Norman Fowler warned the House of Lords this week that the BBC has a fight on its hands. He was right. It is a fight in which the diversity of Britain’s media landscape and the longterm viability of the world’s biggest public service broadcaster are at stake. For its own sake and the country’s, the BBC should emerge slimmer, more efficient and more accountable to those who pay its bills.
The national broadcaster has few rivals as a producer of factual television and is a respected global news brand. But it has grown wasteful in its use of public money. It has spent too much on an overpromoted cadre of managers aptly skewered in W1A, and it has extended its own remit into online