Post by Teddy Bear on Jun 18, 2008 16:58:35 GMT
Excellent article highlighting several problems with the Beeb
Do these BBC trustees deserve our trust?
Dame Patricia Hodgson:
The sheer size and reach of the BBC, from its television channels to its iPlayer, from its countless radio stations to its website - both nationally and ever-increasingly locally - casts a long shadow across the British media scene.
So to keep it under control, it has a Trust which oversees the Corporation's management team. The trustees have two crucial jobs. First, to keep the BBC independent of politicians, to stop all this power and influence being being used to help any one political party.
And second, just as important, to prevent the BBC's subsidised output, funded by an involuntary licence fee paid by everyone with a television, from damaging its commercial rivals.
To achieve this, the trustees should be wholly independent of the BBC structure and able to rein in the Corporation's managers when their dreams of grandeur are not in the wider public interest.
But how can they be expected to do this when several key players on the Trust are BBC apparatchiks, dyed-in-the-wool supporters of the Corporation against the world?
And none more so than Dame Patricia Hodgson, now a paid-up member of the Establishment's great and the good and Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge. But before reaching these heights, Dame Patricia spent 30 years as a BBC staffer, and is still committed, heart and soul, to Auntie.
So when she appeared yesterday - on the BBC's own Radio Four Today programme, naturally - to talk about the Trust's new review into the BBC's website, it wasn't an encouraging sign.
>The BBC is rapidly and aggressively expanding on the web, as even the Trust's toothless report identified. It went almost £36million over its intended budget in the last financial year alone.
The result, of course, is that commercial competitors - including, to declare an interest, newspaper websites - find it very difficult to compete.
Private sector rivals are being hit by a double whammy from the Corporation. On the one hand, British viewers of the BBC website are being offered a comprehensive news service without advertisements (possible only because of the licence fee subsidy), while commercial alternatives have to run advertising to cover their costs.
But now the BBC is putting advertisements on its website which can be seen only by overseas viewers, putting it in direct competition for advertising spending with private sector companies.
These are just the kinds of conflict of interest that the Trust is supposed to sort out, but instead its report is a complete whitewash. It explicitly admits that it did not carry out an assessment of the impact that the website is having on the wider market. But we should not be surprised. Patricia Hodgson began her career at the BBC in 1970, making programmes for the Open University. After a number of years she graduated to a role in the Policy and Planning Department, which she ran when John Birt was director general.
She was Birt's enforcer, arguing the BBC's case to the outside world, and carrying out his edicts within the Corporation. 'I know the BBC like the back of my hand,' she said a few years ago. Of course there is nothing wrong with that, but it makes her totally unsuited to keeping the BBC under control.
Other members of the Trust are also compromised. Richard Tait had a long career at the BBC and edited BBC2's Newsnight. David Liddiment was Head of Entertainment at the BBC. Diane Coyle is married to a BBC journalist.
The danger here is twofold. First, that these supine Trustees will allow the BBC to ride roughshod over their commercial rivals.
But even worse, by failing to keep the BBC under control, they are playing into the hands of those who want to bring the Corporation under political control.
Ofcom, the independent media watchdog whose chief executive is a former Blairite apparatchik who wrote the 2001 Labour manifesto, would love to abolish the Trustees and regulate the BBC directly.
If the Trust doesn't start doing a better job, then that is exactly what will happen - and Auntie's long tradition of independence will be threatened.
Dame Patricia Hodgson:
The sheer size and reach of the BBC, from its television channels to its iPlayer, from its countless radio stations to its website - both nationally and ever-increasingly locally - casts a long shadow across the British media scene.
So to keep it under control, it has a Trust which oversees the Corporation's management team. The trustees have two crucial jobs. First, to keep the BBC independent of politicians, to stop all this power and influence being being used to help any one political party.
And second, just as important, to prevent the BBC's subsidised output, funded by an involuntary licence fee paid by everyone with a television, from damaging its commercial rivals.
To achieve this, the trustees should be wholly independent of the BBC structure and able to rein in the Corporation's managers when their dreams of grandeur are not in the wider public interest.
But how can they be expected to do this when several key players on the Trust are BBC apparatchiks, dyed-in-the-wool supporters of the Corporation against the world?
And none more so than Dame Patricia Hodgson, now a paid-up member of the Establishment's great and the good and Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge. But before reaching these heights, Dame Patricia spent 30 years as a BBC staffer, and is still committed, heart and soul, to Auntie.
So when she appeared yesterday - on the BBC's own Radio Four Today programme, naturally - to talk about the Trust's new review into the BBC's website, it wasn't an encouraging sign.
>The BBC is rapidly and aggressively expanding on the web, as even the Trust's toothless report identified. It went almost £36million over its intended budget in the last financial year alone.
The result, of course, is that commercial competitors - including, to declare an interest, newspaper websites - find it very difficult to compete.
Private sector rivals are being hit by a double whammy from the Corporation. On the one hand, British viewers of the BBC website are being offered a comprehensive news service without advertisements (possible only because of the licence fee subsidy), while commercial alternatives have to run advertising to cover their costs.
But now the BBC is putting advertisements on its website which can be seen only by overseas viewers, putting it in direct competition for advertising spending with private sector companies.
These are just the kinds of conflict of interest that the Trust is supposed to sort out, but instead its report is a complete whitewash. It explicitly admits that it did not carry out an assessment of the impact that the website is having on the wider market. But we should not be surprised. Patricia Hodgson began her career at the BBC in 1970, making programmes for the Open University. After a number of years she graduated to a role in the Policy and Planning Department, which she ran when John Birt was director general.
She was Birt's enforcer, arguing the BBC's case to the outside world, and carrying out his edicts within the Corporation. 'I know the BBC like the back of my hand,' she said a few years ago. Of course there is nothing wrong with that, but it makes her totally unsuited to keeping the BBC under control.
Other members of the Trust are also compromised. Richard Tait had a long career at the BBC and edited BBC2's Newsnight. David Liddiment was Head of Entertainment at the BBC. Diane Coyle is married to a BBC journalist.
The danger here is twofold. First, that these supine Trustees will allow the BBC to ride roughshod over their commercial rivals.
But even worse, by failing to keep the BBC under control, they are playing into the hands of those who want to bring the Corporation under political control.
Ofcom, the independent media watchdog whose chief executive is a former Blairite apparatchik who wrote the 2001 Labour manifesto, would love to abolish the Trustees and regulate the BBC directly.
If the Trust doesn't start doing a better job, then that is exactly what will happen - and Auntie's long tradition of independence will be threatened.