- A new mission statement for the BBC: "To act in the public interest, serving all audiences with impartial, high-quality and distinctive media content and services that inform, educate and entertain."
We are bound to ask, so whose interests have they been serving all this time?
As a recipient of direct taxation, the Corporation has always been vulnerable to government interference and pressure, but since the Thatcher regime threatened it's survival, it's dismal decline has continued unabated.
The Falklands War, years of conflict in Northern Ireland, the destruction of British manufacturing, were all issues which it could not be seen to be impartial on, and was left in no doubt what was expected, and what the consequences of dissent would be.
For an organization which prided itself as a trusted provider of News around the world, the collapse of USSR was probably the last time that BBC had a clear purpose.
What we have now is a confused mouthpiece of government policy, a 'cultural icon' in a multicultural society, when most British people don't know what it means to be British any more.
Another laudable function of the new charter:-
- The BBC will be required to give "greater focus to underserved audiences, in particular those from black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds and from the nations and regions which are currently less well served".
This, at a time when each and every culture is represented on terrestrial and cable TV, satellite and on-line, as never before.
The irony is that those 'underserved audiences' are mostly watching their preferences elsewhere while the ones providing the licence fee are finding their own culture subsumed and subordinated for the benefit of a largely non-paying and non-existent viewer.
