Rona Fairhead: "All is for the best in the best of all possible BBC worlds (except for the cuts)"

The Independent today contains a lengthy piece by the Head of the BBC Trust, Rona Fairhead. 

It needs saying, for starters, that it easily surpasses any other recent piece by a senior BBC figure for sheer self-serving complacency. Read it and be staggered!

As it's rather a long piece, here are a selection of quotes from it which will give you a very good sense of what it says: 

The UK has built something special in the BBC. That’s what our audience surveys tell us. It is a very British institution with an enduring mission which countries around the world respect and would love to call their own. It’s certainly not perfect. But it is something of real and lasting value. It informs us. It educates us. It entertains us. It creates economic wealth through support for key industries like music and television production and plays a critical role in the UK’s position as a creative powerhouse. It brings editorially independent news into people’s homes throughout the four nations of the UK on television, radio and online. It brings people together to witness and enjoy significant events in our national life. And through the quality of its content, it encourages other broadcasters to up their game, improving standards across the board to the benefit of all viewers. 

[The] BBC ... provides programmes people love at a lower cost than would be possible for a niche broadcaster, and that brings a multitude of other benefits, like jobs, economic growth, social cohesion and enhanced international standing.

The trust’s research shows an extraordinarily high level of public support for the Reithian mission to inform, educate and entertain (although not necessarily in the order Reith originally expressed it).

Despite the incessant noise around it, the future of the BBC needs to be driven by evidence and fact, not by prejudice and not by vested interest. 

The truth is – and it’s sometimes a difficult one for governments to accept and for the BBC to live up to – there isn’t a lot in broadcasting that audiences don’t want from the BBC, and most of them are prepared to pay for it. 

The evidence shows that the UK would be a far less formidable force in world markets if the BBC did not exist.  

The problem for the BBC, of course, is not lack of aspiration to meet audience expectations, but ever more acute pressure on budgets.  

That independence has needed defending over decades, not just from governments but also from parliament, with a growing tendency in recent years for select committees to question BBC executives about detailed editorial decisions. 

You might not believe it if you rely on what some of the BBC’s harshest competitors in the press report, but actually the corporation has a good record of becoming steadily more efficient in recent years, and we know it can do more. 

We [the BBC Trust] have set – and effectively policed – the highest editorial standards in broadcasting, putting complainants and the BBC on an entirely equal footing in the hearing of appeals. 

What we do know is that people value the BBC. As its owners, they rightly have huge expectations of it; expectations that need to be met as far as possible within these ever tighter funding constraints and in the face of arguably the greatest external challenges the BBC has confronted in its lifetime.