Geoff Kemp: BBC stronger after Kelly affair fallout

COMMENT

Among the gems in the BBC comedy The Office is the moment when bumptious boss David Brent reports back to apprehensive staff on the firm's reorganisation plans.

"Well, there's good news and bad news," he declares - the staff will lose their jobs but Brent himself has been promoted.

"So, every cloud ... " he starts to say, before the prevailing mood penetrates even his thick skin, and he finishes lamely: "You're still thinking about the bad news, aren't you?"

For the BBC, good news came with success for The Office in the Golden Globe awards. The bad news arrived a day later when the broadcaster was criticised by the Hutton report for "unfounded" allegations against the Blair Government and management failings.

Soon after came the resignations of BBC chairman Gavyn Davies and Director-General Greg Dyke - since followed by journalist Andrew Gilligan - as the corporation faced up to what some predicted would be its greatest crisis, its reputation seemingly in tatters.

Like David Brent's staff, BBC insiders must have found it difficult to see any silver lining amid the dark clouds. The title of another recent report on the BBC, Uncertain Futures, seemed all too appropriate.

Yet the willingness of Davies and Dyke to fall on their swords itself provided a glimmer of hope, a gleam intensified by polls that showed Britons siding with the BBC rather than the Government, feeling it had been unfairly penalised for seeking truth.

The estrangement also has its bright side, undermining accusations of "Auntie Beeb" as establishment apologist, or Dyke and Davies as "Tony's Cronies". And despite its melancholy title, the Uncertain Futures research, on which I worked at Cambridge University, adds illumination.

The BBC resignations first represented apologetic abjection but increasingly have appeared less a sign of weakness than strength, symbolising the ethos, purposes and status that separate the BBC from the norms.

The joke in The Office was rooted in Brent's self-aggrandising claims of loyalty to staff. Given his principles, it was suggested, did he still want the promotion? "Yes please," came the instant reply.

Davies and Dyke showed they had more spine than Brent - few have less - but the wider significance was the reassertion of the BBC's commitment to principles of public responsibility and accountability.

Dyke told staff in a farewell email that his sole aim had been to defend the BBC's editorial independence and act in the public interest. "We need closure to protect the future of the BBC," he wrote. "Not for you or me but for the benefit of everyone out there. It might sound pompous but I believe the BBC really matters."

Cynics might, indeed, hear a Brentesque echo, but the support from the public, the protests from staff, and the sight of Dyke questioning his own earlier apologetics to acclaim in BBC offices, endorse his view.

The BBC matters in New Zealand, of course, whether we're watching The Office in the evening or BBC news through the night. It matters elsewhere, too, whether picking up American TV awards or drawing more radio listeners in Nigeria than the population of Britain.

But it is hard to explain quite how much the BBC matters in Britain, where it rivals the Government as an institution charged with embodying and representing the public will - a reason the Hutton inquiry involved such high stakes.

The BBC at its most powerful is akin to what the political philosopher Jeremy Bentham called the "public opinion tribunal", before which governments must answer. More recent writers have seen it as the exemplar of the "public sphere", a realm of critical public discussion independent of both Government and commerce.

Such claims have their critics. "Auntie" is seen as much paternalistic instructor as people's forum, and its role as voice of the nation neglects the plurality of public spheres. Yet the BBC continues to matter, as a largely successful project in public-service broadcasting and a model pressed into service whenever the health of the media is being discussed. The TVNZ charter is just the latest implied compliment.

Publicly owned but independent of Government, committed to citizens not just consumers, its licence-fee funding provides freedom from intrusive advertising and breathing space for ideals - quality, diversity, universality, impartiality and more.

Its media rivals tend to hate the BBC for its principles, or at least the air of superiority they feel accompanies them. Detractors also hate it for its non-commercial advantages, arguing that its public subsidy distorts the market, which left to itself can provide the infrastructure, programming and journalistic depth and breadth required in a modern, democratic society.

The Uncertain Futures report questions this confidence, finding that the BBC's size, funding and public service ethos have been crucial in pressing ahead with the "digital revolution" sought by the Blair Government - the creation of a quality multichannel environment accessible to all, a task to which commercial rivals have largely been unequal.

The outcome has been an even larger BBC, with eight free-to-view TV channels and 10 national radio networks for the equivalent of about $1 a day.

The concerns of the Uncertain Futures project were not those of Lord Hutton, but the lessons can apply to the newsroom, where an aspiration to inform and represent public opinion is enhanced by having a strong, well-resourced journalistic operation guided by public-service principles and insulated to some degree from commercial imperatives.

Of course, the BBC does not have a monopoly in journalistic expertise, as the Hutton report confirmed, and has been criticised for its own tabloid tendencies - Gilligan's offending remarks came in the kind of unscripted opinionating increasingly used to keep the news lively.

But the case for what protesting staff called "brave independent and rigorous BBC journalism" has been underwritten rather than undermined in the Hutton aftermath - and not least by again confirming what the alternative might be. Gilligan's crime was to err while probing the veracity of the Government's justification for war.

But David Kelly is still dead, the victims of the Iraq conflict are still dead, there are still no weapons of mass destruction, and there are still questions to be asked. The BBC appears ready to ask those questions, and to leave the comedy to Ricky Gervais.

* Dr Geoff Kemp lectures in politics at Auckland University.