So. Farewell then Tim Davie. The BBC Director General undertook the first leg of his long goodbye tour today, speaking to some of his 23,000 staff in true Corporation style: on a call with the Director of Internal Communications. Talk about the personal touch. Over 35-minutes, Davie answered questions from the Corporation’s (many) hacks about the ‘tough few days’ which he and others have endured. Having revealed that he turned to BBC iPlayer on Sunday night to ‘try and find a bit of relaxation’, Davie went on to turn his guns on the Beeb’s opponents, saying:
We are in a unique and precious organisation and I see the free press, I see the weapon and the pressure, I see the weaponisation. I think we’ve got to fight for our journalism. I’m really proud of our work. And, you know, the amazing work locally, globally that we’re doing is utterly precious. We have made some mistakes that have cost us, but we need to fight for that. And I’m fiercely proud of that… I’m fiercely proud of this organisation. There are difficult times it goes through, but it just does good work. And that speaks, it speaks louder than any newspaper, any weaponisation, we are the very best of what I think we should be as a society. And that, that will never change.
Inspiring stuff. Elsewhere Davie claimed that the Corporation had done all it could to maintain political impartiality, telling stuff that ‘ I think the biggest number complaints we’re handling at the moment is we give Reform too much time.’ As for Samir Shah, the BBC Chair, he justified the length of time it took to offer a substantive response on the Panorama editing scandal by saying:
The question that I was asked was detailed and we needed a detailed response. If I had done a rather, I don’t know, vanilla response very quickly, that wouldn’t have played. We had to do it properly, we had to do detail, we had to take into account everybody’s thoughts on it and it did take time. We had a deadline that was Monday yesterday morning and we met that.
Penny for the thoughts of hacks who often demand a right of reply within hours, not days…
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