Charlie Walsham

The real problem with the BBC’s partygate coverage

(Photo: iStock)

As a journalist, it’s never a comfortable feeling when the news organisation you work for becomes the story. But with No. 10 desperate to throw some ‘red meat’ to the green benches — to take the spotlight off the rotting carcass of ‘partygate’ — it was inevitable that the BBC would end up being fed through the mincer this week.

The Culture Secretary, Nadine Dorries, lit the touch-paper by announcing on social media (where else?) that the latest BBC licence fee announcement would ‘be the last’, adding with provocative hyperbole that ‘the days of the elderly being threatened with prison sentences and bailiffs knocking on doors’ were over.

Up until then, social media had been awash with calls for Boris Johnson to step down. Satisfyingly for the orchestrators of ‘Operation Save Big Dog’, many of the usual suspects took the bait and leapt to the defence of the BBC . Writing on Twitter, Gary Lineker described it as ‘the most treasured of national treasures’. What the goal-poacher-turned-presenter didn’t mention was the treasure he takes away from the Corporation. As its highest-paid star, 8,176 licence fees were required to cover Lineker’s £1.3 million salary last year alone. Back of the net!

When Dorries rose in the Commons to confirm the licence fee would be frozen for two years, journalists across the newsroom at New Broadcasting House watched with shaking heads and pursed lips. Much of the commentary wasn’t complimentary. One wag remarked that putting Nadine Dorries in charge of culture was like appointing a bull as Secretary of State for fine bone china.

The gallows humour masked a bitter reality for the backroom staff of the BBC’s news output. Dorries was sticking the boot in after a decade during which the broadcaster has implemented wave after wave of job cuts, with the management mantra of ‘doing more with less’ roughly translating into ‘work harder as we squeeze pay packets and pensions’.

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