The Return of the Public - Dan Hind

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should, however, be wary. The idea of public service excluded most of the population from an effectively public status just as effectively as had property qualifications and the mystifications of good breeding. The concerns of citizens might be legitimate, but they themselves lacked the moral imagination and intellectual discrimination needed to strike a balance between competing claims and incommensurable goods. As the franchise expanded and the prospect of universal suffrage loomed, liberals had begun to worry about the levelling effects of majority rule. Fears about the tyrannical impulses of the majority combined with the notion of public service to justify continued control by a social and intellectual elite. Only this classically educated caste could be trusted to reason disinterestedly and so discover the public interest by balancing different group interests. The individual outside the elite was assumed to be self-interested and narrow minded. He, and later she, registered as constitutive units of an idealized social force or as voices in the choir of a similarly idealized ‘public opinion’. Public service as a doctrine very successfully frustrated the emergence of a meaningfully sovereign public.

      Broadcasting provides a good example of how a public service ethos can shape and limit the ways in which the general population engages with the political process. Much is sometimes made of the advantages of public service broadcasting over market-driven models. And certainly it seems preferable to treat information as a public good to which all citizens have broadly equal access, rather than as a private commodity where the ability to pay secures cumulative advantages for the wealthy. But treating information as a public good does not ensure that individuals will receive the information and analysis that they need for active citizenship and self-government.

      From the 1920s onwards in Britain the public servants at the BBC sought earnestly to inform and to entertain a national audience. An assumption of cultural, intellectual and social superiority gave the managers of this system the confidence necessary to determine what counted as knowledge deserving of publicity. It further emboldened them to decide on the structure of legitimate controversy without serious or sustained attention to the views of the general population or even the facts of the matter. In political debates, public service broadcasters saw their role as that of representing views found in Parliament. In the words of Stuart Hood, impartiality was understood as ‘the acceptance of that segment of opinion which constitutes parliamentary consensus’.13 In such circumstances balance and impartiality reliably favoured those who had secured some degree of power already. In a society where wealth and power are distributed very unevenly the doctrine of balance will tend to favour those already favoured while making this bias seem both natural and just. Necessarily, too, balance will marginalize information that would strengthen calls for changes to the structure of power. So, for example, Sweden’s social democratic response to the economic crisis of the 1930s might as well have happened on the moon, as far as the BBC’s editors at the time were concerned.

      Though shaken by the spread of market forces through the broadcasting system, the BBC’s managers remain convinced that they can discern what the population needs to know and that they can frame political and economic controversies in a balanced and fair way. The notion of public service helps them to see themselves as high-minded professionals. Their right to decide what receives publicity derives from their technical accomplishments, their experience and their commitment to a quite specific ideology. And so the doctrine of public service pre-empts and forestalls democratic participation in setting the agenda and broadcasting the content of journalistic inquiry. Quite understandable concerns about the impact of market forces should not blind us to the deficiencies of public service broadcasting as currently constituted.

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