Bbc

Wednesday

Grace Goddard and Barbara Speed

Oxford students: Chris Patten needs to devote time to being our Chancellor

As students at Oxford University, we are told repeatedly by tutors, proctors, and the Chancellor himself that we’re not allowed to do much outside our degree. We cannot do more than eight hours of paid work a week, and extracurricular activities are monitored carefully by colleges, who can revoke your right to do them at any time. Any major positions at the student union or Oxford Union require you to take a year out. And, as we can vouch for, taking on an editorship of a student newspaper isn’t exactly welcomed by teaching staff. We’ve handed (nearly) all our essays in on time; but Lord Patten has arguably spread himself

Tuesday

Steerpike

Murdoch’s son-in-law advising the new BBC chief

You have to hand it to Rupert Murdoch. The BBC is in turmoil and now being led by Tim Davie, its former audio and music chief whose journalistic experience does not even run to making cups of tea at the Scunthorpe Gazette. Mr Davie needs help, especially as he fancies his chances of keeping the top job. So who is he turning to? Mr Steerpike is reliably informed that he’s being advised by his old mate Matthew Freud. That’s right: Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law. Our dynamic duo has not had the best start. Yesterday, Mr Davie filmed a car-crash interview with Sky News in which he revealed that his broadcasting skills

Sebastian Payne

Revealed: who decides the BBC’s climate change policy

Just when you thought the BBC had no more scandals, Guido Fawkes has revealed what the Beeb tried very hard to cover up: the 28 mysterious individuals who have been informing its climate change reporting policy. As a state-funded broadcaster, the BBC has a duty to provide balance. It rejected this on its environmental coverage after taking advice from people in a now-infamous 2006 seminar from people whose identity the BBC was keen to keep secret. I wrote on Sunday how it had refused FoI requests to reveal those names. But Maurizio Morabito has revealed a list which the BBC cannot describe as a bunch of dispassionate scientists: it’s a veritable who’s who

Monday

James Forsyth

Abu Qatada evades deportation, again

On any normal day, the fact that Abu Qatada has won his appeal against deportation would be a major news story. But today it has been pushed down the running order by the slew of BBC stories. The court’s reason for granting his appeal is that Qatada, in its judgement, would not receive a fair trial in Jordan. The government, which negotiated extensively with Amman to try and satisfy the courts on this point, will appeal. I suspect that Theresa May’s statement to the Commons on the matter later this afternoon will be defiant. It does seem absurd that someone who is not a British citizen, came here illegally and

David Blackburn

The BBC saga distracts from Abu Qatada deportation and bail decision

The decision to award George Entwistle a £1.3 million payoff appears, as my colleague Rod Liddle notes, to have misjudged the public mood (and indeed the mood of the majority of hard working and underpaid BBC staff). It is the sort of development about which the government feels it ought to comment, to provide a source of moral leadership. There is an added complication because the government must do so without infringing the BBC’s independence. There is even more danger in this case because the Chairman of the BBC has launched a very spirited assault on the corporation’s detractors in the Murdoch press and elsewhere; this is a possible culture war in the making. Naturally, the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

George Entwistle’s parting gift

Have to say, I wish I’d got a year’s salary plus pension when I made an, er, dignified resignation from the BBC. The outgoing DG, George Entwistle, will receive an entire year’s salary plus various other stipends, amounting to more than a million quid. He’s had a horrible time of it recently, for sure – but this is another example of the BBC, and in particular Fatty Pang Patten, neither understanding what happens in commercial organisations nor indeed understanding the mood of the public. Nor, still further, understanding the BBC’s vast majority of employees. They are for the most part underpaid and have no secure tenure, working on short term

David Blackburn

Chaos at the BBC

The BBC crisis continues to dominate the airwaves. George Entwistle’s £1.3 million payoff has set outraged tongues wagging. Tim Montgomerie has collected the furious comments made by several Tory MPs. Much of the rest of the press pack has followed suit, saying that the severance deal is yet another self-inflicted wound by BBC management. Meanwhile, Helen Boaden and Stephen Mitchell, who are respectively the director and deputy director of BBC News, have stepped aside pending the results of the Pollard inquiry. David Dimbleby told the Today programme that he couldn’t understand why George Enwistle resigned, adding that the continuing fallout from the Savile scandal is not the greatest disaster to befall the BBC. He also

Sunday

Sebastian Payne

Another BBC scandal: hiding their climate change agenda

While the BBC struggles to deal with its recent bout of self-proclaimed ‘shoddy journalism’, there’s another ethical scandal simmering away. The simple question of ‘who decides how the BBC covers climate change’ has a rather complicated answer. In 2006, the BBC Trust held a seminar entitled ‘Climate Change – the Challenge to Broadcasting’. As m’colleague James Delingpole has written at Telegraph Blogs, the seminar appeared to be far from a healthy debate. One of those in attendance, conservative commentator Richard D North, has gone public with his take on the event: ‘I found the seminar frankly shocking, The BBC crew (senior executives from every branch of the Corporation) were matched by a equal number of specialists,

Douglas Murray

A crisis, yes. But let’s not all shoot the BBC.

I have just returned from two hours of broadcasting on the BBC World Service. It is an odd time to be inside the BBC, not least because reporters from the organisation itself, as well as its rivals, are standing outside the studio doing pieces to camera about what is going on inside. Anyhow – having dealt with some web and print-press troubles in my last post, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts on the BBC’s troubles. 1) The first is that the Newsnight McAlpine story is devastating. How any news organisation, let alone the publicly-funded (and compared to its commercial rivals extremely well-funded) BBC could have run such

David Blackburn

Chris Patten claims he has a ‘grip’ on the BBC’s crisis

Chris Patten has just appeared on the Andrew Marr Show to discuss the resignation of George Entwistle and to evaluate its fallout. Patten conceded that the BBC is mired in a mess of its own making and that it was inevitably under pressure as a result. He opened a media war while defending the BBC’s independence, saying that the corporation was ‘bound to be under fire from Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers’ and sceptical (Tory) MPs, adding later in the interview that Murdoch’s papers would be happy to see the BBC diminished. (There is no love lost between Murdoch and Patten, after the Murdoch-owned publisher Harper Collins decided against producing Patten’s account

Saturday

James Forsyth

BBC in turmoil as George Entwistle quits as director-general

After his Today Programme interview this morning, it seemed almost inevitable that George Entwistle would have to resign as director general of the BBC and this evening, in a dignified statement, he has. I suspect that Entwistle’s won’t be the last resignation before this saga ends. Chris Patten, the chairman of the BBC Trust, appears on the Andrew Marr show this morning and he will have to show grip. The time is fast approaching when Patten will have to pick between his BBC job and his various other roles, including being Chancellor of Oxford.

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Now that George Entwistle has quit, the BBC needs an outsider

After just 54 days in the job, George Entwistle has quit as BBC director general. In a career-ending interview with John Humphrys this morning, Entwistle admitted that he didn’t know in advance about, or even watch, the Newsnight investigation which which led to Lord McAlpine being falsely named as a child abuser. Nor did he read Friday’s newspapers which revealed the Newsnight claims were false. (“Do you not read papers?’ asked Humphrys. “Do you not listen to the output?”). Here’s the full car-crash interview:- listen to ‘ Entwistle: I am doing everything I can’ on Audioboo And the resignation text:- “In the light of the fact that the Director-General is

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The end of the road for Newsnight?

Oddly enough, re the latest Newsnight/BBC debacle, Esther Rantzen got it right. She was talking on Newsnight. She made the point that her old programme That’s Life regularly did investigative stuff, but that there was always a lawyer involved, all the way along, right from the off. Absolutely. I did the same thing at the Today programme – when both Andrew Gilligan and Angus Stickler were on my books and we did an investigative piece at least once a week. No question: the reporter would be told what he needed to get to stand the story up at the commissioning point. There would usually be a lawyer in then. Then

Wednesday

James Forsyth

US election 2012: the broadcast election

One product of the modern communications age is that we can all follow what US outlets and Twitter are saying while watching the BBC coverage’s of the US elections. This creates a whole host of challenges for the Beeb. Back in the day, few would have noticed that there was a gap between the US networks calling the key state of Ohio for Obama and the BBC catching up. But this time, it stuck out like a poor thumb. The other great challenge for any international broadcaster is the sheer quality of the coverage on US television. One can chuckle at NBC and their political editor having a ‘Command Centre’.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

The politics of poppies

The politics of poppy-wearing shift slightly each year. The unofficial rule used to be that poppy-wearing began at the start of November. In recent years this has crept forward further and further into October, largely, I think, because of politicians and the BBC. The BBC lives in terror of someone appearing on one of its programmes without a poppy and thus sparking a round of ‘BBC presenter in poppy snub’ stories in the papers. If you appear on the BBC during this period you will find people on hand to pin a poppy on anyone not already sporting one. To my mind this slightly misses the charitable, not to mention

Monday

Rod Liddle

Chasing Jimmy Savile’s chums

And still it goes on and on. Apparently Jimmy Savile was banned from Children In Need because it was thought he was a bit creepy. Did he try to touch up Pudsey, or something? I think we are getting ourselves into a self-righteous frenzy here. Savile was unspeakably ghastly. He was unspeakably ghastly before these latest allegations and he’s – probably, almost certainly – even worse now. But are we really going to exact revenge on pop stars who may have fondled a fourteen year old girl forty years ago? Were there any of those glam rock stars – Gilbert O’Sullivan excepted – who didn’t fondle fourteen year old girls?

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 — BBC in crisis, a Major problem for the Conservatives and Lost in Europe

What is going to happen next with the BBC Jimmy Salvile saga? In this week’s magazine cover, Rod Liddle blames institutional problems within the organisation and predicts there will be plenty of buck-passing to come. Fraser Nelson says in this week’s View from 22 podcast that although he sympathises with the decision the BBC took, he believes there are more scalps to come: ‘As an editor myself, I know that if you are to come up with a story that makes an explosive allegation it has got to be absolutely nuclear-proof nowadays and if it’s not, if there is a slightest bit of chink in your armour, it could sink

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

The Beeb’s self-inflicted wound

And so the Savile stuff rumbles on with George Entwistle’s singularly unimpressive performance before the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee. It still seems to me that the bosses are being evasive over the issue of pressure applied, or otherwise, to the Newsnight editor Peter Rippon. Someone is hiding something, I think. But this whole catastrophe need not have occurred. There is no great crime in a senior manager quizzing a programme editor about a controversial investigation. There is no crime at all in a programme editor deciding not to run a story because he has doubts about it. And I take issue with the Times today which

Tuesday

Isabel Hardman

George Entwistle’s quietly savage attack on Newsnight editor Peter Rippon

George Entwistle seemed rather mild-mannered at his first appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport select committee this morning. But after listening to him for two hours, MPs were starting to suggest that the BBC director general was making a quietly savage attack on one of his juniors. It will be astonishing if, after Entwistle’s evidence, Newsnight editor Peter Rippon is not called before the committee. Entwistle told the committee that he had asked Rippon to ‘step aside because of my disappointment at the inaccuracies in the blog… he hasn’t stepped aside to prepare or the Pollard review, he’s stepped aside because of it’. He also made clear that he

Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Five questions for George Entwistle about Jimmy Savile

George Entwistle is appearing before a select committee for the first time this morning. It won’t be a gentle start for the new BBC Director General, though. He is giving evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport committee from 10.30 on the Jimmy Savile scandal, and will face a slew of awkward questions from MPs. Here are five of the most pressing: 1. Why did he hold such a brief conversation about the implications of the Newsnight investigation for the rest of the BBC’s output? Entwistle held a conversation with Helen Boaden last December in which she warned that the report would impact on the BBC’s tribute to Savile. He