Can the BBC Be Saved?
Then, as if by magic, Thatcher was gone. But instead of drawing back the blade, her departure merely dulled it. No doubt the arrival of John Major has spelled an end to the most gratuitously ideological attacks on the BBC. But the more subtle changes in the political culture, changes wrought by Thatcher but by no means unique to Britain, remain. The paradigm of public provision embodied by the British welfare state, and epitomized in broadcasting by the Reithian BBC, is tattered and torn. Across the political spectrum there is a headlong rush to reform public services. Vast, lumbering bureaucracies are out; efficient, market-oriented ones are in. This is bad news for the BBC, an organization for which the market has always been a subject of suspicion, and “efficiency” a word spat out like a mouthful of curdled milk. In fact, the BBC provides a fairly colorful case history in bureaucratic bloat. When George Orwell worked as one of 5,000 employees there in the early 1940s, he wailed abou
