Two Masters for BBC

In Tuesday's BBC Trust AGM, the Trust chairman Michael Lyons said that one of their aims is to ensure the BBC remains indepent, resisting pressure and influence from any source.

However, the BBC still has two masters to serve. One is the great number of license fee payers. The other is market, where BBC has to compete for audiences with commercial broadcasters and try to drive ratings up to justify the license fee.

Both masters are hard to satisfy. The first master, composed of people from a large variety of background, will have differnt agenda and priority requirement on BBC. It is really an impossible mission for the BBC to satisfy everyone.

The second master is also hard to serve, mainly because it sometimes fights with the obligations of the BBC as a dedicated public service broadcaster. As a PSB, the BBC is expected to provide merit good or high-brow programming which market would fail to provide. But such programming, in most of the time, would fail to secure high ratings. It pose a big question for the BBC: how to make popular good while making good popular.

Are there solutions for BBC? The answer is yes. For the first master in the form of license fee payers, BBC may not be able to satisfy everyone at the same time, but they could manage it at different periods and in different programming. For the second master, as BBC Director General Mark Thompson pointed out, BBC could provide a wide range of high-quality programming to solve the popular-good issue.