Digest 2/14/2022

The potential demise of the BBC, and a spotlight on gal-dem as a fresh way forward for UK media, and more.

This week’s Study Hall Digest feature has been handed over to James Greig, a UK-based writer featured in VICE, I-D, Dazed and more. You can follow his work at @jamesdgreig.

THE BBC’S DECLINE

The biggest UK media news in the last few months has been the potential demise of the BBC. The Conservative government recently announced that the license fee – the £159 flat rate tax through which the BBC is funded – will be abolished in 2026. What the organisation’s funding will be replaced with remains to be seen, but a Netflix-style subscription model seems a likely alternative. It’s possible that the government’s plans will never come to fruition, but if it does, the BBC as we know it will effectively be finished. This fits into a wider strategy of privatization that the Conservative government has pursued over the last ten years, which has affected about every facet of public life you could mention. The end of the BBC as a publicly funded service would also spell disaster for the UK’s film, television, arts and music industries, all of which rely on its patronage. You might then think that this news would be greeted with dismay and anger by progressives in the UK. In fact, many of us found it funny.

It became clear in the days following the announcement that a significant portion of left-leaning young people loathe the BBC to such an extent that they welcome its demise. They have good reason: it would probably be fair to say that the institution has caused more harm than good in recent years. It’s become a popular theory on the left that the BBC is partly to blame for the 2019 defeat of Jeremy Corbyn, and there is some merit to this idea. Throughout the election, it faced a series of allegations of bias, including “accidentally” editing footage of Boris Johnson to make him look better and a particularly hectoring interview between Corbyn and Andrew Neil.

The fact that the BBC maintains a veneer of neutrality – and that it’s still the UK’s most trusted news source – makes its influence even more corrosive when it fails to uphold its own professed standards. In this sense, it can be more dangerous than more flagrantly biased platforms like Fox News and the British tabloid press, which at least wear their political allegiances on their sleeves.

The BBC lost even more goodwill among young progressives when, last October, it published an article titled, ‘We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women’. One of the subjects interviewed was Lily Cade, someone who had previously described trans women as ‘vile, weak, and disgusting’, called for them to be lynched, and had been the subject of a series of allegations of sexual misconduct herself. Hardly a credible authority, then, on the question of whether trans women are predatory. Trans performer Chelsea Poe has claimed that she was also interviewewd for the article,  and pointed out the accusations of sexual misconduct against Cade – apparently, an editorial decision was made not to include this information. Despite an enormous backlash, the BBC maintained that the article met its own editorial guidelines, and to this day has never apologized. It’s difficult to overstate the harm caused by an ostensibly impartial public service broadcaster legitimizing transmisogynistic talking points like this: even four months later, if you Google ‘trans women’ in the UK, this story is one of the first items to appear. In light of this, it’s hard to begrudge anyone who reacts to the news of the BBC’s misfortunes with schadenfreude.

It would also be fair to say that the BBC doesn’t quite embody the ideal of public broadcasting in the way that its admirers imagine. I spoke with Tom Mills, chair of the campaign group Media Reform UK, and author of The BBC: Myth of A Public Service, a critical history of  the institution. ‘The culture and structure of the BBC profoundly changed in the 1990s, in terms of an intensive marketization and a very explicit attempt to erode its political independence,’ he tells me. ‘It’s always been claimed that the license fee affords the BBC a degree of political independence, which is complete nonsense.” Instead, the license fee, which the government sets and can wield as a weapon, has been a mechanism used to further erode its independence and push commercialisation.

But just because things are bad now, doesn’t mean they can’t get worse. The further marketization of the BBC is not a good thing. However much its demise might feel like just deserts, this will only erode an important part of public life, and further impoverish the culture of the UK, where arts funding is already among the lowest in Europe. ‘Part of the problem is that people think the BBC has wronged the left, and that therefore, it deserves everything it gets,’ says Tom. ‘That’s not the way to think about institutions. People should be held accountable for their actions, but if an institution produces a harmful outcome, you don’t punish it; you change it.’

GAL-DEM

The subject of the UK media’s institutional racism, never exactly a secret, has flared up again this week due to the success of ‘The Trojan Horse Affair’, a new podcast produced by The New York Times and the team behind Serial. The series concerns an Islamophobic hoax to which the British press lent its enthusiastic support – a turn of events which is infuriating yet, for many of us, utterly unsurprising. More broadly, the barriers of entry for people of color who want to work in the media are considerable, and stories of workplace racism common. This is why the success of gal-dem, an online and print magazine which publishes work by people of color of marginalized genders, is so encouraging. Founded in 2015 by Liv Little and Charlie Brinkurst-Cuff, gal-dem continues to thrive: in the past year alone, it has published a number of agenda-setting articles, and has easily matched the influence of more established new media companies. Last year, for instance, gal-dem’s Moya Lothian-Mclean wrote a critique of Labour leader Keir Starmer so blistering and well-received that his office had to issue a panicked rebuttal. Plus, the commitment of its editors to giving young writers an early byline has acted as a launchpad for a number of successful careers. It’s great to see a publication doing so much to amplify people from marginalized communities, because, believe me — the UK needs it.

One interesting facet of gal-dem’s success has been its membership model, which it launched in the early stages of the pandemic in 2010. Since then, membership has brought in £350k revenue. For Editor-in-Chief Suyin Haynes, this approach allows gal-dem to work more closely with the communities it represents. “We’ve done focus groups, members-only events, and we even made a book especially for members which came out at the end of last year,” she tells me. “A massive goal for us over the course of this year has been to increase the percentage of revenue we’re getting from memberships. We want people to have a sense of ownership and a sense of connection to gal-dem beyond paying us for a product.” Against an overwhelmingly bland and conservative media culture, the success of gal-dem and its membership model is reason to be optimistic about the potential for alternative outlets to thrive in the UK.

EVERYTHING ELSE

by Study Hall editorial staff

– Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, EatingWell, Health, Parents and People en Español, all titles owned by Barry Diller’s Dotdash Meredith group, are all shuttering their print editions and moving exclusively online. Dotdash Meredith acquired the titles only last year, and gave a statement that “Today’s step is not a cost savings exercise and it is not about capturing synergies or any other acquisition jargon, it is about embracing the inevitable digital future for the affected brands… Naysayers will interpret this as another nail in print’s coffin. They couldn’t be more wrong — print remains core to Dotdash Meredith.” My statement contradicting naysayers has naysayers asking a lot of questions already answered by my statement addressed to those very naysayers!

Readers mourned the loss of EW and InStyle as iconic print publications many of us grew up with, as well as noting that right now the 30+ years of print content aren’t accessible or archived digitally; journalists mourned the implied sweeping job losses.

https://twitter.com/LaceyBanis/status/1491581166536642560

https://twitter.com/timleong/status/1491866076778434560

https://twitter.com/shananaomi/status/1491621388779622401

– The Chicago Reader was planned to transition to nonprofit status; that process has been derailed by several of the Reader‘s board members, who objected to attempts to fact-check a column by Chicago investor and Reader co-owner Leonard Goodman in which he expressed a hesitancy to vaccinate his child. The two board members, Dorothy Leavell and Sladjana Vuckovic, are calling for the resignation of longtime co-publisher Tracy Baim and for the outlet to commit to a policy saying it “abhors censorship of any kind,” blocking the mag’s ability to transition to a nonprofit unless those demands are met. Hanging in the balance is the opportunity for the Reader to secure its future by coming under the ownership of the Reader Institute for Community Journalism, and the jobs of the Readers’ 35 employees.

The Chicago Reader editorial union has released its own statement, calling on the board to “transfer ownership to the RICJ, as they agreed to do more than two years ago. We insist: Free the Reader.”

– Earlier this month, The New Republic raised eyebrows when it let go of its only full-time culture critic, NYC-based Jo Livingstone. It appears that decision was motivated by a desire to refocus the magazine’s coverage on DC exclusively, as opposed to the dual presence in DC and NYC it’s maintained for a decade.

– Staff including journalists, editors and business staff at nonprofit climate justice solutions platform Grist announced their intention to unionize this week with the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild. Several senior staff have indicated they would support the union.

– *Touches earpiece* We’re getting word that Substack’s internal metrics have been erroneously reporting readership data to newsletter writers, falsely inflating them by up to 100% for an unsubstantiated period of months before it was corrected.