to power is vital. Bend the truth to curry favour, self censor to get an easy ride and you abuse the trust of licence fee payers.Objective truth telling which the BBC strives for is valued by the majority of people. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, in its Digital News Report for 2022, showed that despite levels of trust falling across broadcast media and print, the BBC is still the most trusted news brand in the UK.Attempts to establish objective truths are needed now more than ever. Anyone can have an opinion, they’re two a penny, and opinions are coloured by a whole range of variables. Your background, education, race, gender, politics and so on. That’s the point about opinion, it’s individual to who you are. But as a former editor of the Guardian, CP Scott, famously wrote: “Comment is free, facts are sacred.”I asked you to close your eyes and imagine a world without the BBC. Well, the corporation recently tried a similar experiment, launching what it called, rather darkly, a deprivation study. Eighty households had BBC content taken away from them for nine days (including two weekends, so no Match of the Day, no weekend news, no Strictly). Indeed, no TV and radio, recipes, podcasts or access to any social media platforms linked to the corporation. Around 200 people were involved in the study and there was an emphasis on those who, given the chance, would forgo the BBC so they wouldn’t have to pay the licence fee and those who said the licence fee was too high.The results, which were revealed in April, found that before the experiment began, 30 households said they wanted to pay nothing and not receive the BBC’s services; another 30 said they would want to pay less than the current licence fee, while the remaining 20 said they’d pay the current fee or more. Afterwards, of the 60 who were not keen on the price, 42 said they would pay the full fee or more, meaning 70% changed their minds.Only one household out of the 20 who initially supported the licence fee said they’d rather pay less. After having been deprived of the BBC’s output for a little over a week, many said they missed the BBC for trustworthy news. After their hiatus, the participants were handed an envelope with the value of that nine days of content, in relation to the overall licence fee per year. It was less than £4.Many undervalue the BBC at their peril. As a foreign correspondent for many years based around the globe, I know how much people from other countries appreciate BBC News. And now is the time, in an age of lies and deceit and propaganda with no shame, when the BBC is needed the most.This post is a views of Clive Myrie who is a BBC broadcast journalist.
© 2022 Guardian News & Media Limited.