is the director of television at the BBC, and she explains her philosophy thus:
“People who express highly controversial views are welcome on the BBC but they cannot be presenters of a news or current affairs programme”.
So what’s Paxman doing working there, then?
“Television must be allowed to engage with the real world, to challenge and inform audiences”.
So that’s why we pay our licence fee. To be patronised, uncontroversially. Can’t be easy.
Translation
“highly controversial” = Politically to the right of Tony Benn.
“welcome on the BBC”
But edited out.
Peter,
First of all, thanks for linking to my post. I’m glad you found it interesting.
Second, in fairness to Paxman (man, it feels strange to type that), the problem I have with him in this post is a sin of omission — in his book, he seemed to be going out of his way to avoid discussing AIDS conspiracy theories, but he never actually endorsed any.
Third — if you’d like to read about what I think is a huge sin of commission on Paxman’s part, you can find that here. It has to do with a strong argument by Paxman, published in August 2002, in favor of the idea of Saddam’s continued stockpiling of WMD.
I’ve e-mailed Paxman on the subject of the WMD argument in his book, and I hope he writes back — I’d be genuinely interested to see how he explains the discrepancy.
“Television must be allowed to engage with the real world, to challenge and inform audiences”.
To challenge and inform viewers that we are king and you have no rights…
Especially when we want to use your money to pay a criminal…