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...year-old head: "We don't make our programs with 50-year-old viewers in mind." Among the channel's new projects are not only dramas and comedies but also a Web-based experiment, which Cohen describes as a "weird mixture of YouTube and talent show." Part of the BBC's updated mission is to boost "media literacy" and push its flock to digital technology as analog is phased out. BBC3 intends to set trends and not just follow them...
...BBC's enduring belief that it must stay in the forefront of changes in media has driven its growth. The Beeb ballooned in the 1990s, adding staff and diversifying its operations and output. In came the rolling news service BBC News 24, along with a commercial arm, BBC Worldwide. In the drive for ratings, nobody stopped to ask if the corporation could sustain such growth or stretch itself in so many directions...
Thompson's new plan reduces staffing (23,000 before the new round of cuts) and budgets but leaves the range of activities pretty much intact. There's a constant tension between the BBC's aim of making what Byford calls "brilliant, outstanding, special, standout content" and the need to justify its existence by attracting mass audiences, which, as Fox Television has proved, tend to gather at the bottom of the taste pyramid. Consider the huge popularity of reality TV, which is cheap to produce and capable of provoking controversy that hooks big audiences. Controversy is, of course, hard to control...
...British government isn't particularly happy with its national treasure either. In 2003 it fell out with the BBC over its coverage of the Iraq war. The current Prime Minister Gordon Brown seems to share his predecessor's lack of enthusiasm. At a September press conference Brown gestured to a journalist that it was his turn at the microphone. As the journalist identified himself, Brown motioned him to stop. The event had barely begun, and the PM had already answered questions from four BBC correspondents. Now here was a fifth. Brown didn't care that each journalist represented different BBC...
Byford concedes that BBC swarms at news events can seem "incoherent and duplicative." Plans to fuse TV, radio and online newsrooms and cut up to 490 jobs "should have been done earlier," says Byford. "We're a multimedia broadcaster increasingly organizing around a multimedia platform." But whether or not these cuts deliver the benefits he envisages, the spectacle of the BBC targeting core services and preserving frothier output fuels concerns that it has lost its reason for being. Richard North, author of the 2007 book Scrap the BBC!, calls the broadcaster a "grotesque monopoly" and advocates its privatization. "Broadcasting...