THEY are supposedly the broadcasters par excellence, worth their weight in gold and the envy of colleagues the world over, save, perhaps, in the United States.
That is, what we as radio and television licence fee payers are led to believe, all in the name of market valuation. Yet, they are sustained on a gravy train funded by the taxpayer which, many argue, is the antithesis of the ethos of a public broadcaster.
So, when The British Broadcasting Corporation, known the world over by its iconic sobriquets, BBC or “Auntie” or the Beeb, published last week a list of its presenters earning more than £150,000 (RM835,434) a year, it inevitably reopened the issues of excessive corporate salaries and the greed culture prevalent in society. The list appeared in the BBC’s latest Annual Report under the terms of its new Royal Charter.
The list reveals a staggering 96 BBC presenters and stars earning £150,000 or more at the princely cost of £28.7 million per year.
The best paid included radio personality Chris Evans, who earns £2.5 million; Gary Linker, former England striker and the presenter of Match of the Day, the BBC’s much devalued flagship football programme, earning £1.8 million; TV star Graham Norton with just under £900,000; and three news anchors — Jeremy Vine at £750,000; John “the Rottweiler” Humphreys, the septuagenarian presenter of BBC Radio 4’s influential Today programme at £650,000, and Huw Edwards, the anchor of The Nine O’Clock News at £600,000.
The annual report does not include stars who receive their pay through BBC Worldwide, the corporation’s commercial arm or are paid through independent production companies. The above figures only refer to their BBC broadcasting earnings and do not include payments from other broadcasters or commercial activities.
To think they all earn more than Theresa May, the British prime minister, who has the unenviable part of her job description of sending British troops in harm’s way if necessary in the defence of the realm.
Listening to the debate today, those involved seemed to revel in their earnings “notoriety” as a vagary of the market place, which is what broadcasting and journalism has become.
That noble tradition of the Fourth Estate of balanced
informing, commenting, investigating and being a platform
for public discourse with checks and balance against the other three modern Estates — the
executive, the legislative and the judiciary, is receding.
Perhaps in an age of social media, alternative and fake news, and blurring of objectivity in reporting, those who hanker for such sensitivities are seen to pander to nostalgia.
Lest critics of inflated salaries in the economy per se are accused of indulging in the politics of envy, as some members of parliament have already said, read what Radio 4 Today presenter John Humphrys, publicly acknowledged about his privileged position.
“On paper, absolutely nothing justifies that huge amount of money, if you compare me
with lots of other people who do visibly. If a doctor saves a child’s life, if a nurse comforts a dying person, a fireman rushes into Grenfell Tower, then of course you could argue that compared with that sort of thing I’m not worth tuppence ha’penny. However, we operate in a market place.”
The BBC revelation has conveniently highlighted gender and BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) gaps in pay. Of the 96 top earners, only 34 women made it to the list with the highest female talent paid £500,000 and the highest BAME star paid £250,000.
Such gaps are justified areas of debate and eradication in society per se, but the real debate
should be on excessive earnings bedevilling society in the name
of market value, which post-World War 2 has merely served
to enhance inequality not
only between countries but within sections in societies. The World Bank considers growing inequality the greatest current threat to humanity.
The excessive earnings gravy train has given rise to the emergence of a number of elites within society which defy old definitions — in financial services (investment bankers, hedge fund managers, commodity traders); sports stars (soccer, tennis, basketball, American football, golf); media and arts, celebrities, technology start-ups, etc.
Equally disturbingly, this has even filtered into previously ideologically no-go areas. Today, trade union leaders, local council leaders, heads of quangos (government agencies), top academics and professional elites in medicine, law and accounting, all feature strongly in the elite pay universe.
What individuals earn, especially if they are self-employed, is their affair as long as it is not at the exploitation of others by underpaying employees and passing costs wantonly to customers sometimes with collusion of regulators, at the expense of the exchequer through tax evasion and nature through the destruction and overuse of natural resources.
Society needs to revisit the Aristotelian concept of “the good life” and when is “enough is enough”.
Remember bankers’ bonuses? This is greedy, people retorted. If they say something is greedy, that implies that they have an idea what enough looks like. Unfortunately, society does not seem to have a common understanding of what enough is, because people were increasingly told over the last 30 years by the market that more is always better, and the only real indicator of value is a monetary indicator, which squeezes out any other form of valuation.
We will know what enough looks like when we have a clear idea of what constitutes the good life. Aristotle had a very good, but selective idea of what the good life looked like, albeit I doubt whether the slaves in Athens would have agreed with it.
Valuation is the curse of contemporary society — largely set arbitrarily by people with vested interests and who oft do not have a clue about it.
The thought of our beloved “Auntie” as the very epitome of elite capture of society, a liberal democratic one to boot, by its discriminatory, bloated and unfair salary packages to a minority of its elite presenters, is depressing indeed!
The writer is an independent
London-based economist and writer.