“They went on a lot about their responsibilities to society, the nation, their viewers, the truth. I found it nauseating”. (Ingham, 1991, p. 355)
For veteran journalist and producer Roger Bolton (2025), the value of public service broadcasting (PSB) is underscored by the discomfort and disapproval of those in power. Referring to Bolton and his colleagues’ aspirational descriptions of the responsibilities of PSB at a dinner party, Bernard Ingham (1991), press secretary to Margaret Thatcher, articulates his scepticism about such lofty ideals vividly. The stakes for today’s media professionals holding those in power to account are even higher. But is there still a public service ethos, an audience, and an economic model to support PSB in today’s media landscape?
As Oakley and O’Connor (2018, p. 12) point out, analysing cultural production provides us with a “key to understanding how power [is] distributed and used in society.” And this is as true today as it was when Bolton (1988) broadcast Death on the Rock, a scathing investigatory documentary about the killing of three Provisional Irish Republican Army members in Gibraltar by the British Special Air Service. The UK government’s response to the programme—attempting to ban or postpone its broadcast—underscored how cultural works can both illustrate and constitute political struggles over freedoms to know and communicate. Indeed, in a 2019 episode of BBC Radio 4’s Reunion (Nicholson, 2019) that brought together key antagonists in this conflict thirty years later, Stephen Bullock, the Ministry of Defence’s chief of PR at the time was still incensed, calling Bolton’s appeal to the public service functions of Death on the Rock “complete horseshit”, and complaining that “it’s as though thirty years hasn’t passed”. The political stakes in media production are clearly still as high as ever, although as media tends toward increasingly fragmented platforms, channels, and formats, it can become harder to track what Hesmondhalgh (2018, p. 11) characterises as “the complex intermeshing of economic, political and cultural power”.
As Bolton (2025) warns us, if we move towards fragmented, subscription-based broadcast models instead of the BBC’s public service license fee funding model, we are likely to have a “dominance of personality and the dominance of the extreme”. The BBC charter and funding settlement is due for renewal in 2027 (BBC, 2016), and depending on the political will of the government of the day, we might find ourselves unable to fund traditional forms of UK PSB. The BBC model, Bolton argues, has bolstered social cohesion, informed us about one another’s lives, provided impartial news, original children’s and educational programming, and provided a non-commercially driven space for the arts. What kinds of media formats and genres might predominate in a landscape without this public service ethos? Or might other formats become channels for PSB in the absence of a license-fee funded BBC? We might return to Oakley and O’Connor’s (2018) advice to turn our analytic lens on contemporary media formats to speculate about such a future.
For example, imagine how ‘public service social media’—including public service social media algorithms might function. Could they serve a public interest and prioritise content that reduces atomisation and enhances democratic norms and values? How could a future ethos of public service be served through more popular and accessible formats such as award ceremonies, reality TV, sportscasting, festivals, and gaming media, as well as via more traditional, but still popular, formats such as film? And what about more obscure genres that seem to proliferate in the attention marketplace of online video? Can we look forward to a future in which impartial political and social commentary is provided by TikTok-style shorts, ASMR videos[1], and ‘mukbang’ video creators (who invite viewers to watch them eating huge quantities of food on camera). Hard to imagine, perhaps, but we may find ourselves without a recognisable BBC as soon as 2028. As Roger Bolton (2025) suggests, “it is desperately important we have this debate about public service”—and find answers that will prepare us to navigate the media landscapes of the future.
Bibliography
BBC. (2016). Charter and Agreement. https://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/governance/charter/
Bolton, R. (Producer). (1988, April 28). Death on the Rock [Broadcast]. In This Week.
Bolton, R. (2025). Media Landscapes: Introduction. Talk, Loughborough University, 6th February 2025.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2018). Introduction. In The cultural industries (4th edition, pp. 3–26). SAGE Publications.
Ingham, B. (1991). Kill the messenger / Bernard Ingham. Fontana,.
Nicholson, R. (Director). (2019, August 25). The Reunion—Death on the Rock [Broadcast]. In The Reunion. BBC Radio 4. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0007wrv
Oakley, K., & O’Connor, J. (2018). The cultural industries: An introduction. In K. Oakley & J. O’Connor (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Cultural Industries (pp. 1–32).
[1] Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response: a pseudo-therapeutic form of audio sensory stimulation. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASMR