[cma-l] The Guardian 14/02/14 - Ofcom boss: 'BBC licence fee should be shared with other broadcasters'

[Trevor Lockwood]

Marilyn

Unfortunately competition destroys the small people. Supermarkets have beaten local shops. Cheap foreign goods destroyed British industry. 

The BBC is badly-run, expensive and inefficient but there will be no innovation or dynamism if commerce gets its hands on the cash.

Let's make a small start - allow community media to merge with BBC local radio - and test the water first, before allowing Collete Bowes' ideas to emerge.

That's just the view of an economist (LSE) challenging an economist from Queen Mary College. I'd be happy to debate that contention - in support of the little people.

I explored this a little in a recent blog: http://www.trevorlockwood.com/myth-competition/ It is a fallacy that should be challenged

Trevor 



From: Marilyn Hyndman <marilyn at northernvisions.org>
To: CMA-L <cma-l at commedia.org.uk> 
Sent: Sunday, 16 February 2014, 11:24
Subject: Re: [cma-l] The Guardian 14/02/14 - Ofcom boss: 'BBC licence fee should be shared with other broadcasters'
 


Press statement from the sector?



On 14 Feb 2014, at 18:38, CMA-L wrote:

The BBC licence fee should be shared with other broadcasters to promote 
"competition, dynamism and innovation", according to the outgoing chair 
of media regulator Ofcom.
>Colette Bowe said she thought some BBC licence fee funding should be "contestable", with other media companies allowed to bid to make public service broadcasting programming.
>"I am an economist. There is a lot to be said for contestable funding on 
competition grounds ... The counter argument is that once you start 
stripping away great chunks of funding you weaken the stability [of the 
BBC]," Bowe said on Thursday night, at a Royal Television Society all 
party parliamentary group dinner marking her departure from Ofcom after five years as chair.
>"I have got sympathy with the idea that some more of the funding currently available for public service broadcasting should be contestable. 
Because on the whole I am on the side of the people in the sector who 
believe that what we need is even more competition and  dynamism and 
innovation than we have got."
>Bowe added that examples such as the Labour government's abandoned plan to use licence fee money to fund 
local news showed that it was "very, very difficult to see a way to make [contestable] work" in practice, but this "doesn't mean there is not a 
good reason to do it".
>"I think the challenge for the BBC, leaving aside political will to continue with a hypothecated tax, the challenge is going to be enforcing the payment for the licence fee," she said, in the face of technological changes.
>Bowe served as an Ofcom board member for several years before taking over as the media regulator's chair in 2009.
>She is stepping down on 31 March, to be replaced by Dame Patricia Hodgson, the former BBC policy director and trustee who is Ofcom deputy chair.Maggie Brown, Friday 14 February 2014 17.50 GMT
>
>http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/feb/14/ofcom-bbc-licence-fee-shared-other-broadcasters
>
>\\
>
>
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Marilyn Hyndman
Northern Visions/NvTv
23 Donegall Street
Belfast
BT1 2FF

Tel: 028 9024 5495 ext 207
Fax: 028 9032 6608

NvTv 
Belfast Community Television

http://northernvisions.org/




 

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