Tag Archives: BBC

Britain, Broadcasting, Government, Media, Society

On the BBC and its day of shame

THE BBC & THE BASHIR SCANDAL

IT would be remiss of Scotland Yard not to read Lord Dyson’s report before deciding if crimes had been committed.

If anyone in the BBC is suspected of any offences, they must be properly and thoroughly investigated.

Note, too, that rather than the debacle involving a single rogue reporter or department, the tentacles of impropriety stretched to the very top of the corporation. The deceit, lies and cover-ups have existed for decades.

Lord Dyson, who rightly left no stone unturned, finds Martin Bashir guilty of “deceit… and dishonesty”. He acted in serious breach of BBC ethical guidelines. Every bit as shameful is the corporation’s egregious attempt to cover up the entire scandal.

Since its inception nearly a century ago, the BBC has haughtily assumed the moral high ground. Richly funded by a torrent of public money, it appears to look down its nose at what it considers its grubbier rivals in TV, radio and newspapers. Yet, behind the sermonising, the broadcaster has been exposed as nothing more than a pious hypocrite.

Lies. Deception. Manipulation. Forgery. Fraud. These were the tactics used by the BBC – and then covered up.

My view is one of disgraceful obfuscation and denial.

The panjandrums implicated have, so far, escaped untouched, enjoying gold-plated pensions and sinecures. The corporation’s former director-general, Lord Hall, sits pretty as chairman of the National Gallery. The Culture Secretary, for one, who appointed him to the prestigious post, should consider removing him as his integrity is now called into serious question following Lord Dyson’s damning and excoriating report.

These issues with the BBC are not going to go away until they are fully addressed both by the Government and the Corporation itself.

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Arts, Culture, Government, Media, Scotland

The monolithic BBC and its privileged position

BBC: SCOTLAND

THE BBC’s new Scottish channel, which launches in February, is designed to offer a platform to new, more diverse voices that collectively should allow the corporation to present a more rounded view of modern Scotland.

The new channel is a tacit admission that BBC Scotland is not, in its present form, capable of meeting the supposed demand for more and better Scottish programming. According to this point of view, a country with exciting and expanding political aspirations deserves a public sector broadcaster with ambitions to match.

The channel is also a belated answer to a question that has, like so many discussions in Scotland, rumbled on unanswered for more than two decades: should there be a dedicated hour-long news programme mixing Scottish news with reporting from the rest of the UK and the world? The answer, at long last, is yes.

This is positive, even if it seems likely that there is a disconnect between the channel’s stated ambitions and the budget it has been given for original programming. The new channel, however, is also a defensive move, designed in part to rebut accusations that the BBC is incorrigibly biased against the ruling Scottish National Party. It has become an unfortunate – and baseless – article of faith in certain nationalist circles that the BBC’s coverage was a major reason why Scotland rejected independence in 2014.

The BBC is controversial precisely because it is Britain’s most powerful media enterprise. So powerful, in fact, that it enjoys a dominant position. Across the United Kingdom, 97 per cent of the population access its services each week. In Scotland the BBC has a 30 per cent share of the television market and nearly 50 per cent of the radio audience. Its website is an increasingly dominant player in digital news, accounting for nearly one in three visits to all news sites in the UK.

OFCOM, which regulates the BBC, is charged with “promoting competition”. Most broadcasters, newspapers and citizens should have an evident interest in this happening. It is not obvious how the BBC’s ever-expanding remit assists this process.

If the BBC restricted its activities to broadcasting, these competition concerns might be less pressing. Increasingly, however, the BBC is a publisher as much as it is a broadcaster. Modest moves to support local newspapers threatened by the BBC’s monolithic and full-spectrum muscle are both insufficient and a step in the wrong direction: self-restraint on the BBC’s part would be more useful than linking to newspapers from its own website. Thanks to – as the corporation says – the “unique” way the BBC is funded, it has a significant advantage over all its rivals. The imposition of what is, in effect, a poll tax gives the BBC a privileged position that is ripe for abuse.

Because the licence fee, which is guaranteed to rise in line with inflation until 2022, is effectively a tax, the BBC feels bound to move beyond any strict or limited definition of what a public sector broadcaster should offer. It is a commercial organisation itself, and a rival to media companies in the private sector.

The BBC argues that it must be popular, in every sense of the word, to justify the licence fee but the more the BBC behaves like other media companies, whether in terms of broadcasting or publishing, the harder that becomes. This is the paradox in which the BBC traps itself: the more it tries to justify its monopoly over the licence fee, the less it does so.

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BBC, Government, National Audit Office

£369m severance payments at the BBC. A probe is possible…

NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE REPORT

BBC executives who authorised severance payments amounting to £369 million to their own staff may be investigated by the police. The warning came from Conservative MP Rob Wilson who has written to the National Audit Office (NAO) and BBC director-general Lord Hall asking for full disclosure of the names of those responsible. Mr Wilson has promised to take evidence of fraud to the police.

MPs who sit on the influential Public Accounts Committee have called for ‘full accountability’ and castigated the ‘greedy and excessive payments’ paid by a ‘self-serving elite’ at the head of the BBC.

As corporation bosses insisted there was no need for a ‘witch-hunt’, pressure is growing on those responsible to face internal disciplinary action and to meet the full force of the law if any of the deals proved to be fraudulent.

In a report published this week, the NAO found pay-outs were made to 7,500 staff over eight years, including £61 million to 401 senior managers. The report states that the corporation had paid staff more than they were entitled to in almost a quarter of the cases it reviewed, putting ‘public trust at risk’.

It is understood that a £680,400 farewell payment was made to the BBC’s former chief operating officer and a £949,000 payment to another former senior executive.

Evidence will be taken next week before a special hearing of the Public Accounts Committee. Former director-general Mark Thompson, who is cited as being personally involved in several of the biggest deal payoffs, will not attend. Mr Thompson says he has a ‘diary commitment’.

Writing to the NAO’s head, Amyas Morse, Mr Wilson asked whether it had unearthed any evidence of fraud, collusion in fraud, misuse of public funds, or other wrongdoing in relation to severance payments at the BBC in recent years. Mr Wilson says, that, based on the reply received, he will consider whether there are grounds to refer the matter to the police.

The BBC’s newly appointed director of news and current affairs, James Harding, has claimed that licence fee payers did not want the corporation to be ‘apologetic’.

Mr Harding, a former editor of the Times, said:

… The BBC has rightly made its fair share of apologies over the past year. I, both as a licence-fee payer and a future employee don’t want an apologetic BBC, I want an ambitious BBC. You don’t want to be apologetic about the BBC, you want to be ambitious about the BBC, that’s the essential choice.

The BBC’s director of strategy and digital, James Purnell, is the only member of the corporation’s executive committee to have given an interview on severance payments since the NAO report was published.

Mr Purnell, a former Labour minister, appeared on BBC2’s Newsnight programme on Monday evening, and has resisted calls to point the finger of blame at individuals responsible for agreeing the payments. He said:

… It was a collective decision. On things like this you can have a witch-hunt or you can learn from your mistakes and that is exactly what we are going to do.

But Conservative MP, Richard Bacon, who also sits on the public accounts committee said that unless (and until) people are named you will not get accountability. Mr Bacon added:

… At the top of the BBC there is a self-serving elite who just look after themselves. These payments were greedy and excessive.

The NAO report also revealed that the BBC still plans to make 15 further severance payments of more than £150,000, even though Lord Hall is on record as saying that such deals would be scrapped in April. Mr Purnell said it would be illegal to ‘unpick’ them because those involved had been sent letters setting out their severance terms.

Labour MP Margaret Hodge, who chairs the committee, urged Lord hall to scrap the deals. She says he needs to be very firm and should not be allowed to back down on these payments.

The NAO has stressed that it had not found any evidence of illegality during its investigation of severance deals to senior managers.

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