structural:expansion, information:filtering, quality:correction, information:extraction
BBC and public service broadcasting

Attenborough is a lifelong supporter of the BBC, public service broadcasting and the television licence. He has said that public service broadcasting "is one of the things that distinguishes this country and makes me want to live here", and believes that it is not reducible to individual programmes, but "can only effectively operate as a network that measures its success not only by its audience size but by the range of its schedule".

... the BBC per minute in almost every category is as cheap as you can find anywhere in the world and produces the best quality. The BBC has gone through swingeing staff cuts. It has been cut to the bone, if you divert licence fee money elsewhere, you cut quality and services. There is a lot of people who want to see the BBC weakened. They talk of this terrible tax of the licence fee. Yet it is the best bargain that is going. Four radio channels and god knows how many TV channels. It is piffling.

Attenborough expressed the view that there had often been people wanting to remove the BBC, adding "there's always been trouble about the licence and if you dropped your guard you could bet our bottom dollar there'd be plenty of people who'd want to take it away. The licence fee is the basis on which the BBC is based and if you destroy it, broadcasting... becomes a wasteland." He expressed regret at some of the changes made to the BBC in the 1990s by its director-general, John Birt, who introduced an internal market at the corporation, slimmed and closed some departments and outsourced much of the corporation's output to private production companies.

Although he said Birt's policies had poor results, Attenborough also acknowledged "the BBC had to change." In 2008, he criticised the BBC's television schedules, positing that the two senior networks, BBC One and BBC Two – which Attenborough stated were "first set up as a partnership" – now "schedule simultaneously programmes of identical character, thereby contradicting the very reason that the BBC was given a second network."