Nick Robinson’s Battle for the Airwaves

Deep within the BBC’s inquiry into the Newsnight and Jimmy Savile affair is a comment by Jeremy Paxman so inflammatory as to demand its own investigation (lasting months and costing squillions). The trouble, he said, with BBC News is that it has become dominated by ‘radio people’. This was not, it seems, intended as a compliment. It’s as if, in Paxman’s view, the whole dreadful, dreary, demeaning muddle was the fault of those ‘radio people’, because according to Paxman they ‘belong to a different kind of culture’.

You might think it’s of little importance that Paxman thinks himself cast from a different mould to, say, John Humphrys or Eddie Mair. That it’s all just a spat between journalist rivals, each claiming the superiority of their ‘culture’ of gathering, reporting and commenting on events. But it actually shows just how deep the crisis is within the BBC. If Paxman really believes that TV is not only different but also better than radio in its delivery of the news, he’s actually undermining his own organisation. Who else believes this? How deep are the divisions behind those glassy new portals at New Broadcasting House?

Why, for instance, on Monday morning’s edition of Today on Radio 4 did we have two different reports on the same event by two different reporters, neither of whom seemed at all comfortable with the role they were playing. First we had David Willis on the Oscar winners, and losers, and then 18 minutes later we had Alastair Leithead, also direct from Hollywood, giving us exactly the same information as part of the News bulletin. Were both necessary? Both reports sounded so odd, so unprofessional, and gave us such little information, it made me wonder, in the light of Paxman’s remarks, whether two rival news departments were battling it out as to which should be responsible for the coverage? So frustrating was the bulletin I was forced to go online to discover what I really wanted to know (which film won Best Documentary — Searching for Sugar Man).