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

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,

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

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

I may sue for plagiarism. In my failed bid to become Director General of the BBC I suggested that the corporation should henceforth cover no news stories, nor commission any drama or comedy and instead simply occupy itself by debating, in public, its manifest incompetencies. I thought that this would be an entertaining and cheap way of filling up air time. Annoyingly, for me, this is exactly what the BBC is now doing. Friday’s edition of Newsnight debated at great length the culpability of the editor of Newsnight in scrapping a documentary about Jimmy Savile. Meanwhile, the Have I Got News For You team took the executive decision not to

I took the opportunity yesterday to catch up with the BBC’s new comedy ‘Citizen Khan’. Focusing on a Muslim family based in my hometown of Birmingham, it lampoons the trials and tribulations of the self-appointed, self-important, and self-obsessed Mr Khan. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of British Muslim communities will recognise the basic truths on which the programme’s characters are premised. Alia, daughter of the eponymous hero, seems to have provoked the most controversy. Alia is a shrewd young girl, doting before her parents but defiant behind their backs. There are complaints she portrays a disrespectful daughter, affronting not just her myopic parents but also a stylised vision of