BBC: SCOTLAND

THE BBC’s new Scottish channel, which launches in February, is designed to offer a platform to new, more diverse voices that collectively should allow the corporation to present a more rounded view of modern Scotland.

The new channel is a tacit admission that BBC Scotland is not, in its present form, capable of meeting the supposed demand for more and better Scottish programming. According to this point of view, a country with exciting and expanding political aspirations deserves a public sector broadcaster with ambitions to match.

The channel is also a belated answer to a question that has, like so many discussions in Scotland, rumbled on unanswered for more than two decades: should there be a dedicated hour-long news programme mixing Scottish news with reporting from the rest of the UK and the world? The answer, at long last, is yes.

This is positive, even if it seems likely that there is a disconnect between the channel’s stated ambitions and the budget it has been given for original programming. The new channel, however, is also a defensive move, designed in part to rebut accusations that the BBC is incorrigibly biased against the ruling Scottish National Party. It has become an unfortunate – and baseless – article of faith in certain nationalist circles that the BBC’s coverage was a major reason why Scotland rejected independence in 2014.

The BBC is controversial precisely because it is Britain’s most powerful media enterprise. So powerful, in fact, that it enjoys a dominant position. Across the United Kingdom, 97 per cent of the population access its services each week. In Scotland the BBC has a 30 per cent share of the television market and nearly 50 per cent of the radio audience. Its website is an increasingly dominant player in digital news, accounting for nearly one in three visits to all news sites in the UK.

OFCOM, which regulates the BBC, is charged with “promoting competition”. Most broadcasters, newspapers and citizens should have an evident interest in this happening. It is not obvious how the BBC’s ever-expanding remit assists this process.

If the BBC restricted its activities to broadcasting, these competition concerns might be less pressing. Increasingly, however, the BBC is a publisher as much as it is a broadcaster. Modest moves to support local newspapers threatened by the BBC’s monolithic and full-spectrum muscle are both insufficient and a step in the wrong direction: self-restraint on the BBC’s part would be more useful than linking to newspapers from its own website. Thanks to – as the corporation says – the “unique” way the BBC is funded, it has a significant advantage over all its rivals. The imposition of what is, in effect, a poll tax gives the BBC a privileged position that is ripe for abuse.

Because the licence fee, which is guaranteed to rise in line with inflation until 2022, is effectively a tax, the BBC feels bound to move beyond any strict or limited definition of what a public sector broadcaster should offer. It is a commercial organisation itself, and a rival to media companies in the private sector.

The BBC argues that it must be popular, in every sense of the word, to justify the licence fee but the more the BBC behaves like other media companies, whether in terms of broadcasting or publishing, the harder that becomes. This is the paradox in which the BBC traps itself: the more it tries to justify its monopoly over the licence fee, the less it does so.