Harding, James

[Teddy Bear]

(hat-tip Arthur Strebe-Grebling)

Before he came to work for the BBC as the director of News and Current Affairs he used to be a senior editor at the Times.

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE
“Big, Bloated and Cunning … The BBC ought to be a creative force for entrepreneurship. In reality it stifles innovation. It has planned to expand local news services when local papers are struggling to survive … Its websites, which might seem like a handy and innocuous extension of its news-gathering, have destroyed jobs, livelihoods and creativity by dumping free content on to markets where its rivals have no public subsidy.”
Leader published by James Harding, Editor of The Times, 26 February 2010

“The BBC must, if it is to be a public service broadcaster, deliver on its obligation in local news. I say this because there is what I consider to be a mistaken view that the BBC should rein in its local news coverage for fear of aggravating the economic woes facing local newspapers … Let me be clear, the problems facing the local newspaper industry are not the BBC’s fault.”
Lecture given by James Harding, now BBC Director of News and Current Affairs, 13 January 2014


More on his sacrificing his 'values' here:

'Honoured' to join the BBC: James Harding - the man who tore it to bits
New colleagues may be unsettled by the views printed in The Times during his time as editor
IAN BURRELL

After being confirmed as the BBC’s new director of News & Current Affairs, James Harding told his new colleagues that he was “honoured to join a newsroom such as this”.
The former editor of The Times also told journalists at New Broadcasting House that “the BBC, of course, has its critics”.
He should know. The Times, during Harding’s five years of editorship, was among the most strident.

“What the BBC is not, and has never been, is an organisation devoted to investigative journalism. This is neither its forte, nor its primary métier,” opined a leading article in Harding’s paper last November, as the news division which he will lead found itself reeling over the Savile and McAlpine scandals.
Panorama, the BBC’s flagship investigative programme, which is facing a problematic period after criticism of two documentaries, will await his thoughts. The London School of Economics demanded the withdrawal of a programme on North Korea, shown on Monday night, because it allegedly endangered students used as cover by the presenter John Sweeney. And a producer working on a separate investigation into homes in the Caribbean has resigned after allegations that he attempted to bribe a security guard.

Addressing staff, Mr Harding certainly did not say investigative journalism should not be the BBC’s forte. “It is charged with pursuing journalism in the public interest and it can – and must – produce the investigative journalism and analytical reporting that delivers on this mission to inquire and explain,” he said.
Many BBC journalists feel squeezed by cuts resulting from a frozen licence fee. But The Times had no sympathy in a leader published by Harding last July. “The BBC distorts and suffocates an industry. It is too big,” it said. “The BBC’s charter will be up for renewal in 2016. It stretches credibility that it could or should be renewed in its current form.”

Today his tone was different. “The BBC plays a role that should make us all immensely proud.”
The Times, of course, is part of a commercial media empire that is threatened by the BBC. Leading articles do not necessarily represent the personal views of the editor. And by the time Mr Harding resigned in December he had fallen out with Mr Murdoch, as he indicated in his resignation email. “It has been made clear to me that News Corporation would like to appoint a new editor of The Times.”

Among the biggest BBC targets for The Times under Mr Harding was the BBC website, a major threat to subscription-only sites like the one set up by Rupert Murdoch in 2010. “The BBC ought to be a creative force for entrepreneurship. In reality it stifles innovation,” said a Times leader. “Its websites... have destroyed jobs, livelihoods and creativity by dumping free content on to markets where its rivals have no public subsidy.”

Mr Harding will spend four months preparing for the transition in roles. Among his tasks will be to make BBC news output attractive to young people. That does not sit well with Times demands in 2010 for the BBC to “consider selling Radio1”, home of youth news service Newsbeat, or to “give up BBC Three”, which has made award-winning documentaries for the under 35s. The paper, under Mr Harding, also used its leaders to call for the BBC to be regulated by Ofcom and berated the BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten for “arrogance and defensiveness”. It complained repeatedly of BBC executives earning “more than the Prime Minister” (as will Mr Harding, who will have a salary of £340,000).

He was an extremely popular editor and his task is to build a similar morale among the BBC journalists who recently went on strike over their working conditions and who, he acknowledged, have been through a turbulent time. “I know these last months have been hard going, but I hope that the recent chastening of the BBC will have, if anything, renewed our ambition,” he said. He must hope they believe his latest battle cry – and not the withering words he signed off while editing Mr Murdoch’s “Thunderer”.

A change of tune? The Times on the BBC
“The BBC distorts and suffocates an industry. It is too big.”
“Big, bloated and cunning” – headline of a leader on the BBC, 2010
“The BBC ought to be a creative force for entrepreneurship. In reality it stifles innovation.”
“Its websites, which may seem like a handy and innocuous extension of its news gathering, have destroyed jobs, livelihoods and creativity.”
“What the BBC is not, and never has been, is an organisation devoted to investigative journalism.”

[Teddy Bear]

Nick Cohen at the Spectator gives his observations on Harding since he's been at the BBC. Any surprise that what he's seen is none too positive, as he explains why.

A Putinesque world of cronyism and fear: life in BBC News
Nick Cohen

I’ve a piece in the current issue of Standpoint on the disastrous rule of James Harding as the BBC’s Head of News. He was a former editor of the Times, who didn’t strike me as a bad man as editors go, if you can forget about the moment when he turned down the chance to break the MPs’ expenses scandal, one of the biggest stories of his career.

Since moving to the BBC, however, his seedy behaviour has become a threat to British culture. Harding is a sinecure-dispenser, who has stuffed his friends and associates into senior positions, without requiring them to compete in front of BBC boards. Open appointments stop cronyism, and are a useful protection against sexual harassment. (Creepy bosses cannot say to women ‘sleep with me and I’ll guarantee you a promotion’.) And Harding has circumvented them.

Please don’t tell me that all bosses in the private sector insist on having his or her“team” in place. Only the worst surround themselves with sycophants. Good managers and good editors do not behave like Harding, even when the rules of a private company allow them to.

The rules of the BBC should not allow Harding to behave as he does, particularly when the man who turned down the MPs’ expenses scandal manifests his aversion to investigative journalism by sacking all the reporters on Panorama and hammering the budgets of BBC radio news, where much of the corporation’s best journalism is made.

After I wrote the piece, I wondered if I had been too harsh on Harding. Any head of news would have to deal with horrendous financial restrictions at the BBC. He had published decent journalism at the Times, and my colleagues there held him in high regard. Surely, there were worse people in the world than James Harding.

There may be. But the BBC journalists who contacted me after I had published suggested I’d be hard pressed to find them. Here is the testimony of one correspondent. I won’t use his real name for reasons which should be obvious.

On morale in BBC News:

‘There’s so much unhappiness within BBC news at the moment. Your piece is an upsum of many conversations I’ve had or heard within newsrooms in Birmingham, London & Salford. I’ve always thought in the past that, despite its numerous imperfections, the BBC was a good place to work, because by and large it was fair and decent. The past 12 months have seen many changes. Good people have been side-lined, overlooked, even forced to leave.’

On Harding acting like Vladimir Putin promoting his favourites:

‘Cronyism, like nepotism, is almost impossible to avoid in any walk of life, but it has never been so blatant in my XX years with the BBC’

And on the fear in what should be fearless newsrooms:

‘Why not speak out? Mortgage, bills and middle age. It’s still a great place to work, most of the time, and as a loyalist it is hard to publicly criticise an organisation to which I owe so much. There’s also a genuine climate of fear, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. People are afraid to speak out. I often criticise editorial decisions and deployments from within and have been warned by friends higher up not to do so. Although, as you say, Radio News has been stupidly hacked back, it has worked to my advantage because I can get away with more than colleagues in TV, for whom one false word or mistake can end their careers.’

What an adviser to George W. Bush once dismissed as ‘the reality based community’ is growing smaller by the day. PRs outnumber reporters. Spin-doctors outnumber political correspondents. Russia, Rupert Murdoch and Iran launch propaganda channels to fill the gaps in the shrinking world of mainstream news. Only the BBC has the resources to remain a bastion of straight reporting.

It is a backhanded compliment to its honesty that the Right accuses it of liberal bias, the Scottish Nationalists accuse it of pro-union bias and the Left accuses it of pro-Tory bias. All of them are trying to shape BBC coverage because they know that viewers and listeners recognise that – with the well-known exceptions – BBC reporters try to tell the truth as best they can.

This may not sound like much. But in the modern world where PR and propaganda are everywhere on the rise, honest reporting is more necessary and precious than ever.

Tony Hall and the BBC’s HR department have already had to intervene to stop Harding firing reporters without due process. But the wretched man remains in post. If director-general won’t act, then the BBC Trust should, and ask whether it wants to see BBC News remain an essential public service. If it does, as I hope it does, it should then ask whether BBC News can survive with Harding in charge.

[Teddy Bear]

According to Harding,
BBC News better serves ‘rich, old, white people’ than those from poorer backgrounds and ethnic minorities, its most senior executive has claimed.
I don't think BBC News serves British society properly at all, even though some may think so. But since rich, old, white people are untouched directly by most of the news reported, they probably accept whatever they're told without question.

BBC news 'is aimed at rich, white, old people'... and that's what the Corporation's OWN head of news says

• BBC News is better for 'rich, old, white people' than others, says BBC exec
• Director of news James Harding said BBC needs to 'redress the balance'
• Mr Harding came under fire from MPs for the remarks made in a speech
• Conservative MP Angie Bray said Mr Harding's views were 'patronising’
  

By Sam Creighton for the Daily Mail

BBC News better serves ‘rich, old, white people’ than those from poorer backgrounds and ethnic minorities, its most senior executive has claimed.

James Harding, director of news, said the corporation must ‘redress the balance’ and cater for all licence fee payers equally.

Mr Harding based his claims on research by both the corporation and the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom which says that BBC News, along with other major news broadcasters, fails to attract young, poor, non-white audiences.

In a speech yesterday, Mr Harding said: ‘There is a real issue of information inequality in this country. Rich, old, white people are getting a better diet of news than poorer, younger, non-white people.’

His comments echo those made by former director-general Greg Dyke, who in 2001 said the BBC was ‘hideously white’ and had worse race relations than some police forces.  
    However, Mr Harding came under criticism from politicians for declaring that certain audiences have a ‘better diet’ of news than others.

Tory MP Angie Bray, a member of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee, called his views ‘patronising’.

She said: ‘I think he needs to define his terms, what does he mean by better? People get the news they are interested in and that’s why you get such a wide range of newspapers. It’s all different but I’m not going to put a value judgment on it.

‘It doesn’t say much for the BBC, with all its claims that it has by far the widest audience of all. It sounds a bit patronising but I don’t really see what his point is. People take their news from where they get the news they want in the way that they want it.’

Mr Harding, who earns £340,000 for his role at the BBC, levelled the criticism at his own organisation during a speech on the future of BBC News and the corporation’s restructuring in the digital age.

He said: ‘I suppose as a BBC executive, [Mr Harding] would be a bit of an expert on older, white males, who permeate and dominate the senior echelons of the BBC. My problem sometimes with the BBC when they talk about diversity is that they talk about diversity through a rather metropolitan, elite prism.

‘They think they will make their organisation more diverse if they can get some black privately educated men as well as some white privately educated men.

‘[These comments] seem to be an all-encompassing caricature of the problem. I think it’s a challenge for all broadcasters but I think the BBC has a particular responsibility because it is funded by the licence fee.’

In his speech, Mr Harding said the BBC is working hard to improve diversity both on and off screen. He said: ‘We are also going to keep on when it comes to diversity, disability and equality in the BBC: We have made real progress in the past year, on screen and off it but, to my mind, it’s not enough. We’re going to have to go further, faster.

‘We need to make sure we’re alive to the interests and concerns of all our audiences. We have to broaden the tone of what we do.’

A spokesman for BBC News said: ‘Internal BBC audience research suggests that BBC news typically reaches more people from higher social grades each week than people from lower social grades and that we also reach fewer younger people and fewer people from black and ethnic minority backgrounds. That isn’t patronising, it’s simply a fact – and one that we continually strive to address.’

JOHN BIRT: BBC SHOWS DO NOT TACKLE THE TOUGH ISSUES

The BBC is failing to address the ‘awesomely difficult questions’ facing modern Britain such as the threat of radical Islam, its former chief said yesterday.

John Birt, who was director general from 1992 to 2000, praised the BBC’s day-to-day news operation but said it ‘faces a challenge’ on its current affairs shows which are supposed to give a more considered take on events.

Lord Birt, who oversaw a radical modernisation programme during his time in charge at the BBC, said digital journalism had given people access to more information than ever before.

However, he warned: ‘What it is not creating is more quality journalism. We get more knowledge of things happening around the world but pulling it all together and addressing the big policy questions – what should we be doing in respect of radical Islam, the National Health Service – that’s what we’re not doing very well and nobody’s doing very much.’

He added that the BBC must ‘get back to those very high purposes which are appropriate to a publicly funded broadcaster’.