Thoughts on "Careless People" by Sarah Wynn-Williams

If you make a habit of asking people who work in media what motivates them, there’s one answer you’re likely to hear over and over. “I want to make the stuff I wish was there for me when I was younger.” Even John Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, seemed to feel this way, and he presided over the birth of both radio and television in Britain.

Reith was the youngest child of a very large family, but he was a late, unexpected addition. By the time he showed up, his brothers and sisters had mostly already left home and started families of their own. Reith was therefore the nineteenth-century equivalent of a latchkey kid, spending a historically unprecedented amount of time sitting by himself in a quiet, empty house. When confronted with the invention of broadcasting and asked to run the BBC, Reith intuitively understood that the programming his organization produced would break that silence and fill up all of that empty space. That radio receivers and television sets would become surrogate parents for the latchkey kids of the twentieth century.

Reith’s high-minded, eat-your-vegetables approach to programming was borne out of his own personal ideas about what sort of parents these machines should aspire to be. His philosophy was derided as “paternalistic” by detractors, who believed Reith was making decisions for the entire country that each individual ought to be free to make for themselves. Isn’t “I want to make the stuff I wish was there for me when I was younger” kind of a paternalistic statement, too, though? If we all believed, as Reith’s detractors did, that markets are the most honest and accurate representation of human wants and needs available, wouldn’t we just trust the market to shape the future of media? Those of us who decided to intervene directly and spend our adult lives trying to shape that future with our own hands - aren’t we paternalistic, too?

For context, maybe it would help to look at the opposite extreme. The legacy of the BBC shows us what it looks like when incredible power to shape the future of media is handed to a paternalist. To someone who thought children need to be protected from the excesses of ad-supported, market-driven media. What happens if you hand that kind of power to someone who doesn’t believe that children should be protected from anything? Someone who has