Nadine Dorries’s slip-ups may be funny – but her Channel 4 plans are no joke

theguardian.com:

The slip-ups and car-crash interviews of Nadine Dorries, the secretary of state for culture, such as her reference to “downstreaming” films, provide regular fodder for satirists and social media users alike, but the problem is that these clips are distractions from the real substance of what she is doing – and the privatisation of Channel 4 is no joke.

Privatisation in some form has been mooted about half a dozen times since the channel’s launch in 1982, but no one has managed to get as close as this government, which is pressing ahead with its sale. There are doubts over whether it will have the political backing to pass the legislation required to sell off the broadcaster, but Dorries is defending the plans, not by the brilliance of her argument, but by being less than entirely clear about the facts.

Channel 4, which celebrates its 40th birthday this year, is a strange beast: a state-owned broadcaster funded by private-sector advertising, but with a commitment, or remit, to show the sort of public-service content (the news, the Paralympics, regional voices) that is largely unprofitable and then to reinvest profits into new programming.

On the day the white paper to privatise the channel was published, listeners to Iain Dale’s LBC radio show heard Dorries say that investment in the broadcasting rival Channel 5 increased after it was “privatised … three years ago, five years ago maybe”. Channel 5 has never been publicly owned and therefore could never have been privatised.

When the error was pointed out, Dorries doubled down. She said criticism was “nit-picking” after she “misspoke” the date, suggesting that failing to remember when Channel 5 was sold (2014) was the problem and not the fact she had failed to understand the