Post by Teddy Bear on Oct 8, 2007 18:16:55 GMT
In one of the finest disections of all that is wrong with the BBC, Melanie Phillips really excels her usually excellent self. This article is so good I'm going to keep it as a sticky.
Not just worth reading, worth remembering word for word.
Not just worth reading, worth remembering word for word.
October 8, 2007
Lord Reith revolves in his grave
Daily Mail,8 October 2007
The BBC scandal known as ‘Crowngate’ has claimed its first scalp. The controller of BBC1, Peter Fincham, has effectively been sacked after a report by former BBC executive Will Wyatt revealed the incompetence and worse that led the BBC to broadcast faked footage purporting to show the Queen storming out of a photo-shoot when in fact she was arriving at it.
If the BBC’s director-general Mark Thompson hoped thus to draw a line under the affair, however, he is sorely mistaken. For feeling is growing that Mr Fincham has been made to carry the can for those higher up the BBC hierarchy, such as the grandly titled Director of Vision Jana Bennett, who was also criticised for showing a ‘lack of curiosity’ once she had been told what had happened.
Moreover, the manner of Mr Fincham’s departure is disturbing in the light of reports that he refused to sign a prepared ‘Soviet-style’ letter of resignation blaming him for the debacle and was summarily dismissed instead.
The Wyatt report highlighted a sorry catalogue of ‘misjudgments, poor practice and ineffective systems’ that led Mr Fincham to make the false claim about the Queen. But systematic incompetence - the hallmark of the BBC’s sclerotic management structure - is merely a symptom of a much more profound crisis.
In recent months, the BBC’s reputation for integrity has been hit by a slew of revelations of fakery and frauds that it perpetrated upon the public by such iconic shows as Blue Peter, Children In Need and Comic Relief. But even those do not provide the full story.
Mr Thompson is reportedly about to deal with a funding crisis by emasculating the BBC’s core output, with programmes such as Timewatch or Horizon facing the chop along with distinctive TV news bulletins which would be replaced by a rolling news service. Such action suggests that somewhere along the way priorities have gone haywire.
For while it is taking an axe to its core programming, the BBC is spending vast amounts on highly questionable enterprises.
Pleading poverty, the BBC has given the witless Jonathan Ross an £18million three year contract. Pleading poverty, it is funding channels such as BBC3 and BBC4 that virtually nobody watches.
Pleading poverty, it is buying up radio stations, distorting the market place yet further through its mighty Online internet provider, and helping subsidise the Government’s digital switchover by funding the BBC’s digital ‘iPlayer’ and promoting itself on sites such as Facebook, MySpace and even Second Life so that more people can access BBC content.
This all bespeaks not poverty at all but a kind of global power mania.
Why on earth, for example, has its commercial arm BBC Worldwide bought a 75 per cent stake in Lonely Planet, the travel guide group? The chief executive of BBC Worldwide has said the deal is part of its strategy ‘to create one of the world’s leading content businesses, to grow our portfolio of content brands online and to increase our operations in Australia and America’.
But the BBC isn’t a multi-national company selling a range of different products around the world. It is a public service broadcaster, paid for by the British public to play a unique role in the life of this nation. We do not pay the licence fee for the BBC effectively to nationalise a commercial travel guide.
And this is all being done at the expense of the very content for which the BBC is creating more and more platforms. For the more there are, the less there is that anyone actually wants to watch. With a few outstanding exceptions, TV has degenerated into a degrading and tedious diet of game shows, soaps, reality TV, repeats and reruns.
At the same time, the very core of the BBC’s claim to the licence fee, that it is uniquely trusted for its integrity, is being steadily destroyed. It’s not just the serial fakery to which it has now put its hands up. It’s the fact that its output, including its journalism, is politically as bent as a corkscrew.
As its own impartiality review concluded earlier this year, the BBC operates in a ‘Left-leaning comfort zone’ and has an ‘innate liberal bias’, dictating what issues it chooses to cover and how it does so.
It is institutionally and viscerally hostile to America, Israel, conservatism, big business, religion, the countryside and family values; it supports multiculturalism, environmentalism, European federalism, human rights law and ‘alternative’ lifestyles.
Worse still, it sees everything through the distorting prism of this ‘progressive’ agenda. As a result, it views its own left-wing position as the centre ground, and anyone who disagrees is viewed as a right-wing extremist.
Indeed, because by definition it cannot acknowledge its own innate bias, the BBC embodies a totally closed thought system.
At the core of all these problems lies one single cause. The BBC has simply lost sight of the very reason why it exists in the first place. And that is due to a toxic combination of ideology and flawed analysis.
At the heart of the BBC’s own identity crisis lies Britain’s loss of belief in itself as a nation. That has expressed itself in the onslaught by the left-wing intelligentsia on core British and western values, including the belief that there is no such thing as truth or objectivity and that everything is instead a matter of subjective opinion.
As a result, all culture has to be reduced to the lowest common denominator because in a society where no judgment can be made to distinguish the best from the worst, elevating public taste turns into the sin of ‘elitism’.
This ideology of the Left — the group-think of the BBC — has been fused in addition with the belief that the corporation could survive in a multi-media age only by becoming commercially competitive. And that meant a ruthless ratings war and a BBC presence on every new media platform.
This was a strategic error of the most fundamental kind. For the BBC was not set up to be a player in the market, but to be insulated from it. A commercial chase for ratings would inevitably lower standards. So it has proved.
And far from providing the kind of competition which would challenge its institutional bias, this merely became even worse.
In place of the former high-minded disciples of Lord Reith, the BBC came to be run by people who stood for nothing except shallow success. Politically correct to a fault, they therefore enforced the left-wing group think with even greater zeal.
The inevitable outcome has been that the BBC has all but destroyed the very reason for its existence. With its public service ideal thus fatally corrupted, the loss of self-confidence which brought that about has also made it unable to stand up to government pressure.
As a result, it has become all too eager to do the bidding of a Government which scarcely bothers to hide its contempt. So when Gordon Brown announced there would be no General Election, he ignored ITN and Sky and chose to use instead a soft interview by the BBC’s Andrew Marr — who then announced the decision to the nation from Downing Street for all the world as if he were the Prime Minister’s spokesman.
The BBC has lost its way - and it will take more than the removal of an executive or two for it to find it again.
Lord Reith revolves in his grave
Daily Mail,8 October 2007
The BBC scandal known as ‘Crowngate’ has claimed its first scalp. The controller of BBC1, Peter Fincham, has effectively been sacked after a report by former BBC executive Will Wyatt revealed the incompetence and worse that led the BBC to broadcast faked footage purporting to show the Queen storming out of a photo-shoot when in fact she was arriving at it.
If the BBC’s director-general Mark Thompson hoped thus to draw a line under the affair, however, he is sorely mistaken. For feeling is growing that Mr Fincham has been made to carry the can for those higher up the BBC hierarchy, such as the grandly titled Director of Vision Jana Bennett, who was also criticised for showing a ‘lack of curiosity’ once she had been told what had happened.
Moreover, the manner of Mr Fincham’s departure is disturbing in the light of reports that he refused to sign a prepared ‘Soviet-style’ letter of resignation blaming him for the debacle and was summarily dismissed instead.
The Wyatt report highlighted a sorry catalogue of ‘misjudgments, poor practice and ineffective systems’ that led Mr Fincham to make the false claim about the Queen. But systematic incompetence - the hallmark of the BBC’s sclerotic management structure - is merely a symptom of a much more profound crisis.
In recent months, the BBC’s reputation for integrity has been hit by a slew of revelations of fakery and frauds that it perpetrated upon the public by such iconic shows as Blue Peter, Children In Need and Comic Relief. But even those do not provide the full story.
Mr Thompson is reportedly about to deal with a funding crisis by emasculating the BBC’s core output, with programmes such as Timewatch or Horizon facing the chop along with distinctive TV news bulletins which would be replaced by a rolling news service. Such action suggests that somewhere along the way priorities have gone haywire.
For while it is taking an axe to its core programming, the BBC is spending vast amounts on highly questionable enterprises.
Pleading poverty, the BBC has given the witless Jonathan Ross an £18million three year contract. Pleading poverty, it is funding channels such as BBC3 and BBC4 that virtually nobody watches.
Pleading poverty, it is buying up radio stations, distorting the market place yet further through its mighty Online internet provider, and helping subsidise the Government’s digital switchover by funding the BBC’s digital ‘iPlayer’ and promoting itself on sites such as Facebook, MySpace and even Second Life so that more people can access BBC content.
This all bespeaks not poverty at all but a kind of global power mania.
Why on earth, for example, has its commercial arm BBC Worldwide bought a 75 per cent stake in Lonely Planet, the travel guide group? The chief executive of BBC Worldwide has said the deal is part of its strategy ‘to create one of the world’s leading content businesses, to grow our portfolio of content brands online and to increase our operations in Australia and America’.
But the BBC isn’t a multi-national company selling a range of different products around the world. It is a public service broadcaster, paid for by the British public to play a unique role in the life of this nation. We do not pay the licence fee for the BBC effectively to nationalise a commercial travel guide.
And this is all being done at the expense of the very content for which the BBC is creating more and more platforms. For the more there are, the less there is that anyone actually wants to watch. With a few outstanding exceptions, TV has degenerated into a degrading and tedious diet of game shows, soaps, reality TV, repeats and reruns.
At the same time, the very core of the BBC’s claim to the licence fee, that it is uniquely trusted for its integrity, is being steadily destroyed. It’s not just the serial fakery to which it has now put its hands up. It’s the fact that its output, including its journalism, is politically as bent as a corkscrew.
As its own impartiality review concluded earlier this year, the BBC operates in a ‘Left-leaning comfort zone’ and has an ‘innate liberal bias’, dictating what issues it chooses to cover and how it does so.
It is institutionally and viscerally hostile to America, Israel, conservatism, big business, religion, the countryside and family values; it supports multiculturalism, environmentalism, European federalism, human rights law and ‘alternative’ lifestyles.
Worse still, it sees everything through the distorting prism of this ‘progressive’ agenda. As a result, it views its own left-wing position as the centre ground, and anyone who disagrees is viewed as a right-wing extremist.
Indeed, because by definition it cannot acknowledge its own innate bias, the BBC embodies a totally closed thought system.
At the core of all these problems lies one single cause. The BBC has simply lost sight of the very reason why it exists in the first place. And that is due to a toxic combination of ideology and flawed analysis.
At the heart of the BBC’s own identity crisis lies Britain’s loss of belief in itself as a nation. That has expressed itself in the onslaught by the left-wing intelligentsia on core British and western values, including the belief that there is no such thing as truth or objectivity and that everything is instead a matter of subjective opinion.
As a result, all culture has to be reduced to the lowest common denominator because in a society where no judgment can be made to distinguish the best from the worst, elevating public taste turns into the sin of ‘elitism’.
This ideology of the Left — the group-think of the BBC — has been fused in addition with the belief that the corporation could survive in a multi-media age only by becoming commercially competitive. And that meant a ruthless ratings war and a BBC presence on every new media platform.
This was a strategic error of the most fundamental kind. For the BBC was not set up to be a player in the market, but to be insulated from it. A commercial chase for ratings would inevitably lower standards. So it has proved.
And far from providing the kind of competition which would challenge its institutional bias, this merely became even worse.
In place of the former high-minded disciples of Lord Reith, the BBC came to be run by people who stood for nothing except shallow success. Politically correct to a fault, they therefore enforced the left-wing group think with even greater zeal.
The inevitable outcome has been that the BBC has all but destroyed the very reason for its existence. With its public service ideal thus fatally corrupted, the loss of self-confidence which brought that about has also made it unable to stand up to government pressure.
As a result, it has become all too eager to do the bidding of a Government which scarcely bothers to hide its contempt. So when Gordon Brown announced there would be no General Election, he ignored ITN and Sky and chose to use instead a soft interview by the BBC’s Andrew Marr — who then announced the decision to the nation from Downing Street for all the world as if he were the Prime Minister’s spokesman.
The BBC has lost its way - and it will take more than the removal of an executive or two for it to find it again.
