Daniel Hind is an independent publisher and journalist. He was the first editorial director of the revived Bodley Head imprint at Random House. In 2024, he was awarded a doctorate for his thesis The Matter of Opinion: Popular Sovereignty and the Constitution of Social Reality. He is the author of The Threat to Reason, The Return of the Public, and The Magic Kingdom, as well as several policy papers.

Tom Mills is senior lecturer in sociology at Aston University, where he works on media, communication, and the sociology of elites. A former chair of the Media Reform Coalition, he is the author of The BBC: Myth of a Public Service, which examines the BBC’s relationship with the state and the impact of neoliberalism on its organisation and culture.

Tom Chivers is a research associate in British media policy at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-author of Our Mutual Friend: The BBC in the Digital Age. He is vice-chair of the Media Reform Coalition and author of the MRC’s flagship ‘Who Owns the UK Media?’ reports.

The BBC’s host of television channels, radio stations, and online platforms are used by more than 90 percent of the British public every month. It operates alongside public and private rivals, and its programmes are available to global audiences, largely via commercial platforms. Yet despite its previous successes in adapting to new technologies, the BBC’s future in the digital age looks uncertain.

It remains extremely popular in the UK but is dwarfed financially by multinational digital platforms and video-on-demand services, which operate free from any obligation to provide news, education, or content that reflects the lives and cultures of the UK. Once-dominant broadcasters like the BBC are losing ground to social media platforms as providers of news, especially among younger people. And as the BBC itself has commercialised its operations, it has increasingly struggled to maintain its identity as a public-service media organisation.

Trust in the BBC’s news coverage remains high compared to many private competitors, especially the UK’s tabloid press. But it has been hit by public scandals and controversies involving prominent BBC personalities. It has also suffered from a broader loss of public confidence in both political institutions and the major media that organise news coverage around them. The BBC’s history and reputation are rightly considered assets it can exploit politically and commercially, but its place within the British establishment is increasingly a reputational liability. The British news media is the second-least-trusted in the twenty-eight countries surveyed for the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, and this disconnect has been corroborated by qualitative academic studies.

In every decade since its incorporation in 1927, the BBC’s operations have been reviewed, and its constitution revised, by central government. There have been nine BBC Royal Charters, as well as several supplements and amendments. But for all that the BBC has changed in terms of its constitution, organisational culture ,and operations, it retains many striking similarities with the BBC created under Stanley Baldwin.

Its mechanisms of democratic accountability all run through the government, which retains control over appointments to the BBC Board, the Charter renewal process, and the value of the licence fee—the BBC’s major source of income. Its political reporting remains overwhelmingly orientated to Westminster and the dominant political players within it.

In its early years the BBC was forbidden from producing original journalism and was obliged to take content from the private newswire companies. Today, although it has significant resources devoted to journalism, a similar sort of relationship exists, as the BBC continues to rely on the private media as an arbiter of political opinion and controversy, and follows the agenda of the commercial sector in deciding which topics to cover.

The BBC’s commitment to impartial reporting, central to its legitimacy as a publicly funded news organisation, can be traced back to the intellectual and bureaucratic culture of the British Empire. The BBC’s first director-general and ‘founding father’, John Reith, was strongly committed to a Victorian vision of public service, and the BBC’s ethos of impartiality was inherited from the Civil Service and the professions. Immediately after the First World War, Walter Lippmann drew on his admiration of the British Foreign Office to recommend that the instruction of the public be entrusted to ‘men who are not personally involved, who control enough facts, and have the dialectical skill to sort out what is real perception from what is stereotype, pattern and elaboration’. The BBC’s vision of itself as a professional and dispassionate bastion of impartiality is a relic of the late Empire, which has survived into the present day.

The BBC’s relationship to its public is not as remote, or as candidly patrician, as in earlier years. Indeed it has gone to great lengths to reflect the diversity of the country it serves. It also now benefits from access to extensive audience data via industry surveys and its digital platforms. Competition from the private sector and the need to convene large audiences continues to make it acutely interested in producing popular entertainment. But while many of us feel an emotional and civic connection to the BBC, very few of us have any understanding of its inner workings. Despite being publicly owned and funded directly by its audiences, nobody in the general public has any direct influence or say over the BBC’s activities or strategy.

In this book we argue for a new model of public media, built on a mutualised BBC in which its members—the British public and BBC staff—play an active and direct role in its governance and functions. In doing so we take seriously well-founded criticisms of the BBC as it exists today, while recognising the need to fortify it against malicious and duplicitous attacks. Our objective is to put the BBC on a secure foundation, preserving what it does best, as the media environment shifts from the twentieth-century’s characteristic mix of print and broadcast to this century’s digital-first structures of interactive communication.

The promise of mutualisation is nothing less than the activation of the vast reserves of latent knowledge, intelligence, and expertise in society at large. Capitalist social media platforms already allow us to inform, educate, and entertain one another, albeit in the shadow of arbitrary interference by unaccountable owners, moderators, engineers, and algorithms. We are in a position to create a public digital media infrastructure that enables us all to collaborate with the BBC’s professional and technical staff, and to communicate with one another in ways that are themselves constitutive of the BBC’s publicly defined, and publicly interpreted, purposes. The BBC can become a space in which we discover our priorities and preferences, and act upon them.

The stakes could not be higher. Either we build an organisation that can facilitate the conscious deliberation of a democratically articulated public, or we remain at the mercy of billionaire owners, the logic of market forces, and the demands of political oligarchy.

Daniel Hind is an independent publisher and journalist. He was the first editorial director of the revived Bodley Head imprint at Random House. In 2024, he was awarded a doctorate for his thesis The Matter of Opinion: Popular Sovereignty and the Constitution of Social Reality. He is the author of The Threat to Reason, The Return of the Public, and The Magic Kingdom, as well as several policy papers.

Tom Mills is senior lecturer in sociology at Aston University, where he works on media, communication, and the sociology of elites. A former chair of the Media Reform Coalition, he is the author of The BBC: Myth of a Public Service, which examines the BBC’s relationship with the state and the impact of neoliberalism on its organisation and culture.

Tom Chivers is a research associate in British media policy at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-author of Our Mutual Friend: The BBC in the Digital Age. He is vice-chair of the Media Reform Coalition and author of the MRC’s flagship ‘Who Owns the UK Media?’ reports.

The BBC’s host of television channels, radio stations, and online platforms are used by more than 90 percent of the British public every month. It operates alongside public and private rivals, and its programmes are available to global audiences, largely via commercial platforms. Yet despite its previous successes in adapting to new technologies, the BBC’s future in the digital age looks uncertain.

It remains extremely popular in the UK but is dwarfed financially by multinational digital platforms and video-on-demand services, which operate free from any obligation to provide news, education, or content that reflects the lives and cultures of the UK. Once-dominant broadcasters like the BBC are losing ground to social media platforms as providers of news, especially among younger people. And as the BBC itself has commercialised its operations, it has increasingly struggled to maintain its identity as a public-service media organisation.

Trust in the BBC’s news coverage remains high compared to many private competitors, especially the UK’s tabloid press. But it has been hit by public scandals and controversies involving prominent BBC personalities. It has also suffered from a broader loss of public confidence in both political institutions and the major media that organise news coverage around them. The BBC’s history and reputation are rightly considered assets it can exploit politically and commercially, but its place within the British establishment is increasingly a reputational liability. The British news media is the second-least-trusted in the twenty-eight countries surveyed for the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, and this disconnect has been corroborated by qualitative academic studies.

In every decade since its incorporation in 1927, the BBC’s operations have been reviewed, and its constitution revised, by central government. There have been nine BBC Royal Charters, as well as several supplements and amendments. But for all that the BBC has changed in terms of its constitution, organisational culture ,and operations, it retains many striking similarities with the BBC created under Stanley Baldwin.

Its mechanisms of democratic accountability all run through the government, which retains control over appointments to the BBC Board, the Charter renewal process, and the value of the licence fee—the BBC’s major source of income. Its political reporting remains overwhelmingly orientated to Westminster and the dominant political players within it.

In its early years the BBC was forbidden from producing original journalism and was obliged to take content from the private newswire companies. Today, although it has significant resources devoted to journalism, a similar sort of relationship exists, as the BBC continues to rely on the private media as an arbiter of political opinion and controversy, and follows the agenda of the commercial sector in deciding which topics to cover.

The BBC’s commitment to impartial reporting, central to its legitimacy as a publicly funded news organisation, can be traced back to the intellectual and bureaucratic culture of the British Empire. The BBC’s first director-general and ‘founding father’, John Reith, was strongly committed to a Victorian vision of public service, and the BBC’s ethos of impartiality was inherited from the Civil Service and the professions. Immediately after the First World War, Walter Lippmann drew on his admiration of the British Foreign Office to recommend that the instruction of the public be entrusted to ‘men who are not personally involved, who control enough facts, and have the dialectical skill to sort out what is real perception from what is stereotype, pattern and elaboration’. The BBC’s vision of itself as a professional and dispassionate bastion of impartiality is a relic of the late Empire, which has survived into the present day.

The BBC’s relationship to its public is not as remote, or as candidly patrician, as in earlier years. Indeed it has gone to great lengths to reflect the diversity of the country it serves. It also now benefits from access to extensive audience data via industry surveys and its digital platforms. Competition from the private sector and the need to convene large audiences continues to make it acutely interested in producing popular entertainment. But while many of us feel an emotional and civic connection to the BBC, very few of us have any understanding of its inner workings. Despite being publicly owned and funded directly by its audiences, nobody in the general public has any direct influence or say over the BBC’s activities or strategy.

In this book we argue for a new model of public media, built on a mutualised BBC in which its members—the British public and BBC staff—play an active and direct role in its governance and functions. In doing so we take seriously well-founded criticisms of the BBC as it exists today, while recognising the need to fortify it against malicious and duplicitous attacks. Our objective is to put the BBC on a secure foundation, preserving what it does best, as the media environment shifts from the twentieth-century’s characteristic mix of print and broadcast to this century’s digital-first structures of interactive communication.

The promise of mutualisation is nothing less than the activation of the vast reserves of latent knowledge, intelligence, and expertise in society at large. Capitalist social media platforms already allow us to inform, educate, and entertain one another, albeit in the shadow of arbitrary interference by unaccountable owners, moderators, engineers, and algorithms. We are in a position to create a public digital media infrastructure that enables us all to collaborate with the BBC’s professional and technical staff, and to communicate with one another in ways that are themselves constitutive of the BBC’s publicly defined, and publicly interpreted, purposes. The BBC can become a space in which we discover our priorities and preferences, and act upon them.

The stakes could not be higher. Either we build an organisation that can facilitate the conscious deliberation of a democratically articulated public, or we remain at the mercy of billionaire owners, the logic of market forces, and the demands of political oligarchy.