Renewing a Public Service Broadcaster: Review Essay on Georgina Born, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC

Georgina Born Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC, Secker & Warburg, London, 2005 (576 pp). ISBN 9780-09942-893-0 (paperback) RRP $35.00.

What passes for public debate about media policy in Australia moves within fairly predictable narratives. Two mainstays are the promise of ‘new technology’ and the action of a ‘mogul’. The current flurry of attention surrounding Jamie Packer’s withdrawal from ‘old media’—for, apparently, casinos—is fairly typical. Hopefully the interruption of the Packers’ Nine Network’s long ascendancy also puts paid to its occasional pretensions to be ‘the national broadcaster’. That nomenclature properly belongs, of course, to the ABC. Its often precarious fate provides a third standard narrative in Australian media policy discussion. But while the national remit is a real one, it can also signal parochialism in media policy debate. Rarely is a full understanding of media policy settings in other nations brought to bear on the Australian case. Indeed, rarely are the three standard domestic narratives brought together. We lack routine reference to what Georgina Born calls ‘a media ecology’, the broader institutional, technological, and cultural-ideological environment within which any given media institution exists.