Post by Teddy Bear on Oct 6, 2011 19:51:00 GMT
Well with all the courses the BBC echelon have been on to learn how best to disguise giving less as giving more, the results are in, as this article in the Daily Mail shows.
Here's a clip: So I think it is possible to have a guess about what is going to happen when the BBC pumps out a document on staff cuts called Delivering Quality First. Call me a sceptic, but the name does not fill me with confidence.
Shows they never have problem lying when they think it's in their interest.
Here's a clip: So I think it is possible to have a guess about what is going to happen when the BBC pumps out a document on staff cuts called Delivering Quality First. Call me a sceptic, but the name does not fill me with confidence.
Shows they never have problem lying when they think it's in their interest.
The overgrown BBC is in dire need of pruning
By Steve Doughty
You may remember the old joke about East Germany and its official name, the German Democratic Republic: it wasn’t a republic, it wasn’t democratic, and it wasn’t German.
The same sort of exercise can be done in England with slogans based on present participles, the sort that first became popular among left-wing councils in the 1980s. Working for a Better Islington painted on a van means no-one in it is doing any work, and so on.
Anyone who reads Reducing Fear of Crime on a police car knows a mugger is waiting just around the corner.
So I think it is possible to have a guess about what is going to happen when the BBC pumps out a document on staff cuts called Delivering Quality First. Call me a sceptic, but the name does not fill me with confidence.
There are several very good reasons why the BBC desperately needs to rethink and regroup, but not many of them seem to feature on Mark Thompson’s plans.
We have a great deal of noise about cutting staff numbers and the terrible threat of a move to Salford for some. We have some savings that look good on paper. We have promises of a reduction in senior management by two thirds, something that it would be possible to achieve very neatly by changing a few job titles.
But where is the sense that this is an organisation that has become over-extended and overgrown, and which needs radical pruning to restore the public confidence and popularity it once enjoyed?
All the television channels are to stay. There will be cutbacks to daytime programmes on BBC2. Radio stations will share news bulletins. Cuts to comedy on Radio Two and Radio Five. None of this, I submit, is world-shattering.
There will of course, be cuts to sports programmes, probably because there is a genuinely large sports audience and a lot of fans of, say, Formula One motor racing, who will find a lot less of what they want to watch on the BBC.
Instead, they will get more Hardtalk. Say what? It’s a supposedly heavyweight interview programme on the BBC News Channel. The latest is an in-depth chat about relations between Georgia and Russia with the head of the Georgian Christian Democratic Movement. No, I didn’t watch it either.
Hardtalk is not the solution to the troubles of the BBC, it’s the problem. It isn’t public servicing broadcasting, it’s just showing off. It is symptomatic of the way the BBC throws money at coverage of subjects of interest to tiny elites when it should be concentrating on using its great resources to report real news and report it properly.
The horrid flaws in its news coverage over the past 15 years – the way immigration was ignored, European news slanted, climate change propaganda pumped out unchallenged, and the suspicion of bias in favour of Labour – were part of a package with the arrogance which assumed it was the duty of the licence fee payer to subsidise interviews with leaders of opposition parties in former Soviet republics.
A proper rethink at the BBC would reduce the scale of its news and current affairs empire and carry out a thoroughgoing examination of what balance should mean in the future.
The same applies to the radio stations. Radio One has, to us middle aged people, always been a failed effort to catch up with what the private sector showed it could do best in the long-ago days of pirate radio. It should clearly go, but it won’t.
Radio Three is busy reinforcing failure. After alienating much of its small but dedicated audience by diving downmarket, it will now put more money into boosting the Proms, which already give the impression of being rather less serious about music than the Glastonbury Festival. What are we going to lose? Lunchtime concerts. Oh well, as Stephanie Flanders’ dad once remarked, I never did care for music much.
The BBC has a wonderful tradition of popular entertainment, until recent years, a respectable record for news and current affairs. It needs to work out how to recover while stripping out the dross. That can’t be done with management tinkering that puts quality last and won’t deliver.
By Steve Doughty
You may remember the old joke about East Germany and its official name, the German Democratic Republic: it wasn’t a republic, it wasn’t democratic, and it wasn’t German.
The same sort of exercise can be done in England with slogans based on present participles, the sort that first became popular among left-wing councils in the 1980s. Working for a Better Islington painted on a van means no-one in it is doing any work, and so on.
Anyone who reads Reducing Fear of Crime on a police car knows a mugger is waiting just around the corner.
So I think it is possible to have a guess about what is going to happen when the BBC pumps out a document on staff cuts called Delivering Quality First. Call me a sceptic, but the name does not fill me with confidence.
There are several very good reasons why the BBC desperately needs to rethink and regroup, but not many of them seem to feature on Mark Thompson’s plans.
We have a great deal of noise about cutting staff numbers and the terrible threat of a move to Salford for some. We have some savings that look good on paper. We have promises of a reduction in senior management by two thirds, something that it would be possible to achieve very neatly by changing a few job titles.
But where is the sense that this is an organisation that has become over-extended and overgrown, and which needs radical pruning to restore the public confidence and popularity it once enjoyed?
All the television channels are to stay. There will be cutbacks to daytime programmes on BBC2. Radio stations will share news bulletins. Cuts to comedy on Radio Two and Radio Five. None of this, I submit, is world-shattering.
There will of course, be cuts to sports programmes, probably because there is a genuinely large sports audience and a lot of fans of, say, Formula One motor racing, who will find a lot less of what they want to watch on the BBC.
Instead, they will get more Hardtalk. Say what? It’s a supposedly heavyweight interview programme on the BBC News Channel. The latest is an in-depth chat about relations between Georgia and Russia with the head of the Georgian Christian Democratic Movement. No, I didn’t watch it either.
Hardtalk is not the solution to the troubles of the BBC, it’s the problem. It isn’t public servicing broadcasting, it’s just showing off. It is symptomatic of the way the BBC throws money at coverage of subjects of interest to tiny elites when it should be concentrating on using its great resources to report real news and report it properly.
The horrid flaws in its news coverage over the past 15 years – the way immigration was ignored, European news slanted, climate change propaganda pumped out unchallenged, and the suspicion of bias in favour of Labour – were part of a package with the arrogance which assumed it was the duty of the licence fee payer to subsidise interviews with leaders of opposition parties in former Soviet republics.
A proper rethink at the BBC would reduce the scale of its news and current affairs empire and carry out a thoroughgoing examination of what balance should mean in the future.
The same applies to the radio stations. Radio One has, to us middle aged people, always been a failed effort to catch up with what the private sector showed it could do best in the long-ago days of pirate radio. It should clearly go, but it won’t.
Radio Three is busy reinforcing failure. After alienating much of its small but dedicated audience by diving downmarket, it will now put more money into boosting the Proms, which already give the impression of being rather less serious about music than the Glastonbury Festival. What are we going to lose? Lunchtime concerts. Oh well, as Stephanie Flanders’ dad once remarked, I never did care for music much.
The BBC has a wonderful tradition of popular entertainment, until recent years, a respectable record for news and current affairs. It needs to work out how to recover while stripping out the dross. That can’t be done with management tinkering that puts quality last and won’t deliver.