But opinion on the Corporation is divided. Photograph: AP
There was much discussion in today's news conference of the BBC, following the long-awaited appearance yesterday of the government green paper on the future of the Corporation. It made a few front pages this morning, and we trailed it in the Observer on Sunday. The most quoted line seems to have been Tessa Jowell saying the BBC "should not play copycat, or chase ratings for ratings' sake."
More than one editor observed that this is part of a cyclical debate in orbit around the beeb. It starts with the demand that they ignore the populist temptation to poach commercial viewers with crowd-pleasing TV-candy, preferring serious Reithian pursuits. The ratings duly fall. Then comes the argument that low ratings indicate a lack of popular engagement and, hard on its heels, the argument that the licence fee as currently configured is not justified since it amounts to a subsidy of minority viewing. So the BBC goes back to chasing ratings for ratings' sake, at which point it is attacked for queering the competitive pitch. And so on.
Then the question for us arises, how much appetite is there for Sunday paper reporting on this subject right now? Or, put another way, does anyone other than a self-absorbed media coterie really care about the latest twists and turns in the debate over the system of governance and the structure of the beeb, or is it really just a question of the quality of what appears on the box at the end of it all?
At which point discussion inevitably strides off along various tangents. Should licence fee money go on buying expensive US imports? Why is EastEnders still so rubbish?
Sometimes its hard for us to see the wood from the trees on these media-on-the-media stories. Deepest councils, as the Editor, likes to say, are underway.
