MGEITF 2009: James Murdoch, the morning after the night before

In true post MacTaggart style, James Murdoch attempted to add weight to his somewhat brutal attack on the BBC and Ofcom, which he feels are “suffocating” commercial broadcasters in the UK.

Murdoch, News Corporation’s chairman and chief executive for Europe and Asia, left no stone unturned during his MacTaggart Lecture damning Britain’s flagship public service broadcaster and regulatory body.

He continued his scathing attack the following day, saying the BBC should be starved of funds to lose weight, that Ofcom’s regulations suffocate the market and that Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report is “incoherent nonsense” which is based on nothing more than a compulsion to intervene and micro-manage.

Murdoch admits that the BBC is “heavily valued by consumers” but nevertheless wants to see a “much, much smaller” corporation, one that doesn’t feel it has to “serve everyone” and get involved with everything, again criticising its Lonely Planet acquisition.

He even went as far as to say that BBC’s digital news service needs to “be dealt with” as it is, in his eyes, causing huge problems for commercial news.

His attack didn’t stop there. “Ofcom gets involved in things when it may or may not be better for the consumer”, he said, adding that the media regulator should only be allowed to intervene when there is “hard evidence” of actual harm to consumers.

So, he’d like a market with less, if any, regulation and a much-less influential BBC, which comes as no surprise. He also, of course, praised Sky, mainly for being huge investors in British content – although in reality much of that is on sport.

Murdoch went on to support his father’s decision to introduce a paid-for model for online news content in the UK, with papers such as The Times and The Sun.

“I feel confident that people don’t want to be patronised and don’t want to have a limited choice,” he said. “However, the crowding that occurs from the BBC and local councils makes the UK the hardest place to pull this off. We’ve got a lot to lose but the ones who will achieve in the digital news market in years to come will be the ones with a paid-model.”

Murdoch’s views were clear – the commercial market (ie Sky) is suffering as a result of the BBC’s size and scale and from Ofcom’s regulation.

Murdoch, when questioned, also admitted that a regulatory body, such as Ofcom, would need to intervene if a lack of regulation allowed a commercial company to achieve market dominance.

One of the first things he said in the post MacTaggart lecture was that it’s all about “having enough faith in the public to let them choose what they want to watch”. However, he struggled to respond to a delegate’s point that consumers’ value and respect the BBC, regardless of whether they also choose to pay for a subscription to Sky.

While Murdoch’s comments remained the topic of conversation throughout the festival, and there was sympathy for his views, many felt that he failed to offer a vision for the future of the industry or any real solutions.