Post by Teddy Bear on May 24, 2012 21:48:53 GMT
Super article today by Stephen Glover over the upcoming appointment of the new Director General at the 'Biased Broadcasting Corporation'.
The last thing the Biased Broadcasting Corporation needs is yet another Labour stooge at the helm
By Stephen Glover
A new director-general of the BBC will soon be appointed. I can’t say who it will be, but I can say it won’t be someone who could even loosely be described as of the Right.
There is a well-established custom in this country that the BBC director-general should be of the Left — or any rate not of the Right. It is not decreed in any book that it should be so, or enshrined in any statute.
Nonetheless, it is what always happens.
The leading candidate this time is a former stalwart of the Labour Party who worked for Gordon Brown and Tony Blair for many years. Ed Richards, currently head of the communications regulator Ofcom, is a Labour apparatchik who cut his political teeth with David and Ed Miliband and Ed Balls.
Yesterday the bookmaker William Hill had Mr Richards as 7/4 favourite to take the job. The hot money is on him, and his odds have narrowed from around 12/1 over a matter of weeks.
A visitor to our shores would marvel that even with a Tory-led government, no-one from the centre-Right has put themselves forward as a candidate in the hope of being selected.
But it is also true, of course, that the appointment of the director-general is not in the Government’s gift — and rightly so. The chairman of the BBC Trust, however, is, and it confirmed former Conservative minister Chris Patten in the post last year.
Some might say that if a Tory has this job, it is only right for a Labour man to have the other. Such a view ignores two things: Lord Patten is not really a Tory; and in any case it is the director-general of the BBC, not the chairman, who sets the tone of the organisation.
In fact, Lord Patten’s wildly Europhile and socially liberal views sit happily with the innate prejudices of the BBC. The same could certainly be said of Mr Richards. One may be a nominal Tory, the other a paid-up Labourite.
There isn’t much to choose between them.
Lord Patten is believed to like the look of Mr Richards. If so, one can be practically certain that the Labour man will end up as director-general since the chairman is good at getting his way, and members of the BBC Trust (they used to be called Governors) will do what he tells them.
This is my question: why has David Cameron done nothing to prevent this outcome? In private he rails against the BBC. The media tycoon Rupert Murdoch recently told the Leveson Inquiry that all Prime Ministers complain in private about the Corporation, and do nothing about it. That has certainly been true of Mr Cameron.
But in fact it’s not entirely the case that all Prime Ministers do nothing. Tony Blair engineered the appointment of Gavyn Davies, a multi-millionaire Labour donor, as BBC chairman, and of Greg Dyke, a Labour supporter who had also donated to the party, as director-general. They were only unseated after a lowly BBC radio reporter, Andrew Gilligan, blew the gaffe about Mr Blair having ‘sexed up’ the case for war against Iraq, and Alastair Campbell declared war on the Corporation.
Margaret Thatcher was also anxious to make her mark on the BBC, which was unremittingly critical of her, as the present director-general, Mark Thompson, admitted in a 2010 interview with the New Statesman magazine. She appointed Tory peer George Howard, accountant Stuart Young and former newspaper executive Marmaduke Hussey as successive chairmen, all of whom leant to the Right. Not that it made any discernible difference to the Corporation’s loathing of Tories.
At least she tried, though. Mr Cameron, for all his private effusions against the BBC, has merely endorsed the status quo by supporting the appointment of Lord Patten, who in turn seems likely to choose Mr Richards. Nothing will change.
Of course the BBC is so intrinsically anti-Tory — its former newsreader Peter Sissons wrote last year that ‘at the very core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left’ — that the appointment of a lone non-Leftist director-general would not change very much. But it would at least be a start.
Who can dispute the Corporation’s institutional Leftish bias? Mr Thompson admitted in that interview that it used to be ‘massive’ though he is under the illusion it no longer is. A BBC internal report in 2007 said the organisation should make greater efforts to avoid liberal bias, and conceded it was slow to appreciate the importance of stories concerning immigration and euroscepticism.
Has it changed? Hardly. There are almost daily examples of what that report termed ‘a liberal-minded comfort zone’. Look at the BBC’s constant evocation of supposedly severe overall ‘cuts’, which so far amount to about one per cent of public spending. (Such gross exaggeration led Mr Cameron to brand it as the ‘British Broadcasting Cuts Corporation’ last year.) Or mark its almost complete disregard on its news bulletins on Tuesday of the demand by the European Court of Human Rights that British prisoners be allowed to vote.
The BBC has its own agenda, and the arrogance of foreign judges defying the will of Parliament doesn’t feature prominently. It wouldn’t matter if the Corporation were not so powerful. According to a recent study, 47 per cent of the average British person’s news comes from the BBC, which gives it an enormously wider scope than any other news organisation.
Of all the candidates, Ed Richards seems the least likely to shake up its political attitudes, despite being an outsider. To have such an overtly Labour figure — much more devotedly so than Gavyn Davies or Greg Dyke —would be unacceptable in an organisation which is at least supposed to be even-handed.
Moreover, after years of spiralling executive salaries under Mark Thompson, Mr Richards is the last man in the world to introduce financial restraint. At Ofcom he presided over a burgeoning bureaucracy — an empire of nearly 1,000 staff, magnificent offices overlooking the Thames and an annual budget of more than £140 million — before being required to make relatively minor economies by the Coalition.
By the way, as part of his ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’, David Cameron promised in opposition that Mr Richards’ bloated Ofcom mega-quango would ‘cease to exist as we know it’. Some bonfire! Another example, I fear, of Mr Cameron not following through what he says he would like to do.
Maybe the most damning charge that can be laid against Mr Richards is not that he is a Labour apparatchik or a bloodless technocrat who has enriched himself on the public payroll (salary nearly £400,000 a year) without ever doing what most of us would regard as a proper job.
No, it is that he has never shown the slightest evidence of creativity. He has never made a programme in his life. He is a member of the new bossy administrative class — managerial, cautious, working in the shadows, and living like a potentate despite never producing any wealth.
Give me any of the internal candidates, however Leftie they may be: director of news Helen Boaden or director of vision George Entwistle — though I would draw the line at chief operating officer Caroline Thomson.
At least they have made programmes, and know something about creating good television and radio rather than simply regulating it.
David Cameron has given up whatever chance he had of reforming the Corporation. But the final, and most bitter, evidence of failure would be the appointment of this networking Labour stooge as director-general of the BBC.
By Stephen Glover
A new director-general of the BBC will soon be appointed. I can’t say who it will be, but I can say it won’t be someone who could even loosely be described as of the Right.
There is a well-established custom in this country that the BBC director-general should be of the Left — or any rate not of the Right. It is not decreed in any book that it should be so, or enshrined in any statute.
Nonetheless, it is what always happens.
The leading candidate this time is a former stalwart of the Labour Party who worked for Gordon Brown and Tony Blair for many years. Ed Richards, currently head of the communications regulator Ofcom, is a Labour apparatchik who cut his political teeth with David and Ed Miliband and Ed Balls.
Yesterday the bookmaker William Hill had Mr Richards as 7/4 favourite to take the job. The hot money is on him, and his odds have narrowed from around 12/1 over a matter of weeks.
A visitor to our shores would marvel that even with a Tory-led government, no-one from the centre-Right has put themselves forward as a candidate in the hope of being selected.
But it is also true, of course, that the appointment of the director-general is not in the Government’s gift — and rightly so. The chairman of the BBC Trust, however, is, and it confirmed former Conservative minister Chris Patten in the post last year.
Some might say that if a Tory has this job, it is only right for a Labour man to have the other. Such a view ignores two things: Lord Patten is not really a Tory; and in any case it is the director-general of the BBC, not the chairman, who sets the tone of the organisation.
In fact, Lord Patten’s wildly Europhile and socially liberal views sit happily with the innate prejudices of the BBC. The same could certainly be said of Mr Richards. One may be a nominal Tory, the other a paid-up Labourite.
There isn’t much to choose between them.
Lord Patten is believed to like the look of Mr Richards. If so, one can be practically certain that the Labour man will end up as director-general since the chairman is good at getting his way, and members of the BBC Trust (they used to be called Governors) will do what he tells them.
This is my question: why has David Cameron done nothing to prevent this outcome? In private he rails against the BBC. The media tycoon Rupert Murdoch recently told the Leveson Inquiry that all Prime Ministers complain in private about the Corporation, and do nothing about it. That has certainly been true of Mr Cameron.
But in fact it’s not entirely the case that all Prime Ministers do nothing. Tony Blair engineered the appointment of Gavyn Davies, a multi-millionaire Labour donor, as BBC chairman, and of Greg Dyke, a Labour supporter who had also donated to the party, as director-general. They were only unseated after a lowly BBC radio reporter, Andrew Gilligan, blew the gaffe about Mr Blair having ‘sexed up’ the case for war against Iraq, and Alastair Campbell declared war on the Corporation.
Margaret Thatcher was also anxious to make her mark on the BBC, which was unremittingly critical of her, as the present director-general, Mark Thompson, admitted in a 2010 interview with the New Statesman magazine. She appointed Tory peer George Howard, accountant Stuart Young and former newspaper executive Marmaduke Hussey as successive chairmen, all of whom leant to the Right. Not that it made any discernible difference to the Corporation’s loathing of Tories.
At least she tried, though. Mr Cameron, for all his private effusions against the BBC, has merely endorsed the status quo by supporting the appointment of Lord Patten, who in turn seems likely to choose Mr Richards. Nothing will change.
Of course the BBC is so intrinsically anti-Tory — its former newsreader Peter Sissons wrote last year that ‘at the very core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left’ — that the appointment of a lone non-Leftist director-general would not change very much. But it would at least be a start.
Who can dispute the Corporation’s institutional Leftish bias? Mr Thompson admitted in that interview that it used to be ‘massive’ though he is under the illusion it no longer is. A BBC internal report in 2007 said the organisation should make greater efforts to avoid liberal bias, and conceded it was slow to appreciate the importance of stories concerning immigration and euroscepticism.
Has it changed? Hardly. There are almost daily examples of what that report termed ‘a liberal-minded comfort zone’. Look at the BBC’s constant evocation of supposedly severe overall ‘cuts’, which so far amount to about one per cent of public spending. (Such gross exaggeration led Mr Cameron to brand it as the ‘British Broadcasting Cuts Corporation’ last year.) Or mark its almost complete disregard on its news bulletins on Tuesday of the demand by the European Court of Human Rights that British prisoners be allowed to vote.
The BBC has its own agenda, and the arrogance of foreign judges defying the will of Parliament doesn’t feature prominently. It wouldn’t matter if the Corporation were not so powerful. According to a recent study, 47 per cent of the average British person’s news comes from the BBC, which gives it an enormously wider scope than any other news organisation.
Of all the candidates, Ed Richards seems the least likely to shake up its political attitudes, despite being an outsider. To have such an overtly Labour figure — much more devotedly so than Gavyn Davies or Greg Dyke —would be unacceptable in an organisation which is at least supposed to be even-handed.
Moreover, after years of spiralling executive salaries under Mark Thompson, Mr Richards is the last man in the world to introduce financial restraint. At Ofcom he presided over a burgeoning bureaucracy — an empire of nearly 1,000 staff, magnificent offices overlooking the Thames and an annual budget of more than £140 million — before being required to make relatively minor economies by the Coalition.
By the way, as part of his ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’, David Cameron promised in opposition that Mr Richards’ bloated Ofcom mega-quango would ‘cease to exist as we know it’. Some bonfire! Another example, I fear, of Mr Cameron not following through what he says he would like to do.
Maybe the most damning charge that can be laid against Mr Richards is not that he is a Labour apparatchik or a bloodless technocrat who has enriched himself on the public payroll (salary nearly £400,000 a year) without ever doing what most of us would regard as a proper job.
No, it is that he has never shown the slightest evidence of creativity. He has never made a programme in his life. He is a member of the new bossy administrative class — managerial, cautious, working in the shadows, and living like a potentate despite never producing any wealth.
Give me any of the internal candidates, however Leftie they may be: director of news Helen Boaden or director of vision George Entwistle — though I would draw the line at chief operating officer Caroline Thomson.
At least they have made programmes, and know something about creating good television and radio rather than simply regulating it.
David Cameron has given up whatever chance he had of reforming the Corporation. But the final, and most bitter, evidence of failure would be the appointment of this networking Labour stooge as director-general of the BBC.