Post by Teddy Bear on Jul 4, 2012 22:24:35 GMT
Excellent article by Peter Oborne at the Telegraph that I feel is all too accurate in his appraisal of the incoming Director General - George Entwistle, as well as what is wrong with the BBC.
Yet another dismal repeat at the top of the BBC
The new director-general is a clone of the old one - a far cry from the values of Lord Reith
By Peter Oborne
People generally accept that no BBC director-general will ever be as great as Lord Reith, the first occupant of this profoundly important post which has such an enormous bearing on our common national life. But as George Entwistle is appointed the BBC’s 15th director-general, it is worth asking what were the qualities the dour and slightly terrifying Scotsman brought to the job.
First, Lord Reith knew nothing about broadcasting. Instead, he brought with him an experience of life and the real world. He came from a different planet to the over-educated liberal-Left elite which has dominated the BBC high command since the Sixties.
In the early years of the last century, John Reith served an apprenticeship as an engineer before being called to the ranks at the outbreak of the First World War. He fought bravely for the 5th Scottish Rifles until being shot in the cheek in 1915. After that, he supervised arms contracts. Retiring from the Army as a major, he returned to his native Glasgow as director of an engineering concern. It was only in 1922, well into his thirties, that he applied for the post which then carried the modest title of general manager of the BBC.
It goes without saying that were Reith to have applied for the director-generalship when it was advertised earlier this year, he wouldn’t have stood a sliver of a chance. Apart from his fatal ignorance of the inner workings of the media world, it is certain that the BBC selection board would have been puzzled by Reith’s lack of university education, and taken the strongest exception to his indomitable sense of morality. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister, whose religious beliefs had a profound effect on him. This early experience of the Christian Church – a body which the BBC hierarchy views with ill-natured contempt – would have scared away any self-respecting BBC loyalist.
Yet one of the reasons why Mark Thompson, the outgoing director-general, has been on the whole such a failure at his post is his lack of knowledge of the world, allied to hostility or at best incomprehension towards any value system which lies outside the experience of the gilded, self-selecting media elite.
Mr Thompson did some good things, above all moving a significant part of the BBC production effort out of London to Manchester (though this was not far enough – it should have been Glasgow). He wore the uniform of the media class – tieless shirts, dark suits, closely shaved head and a permanent three-day beard – and was quite incapable of thinking outside the liberal mindset.
Thus Mr Thompson’s programmes were always designed to be “challenging”. Hopefully, they should be “innovative” as well. All thoughts in Thompson’s BBC were obliged to be “counter-intuitive”. Furthermore, there were no “barriers” that were not to be “broken”. The British Army at its most blimpish has never been as regimented and conventional as the BBC over the past few decades.
This was dangerous. There is every reason to suppose that the BBC’s insistence on the mantra of change for change’s sake is one reason why its brainwashed executives made such a mess of the coverage of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee (a fiasco for which Mr Entwistle was responsible).
Six months ago the BBC hired a firm of headhunters, at colossal expense, to find a replacement for the outgoing Thompson. After a nationwide search, intensive profiling and hundreds of interviews, they have come up with – an Identikit model! Admittedly, George Entwistle does not sport a three-day beard. But in all other respects he is a manifestation of exactly the same phenomenon as his predecessor: the thrusting, middle-aged, white, male, ultimately meaningless media executive. Both men are habitually called brilliant by their acolytes. Both men – as was tellingly remarked of the broadcaster David Frost – have risen without trace.
Mr Entwistle parrots exactly the same ghastly language as his predecessor – indeed, one BBC executive proudly informed me yesterday afternoon that a memo has already circulated, proposing yet more counter-intuitive thinking.
Anyone who doubts this should examine Mr Entwistle’s profile. One learns that he has recently spent time on “BBC Vision’s knowledge, learning and multiplatform commissioning teams”. Those baffled by this may be interested to know that “Vision” is the BBC’s word for “television”, just as its “Audio” is what ordinary people call radio. But bureaucracies like the BBC love to create an inaccessible private language to make themselves seem more mysterious and important to the outside world.
In his statement yesterday, the BBC chairman Lord Patten inevitably promised that Mr Entwistle would serve audiences in ever more “innovative” ways. But the idea that he could mend the BBC and return it to the values and insights of Lord Reith is preposterous. Mr Entwistle is an establishment man through and through, the insiders’ insider. He entered the corporation shortly after university and has stayed there ever since. To sum up, the Entwistle career trajectory suggests he is a walking, talking manifestation of the BBC culture of metropolitan conformity.
This is all terribly sad, for the BBC is one of the greatest and most valuable of our national institutions. It stands for something truly precious and wonderful which many nations (most notoriously the United States) lack: a broadcaster that can operate exclusively within what the political philosopher David Marquand has called the public domain. It is a priceless part of what it means to be British.
Yet over recent years the BBC has lost touch with those original Reithian values. Executives have abused the licence fee to pay themselves huge salaries, and this corporate greed has been a symptom of a larger failure. Many BBC executives, who sneer at Lord Reith for being out of date, cannot comprehend that the great purpose of the first director-general was to elevate and not to entertain. Entire BBC channels – such as BBC Three – now devote much of their time to peddling salacious rubbish. This task, supposing it has to be carried out at all, surely belongs to the commercial sector. Similarly, there is no conceivable public justification for BBC ownership of Radio 1, let alone the trashy daytime and late-night TV which clutters up our screens.
Surprisingly often, the BBC gives the impression that it does not care for Britain. I once turned on BBC World News hoping to learn the result of the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race. It wasn’t even mentioned, yet viewers were told all the results from the second division of the Dutch football league. The BBC has abandoned coverage of the Grand National and the Derby – doubtless only of mild interest to BBC media executives, but of profound significance for ordinary sports fans who value British sporting tradition. Likewise, the abandonment of Test cricket remains a mystery.
Too many BBC executives seem neither to care nor understand that the organisation they work for is a great national institution which binds our country together. If George Entwistle can bring himself to pay less attention to the “counter-intuitive” ideas he values so highly, and instead bring back the magnificent ideals that animated the BBC for the bulk of the 20th century, he can be a great director-general and do wonders for British public culture.
The new director-general is a clone of the old one - a far cry from the values of Lord Reith
By Peter Oborne
People generally accept that no BBC director-general will ever be as great as Lord Reith, the first occupant of this profoundly important post which has such an enormous bearing on our common national life. But as George Entwistle is appointed the BBC’s 15th director-general, it is worth asking what were the qualities the dour and slightly terrifying Scotsman brought to the job.
First, Lord Reith knew nothing about broadcasting. Instead, he brought with him an experience of life and the real world. He came from a different planet to the over-educated liberal-Left elite which has dominated the BBC high command since the Sixties.
In the early years of the last century, John Reith served an apprenticeship as an engineer before being called to the ranks at the outbreak of the First World War. He fought bravely for the 5th Scottish Rifles until being shot in the cheek in 1915. After that, he supervised arms contracts. Retiring from the Army as a major, he returned to his native Glasgow as director of an engineering concern. It was only in 1922, well into his thirties, that he applied for the post which then carried the modest title of general manager of the BBC.
It goes without saying that were Reith to have applied for the director-generalship when it was advertised earlier this year, he wouldn’t have stood a sliver of a chance. Apart from his fatal ignorance of the inner workings of the media world, it is certain that the BBC selection board would have been puzzled by Reith’s lack of university education, and taken the strongest exception to his indomitable sense of morality. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister, whose religious beliefs had a profound effect on him. This early experience of the Christian Church – a body which the BBC hierarchy views with ill-natured contempt – would have scared away any self-respecting BBC loyalist.
Yet one of the reasons why Mark Thompson, the outgoing director-general, has been on the whole such a failure at his post is his lack of knowledge of the world, allied to hostility or at best incomprehension towards any value system which lies outside the experience of the gilded, self-selecting media elite.
Mr Thompson did some good things, above all moving a significant part of the BBC production effort out of London to Manchester (though this was not far enough – it should have been Glasgow). He wore the uniform of the media class – tieless shirts, dark suits, closely shaved head and a permanent three-day beard – and was quite incapable of thinking outside the liberal mindset.
Thus Mr Thompson’s programmes were always designed to be “challenging”. Hopefully, they should be “innovative” as well. All thoughts in Thompson’s BBC were obliged to be “counter-intuitive”. Furthermore, there were no “barriers” that were not to be “broken”. The British Army at its most blimpish has never been as regimented and conventional as the BBC over the past few decades.
This was dangerous. There is every reason to suppose that the BBC’s insistence on the mantra of change for change’s sake is one reason why its brainwashed executives made such a mess of the coverage of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee (a fiasco for which Mr Entwistle was responsible).
Six months ago the BBC hired a firm of headhunters, at colossal expense, to find a replacement for the outgoing Thompson. After a nationwide search, intensive profiling and hundreds of interviews, they have come up with – an Identikit model! Admittedly, George Entwistle does not sport a three-day beard. But in all other respects he is a manifestation of exactly the same phenomenon as his predecessor: the thrusting, middle-aged, white, male, ultimately meaningless media executive. Both men are habitually called brilliant by their acolytes. Both men – as was tellingly remarked of the broadcaster David Frost – have risen without trace.
Mr Entwistle parrots exactly the same ghastly language as his predecessor – indeed, one BBC executive proudly informed me yesterday afternoon that a memo has already circulated, proposing yet more counter-intuitive thinking.
Anyone who doubts this should examine Mr Entwistle’s profile. One learns that he has recently spent time on “BBC Vision’s knowledge, learning and multiplatform commissioning teams”. Those baffled by this may be interested to know that “Vision” is the BBC’s word for “television”, just as its “Audio” is what ordinary people call radio. But bureaucracies like the BBC love to create an inaccessible private language to make themselves seem more mysterious and important to the outside world.
In his statement yesterday, the BBC chairman Lord Patten inevitably promised that Mr Entwistle would serve audiences in ever more “innovative” ways. But the idea that he could mend the BBC and return it to the values and insights of Lord Reith is preposterous. Mr Entwistle is an establishment man through and through, the insiders’ insider. He entered the corporation shortly after university and has stayed there ever since. To sum up, the Entwistle career trajectory suggests he is a walking, talking manifestation of the BBC culture of metropolitan conformity.
This is all terribly sad, for the BBC is one of the greatest and most valuable of our national institutions. It stands for something truly precious and wonderful which many nations (most notoriously the United States) lack: a broadcaster that can operate exclusively within what the political philosopher David Marquand has called the public domain. It is a priceless part of what it means to be British.
Yet over recent years the BBC has lost touch with those original Reithian values. Executives have abused the licence fee to pay themselves huge salaries, and this corporate greed has been a symptom of a larger failure. Many BBC executives, who sneer at Lord Reith for being out of date, cannot comprehend that the great purpose of the first director-general was to elevate and not to entertain. Entire BBC channels – such as BBC Three – now devote much of their time to peddling salacious rubbish. This task, supposing it has to be carried out at all, surely belongs to the commercial sector. Similarly, there is no conceivable public justification for BBC ownership of Radio 1, let alone the trashy daytime and late-night TV which clutters up our screens.
Surprisingly often, the BBC gives the impression that it does not care for Britain. I once turned on BBC World News hoping to learn the result of the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race. It wasn’t even mentioned, yet viewers were told all the results from the second division of the Dutch football league. The BBC has abandoned coverage of the Grand National and the Derby – doubtless only of mild interest to BBC media executives, but of profound significance for ordinary sports fans who value British sporting tradition. Likewise, the abandonment of Test cricket remains a mystery.
Too many BBC executives seem neither to care nor understand that the organisation they work for is a great national institution which binds our country together. If George Entwistle can bring himself to pay less attention to the “counter-intuitive” ideas he values so highly, and instead bring back the magnificent ideals that animated the BBC for the bulk of the 20th century, he can be a great director-general and do wonders for British public culture.