OxBlog

Monday, February 16, 2004

# Posted 3:58 AM by Patrick Belton  

GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED DUMBING DOWN OF CULTURE: While the NYT public editor makes a virtue of his newspaper's reporting on candidates' hairstyles and sartorial choices, the BBC does the Grey Lady one better with substantive, in-depth reporting on crop circles, psychics, and, yes, a webcam of a BBC reporter spending a night in a haunted hotel. Considering that one of the stronger arguments to be made in favour of publicly funded broadcasting is that high culture won't survive in a fully market-driven public sphere (and, therefore, the likes of Classic FM's "relaxing" Mozart will drive out the more serious, undebased cultural coinage of a BBC 3 or 4), it's not entirely clear why funds from the public treasury should be drawn upon to provide broadcasting fare which seems, if anything, a fair cut below what the market left to its own resources will provide.
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