charged with setting the Corporation’s ‘overall strategic direction’, approving strategies and budget allocations, and overseeing the decisions of BBC management. They have been appointed by central government and have naturally enough tended to be overwhelmingly ‘Establishment’ figures drawn from privileged backgrounds.52
The governors, and later the trustees, have been responsible for appointing the ‘chief executive officer’ and ‘editorin-chief’: the director general – the most powerful figure in the BBC. He (there has yet to be a female DG) has overall responsibility for the BBC’s output, though naturally much of this is delegated, and heads the BBC’s senior management. This consists of a complex matrix of policy-making bodies overseen by the Executive Board, which in recent years has included ‘non-executive directors’ drawn mainly from the corporate sector. Together, the members of the Executive Board are directly responsible for the BBC’s management and output. They have the power to allocate resources to particular programme areas, and they wield the powers of appointment and promotion that shape the lower levels of the BBC hierarchy.
A 2014 report of the quasi-official Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission had no qualms about identifying these top BBC executives, and over a hundred other senior BBC managers, as members of ‘Britain’s elite’ – along with politicians, civil servants, the super-rich, FTSE 350 CEOs, newspaper columnists and other groups. The Commission’s survey of 125 BBC executives found that 26 per cent had attended private school (compared with 7 per cent of the population), 33 per cent had attended Oxbridge (compared with just 0.8 per cent of the population) and 62 per cent had attended one of the Russell Group of leading universities (compared with 11.4 per cent of the population) – figures which were comparable with those for other factions of Britain’s power elite, as the report shows.53 Senior BBC managers are also extremely well paid: in 2014/15, the seven executive members of the BBC’s Executive Board earned an average of over £424,000.54 Meanwhile, around eighty BBC executives are thought to earn over £150,000,55 even after policy measures were put in place to reduce executive pay following fierce criticism from the press. Among this executive cadre are around a hundred or so senior managers in editorial policy who on average earn just over £100,000, and the most senior of whom can earn two or three times that.56
Below these senior editorial managers, we see similar patterns of privilege. In 2006, the Sutton Trust examined the educational backgrounds of 100 leading news journalists in the UK, of whom 31 worked at the BBC. It found that 54 per cent were privately educated and a remarkable 45 per cent had attended Oxbridge.57 Educational background is of course an indicator of shared class background. But it is also in itself a profoundly important basis for elite cohesion, forging along with other formative experiences, if not a shared set of ideas, then at least a shared demeanour and set of dispositions. Elitist recruiting practices – which are naturally justified in meritocratic terms, even if they are recognised to create serious problems in terms of legitimacy – thus create subtle forms of institutional and cross-institutional cohesion.
In the case of the BBC, recruitment has also been much more explicitly political. In combination with the strong Oxbridge orientation, there has, since the 1990s especially, been a greater movement of personnel between the BBC and Westminster. Before this – from the 1930s to the 1980s – the Security Service exercised a secret veto power over appointments to thousands of positions in the BBC which were referred to as ‘counter-subversion’ posts. As we will see later, this practice was not concerned with excluding agents of the Soviet Union from the BBC for the purposes of national security. Rather, it was mechanism intended to prevent the employment of persons whose politics MI5 regarded as too radical for admission to public life. Moreover, the practice was not imposed on the BBC by the secret state. It was encouraged by the BBC leadership, who regarded it as a useful mechanism for the maintenance of ‘impartiality’, complementing and protecting other systems of editorial control. Here, once again, we see the classic conflation between ‘objectivity’ and the national interest as defined by the British state.
What are the more mundane mechanisms of editorial control which operate at the BBC? The sociologist Philip Schlesinger describes how BBC journalists see ‘themselves as working in a system which offers them a high measure of autonomy’ and are generally not cognisant of the fact that ‘orientations first defined at the top of the [BBC] hierarchy’ work their way downwards through a ‘chain of editorial command’, becoming ‘part of the taken for granted assumptions of those working in the newsrooms’. He found BBC journalists to be ‘a mass of conformists’ who adopted ‘the model of corporate professionalism provided for them by the BBC by degrees varying from unreflecting acquiescence to the most full-blown commitment’.58 The former BBC executive, Stuart Hood, at around the same time, similarly wrote of the taken-for-granted assumptions of the editor or producer as a ‘programme ethos – a general view of what is fitting and seemly, of what is admissible and not admissible, which is gradually absorbed by those persons involved in programme making’.59 The learning process that establishes these rules and conventions is evident in historical accounts. Hendy notes in his history of Radio 4, for example, that: ‘Over time, producers had learned to adjust their ideas to what they knew to be acceptable.’ For instance, the celebrated radio producer Geoffrey Bridson tried
offering the Home Service [the forerunner to Radio 4] a series of trenchant documentaries on subjects such as nuclear armament, Soviet Russia, McCarthyism, poverty or racial conflict, but soon found that even these were rejected, mostly for being ‘too controversial or too political’. The BBC, he concluded, had come to regard the Home as the place ‘to reflect the most respectably orthodox opinion as it already existed’.60
As is fitting for an Oxbridge institution, the BBC’s ‘programme ethos’ has been fostered in a subtle, almost collegiate manner, but in a decidedly hierarchical context. Tom Burns notes that it ‘is drummed into producers … that if there is any doubt in their mind about a topic, or viewpoint, or film sequence, or contributor they must refer up to their chief editor, or head of department’. He also observed, though, that the significance of ‘referring up’ was more ‘symbolic rather than operational’, and quotes Anthony Smith’s observation that: ‘There is seldom any doubt about what the man above you thinks on any important issue. You can therefore avoid referring upwards by deciding them in a way which you know he would approve of.’61 In a 1973 policy document called Tastes and Standards in BBC Programmes, Huw Wheldon, the managing director of BBC television, was quoted as saying, ‘The wrath of the Corporation in its varied human manifestations is particularly reserved for those who fail to refer’.62
The process of ‘referring up’ controversial political matters to your superior, Schlesinger notes, was developed as part of a broader system of bureaucratic authority which ensured that staff conform to what he calls the BBC’s ‘corporate ideology’. Broader organisational control, he explains, is exercised through the development and distribution of internal policy publications and the selection and promotion of staff, which acts as an informal ‘sanctioning process’.63
These various mechanisms are not just ‘ideological’. A journalist need not accept the dominant news values of editors, and may even find ways of subverting them. But a bureaucracy like the BBC functions in such a way that makes the opportunities for this somewhat limited. Furthermore, the pressures for conformity are not merely internal to the BBC. Class and educational background influence who is recruited in the first place, and those lucky enough to win out in the competition for a highly prestigious post will not only have to develop a strategic understanding of ‘office politics’ and what is expected of them by colleagues and superiors: they will also enter a broader set of relations with individuals and institutions outside of the BBC. A political correspondent, for example, is not only required to develop a certain understanding of what BBC editors expect in terms of what they report and how. They are also required to familiarise themselves with the broader world of formal politics and authoritative political commentary. This is all part of the BBC’s Establishment culture. Indeed, its ‘corporate ideology’
