Why the bbc is worth saving?
This is an edited extract from a speech given by former BBC special correspondent Allan Little for the Hetherington Lecture at Stirling University
Is the BBC worth saving? I am not and never have been a BBC executive. I am not much of a corporation man. I am a jobbing journalist. I cannot list for you the supposed abundances the BBC brings into your homes – from Doctor Who and MasterChef, to Live from the Proms; from CBeebies to Newsnight; from the Radio 1 Breakfast Show to Poetry Please.
My subject, my concern – my life’s work, if you like – is the news. And what I want to argue is that the BBC is uniquely valuable because it can carve out in our society’s discourse a public square, a place that most of us will pass through from time to time, in which we will encounter views that we don’t like, in which we will have to acknowledge the right of others to disagree and take issue and challenge and dispute our own view of the world.
This is more urgent now than it has been at any time in my working life, not only because the BBC is now facing a formidable array of vested interests who want to see it dismantled, but because I have seen this tradition, this civic ideal, in retreat, in places where it was once strong.
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