, BBC Views Online bring us news that TV’s McGovern calls BBC ‘racist’:
Asked by Mayo whether the country was less racist than it once was, McGovern said: “I have got to say this, you will not like this. But I’ve worked a lot in the BBC, you know.
“I love the BBC as an institution and as an organisation and you do see lots of black faces in the BBC. But you see them in the canteen. You do not see them in positions of power.
“It would appear to me that one of the most racist institutions in England is in fact the BBC.”
You could’ve fooled me, but there’s no shortage of “black faces” all over the BBC’s output. Perhaps an over-representation in strict numerical terms even. To present for BBC London it seems that being a good-looking Asian female is a big advantage, and nobody can say that the Black and Asian community of Mull isn’t more than amply represented in Balamory for instance.
Fortunately, the BBC does defend itself against this nonsense:
Mayo reacted by saying it was “a very serious allegation to be making”, adding that the BBC would be responding.
He later read out a statement from the BBC. It said: “What really matters is that we reflect our audiences through our programmes.
“The BBC’s ambition is to reflect the ethnic and social mix of people around the country. We’re actively seeking and nurturing ethnic talents both on and off the air.
“This has been coming through in our output with a range of presenters and reporters across our peak-time programmes for example Freema Agyeman in Doctor Who, the forthcoming Omid Djalili show, Dance X, and dramas such as Waterloo Road.
The BBC can certainly be accused of having too narrow a cross-section of people running the BBC – but it’s not so much that there are too few “black faces” (to use McGovern’s loaded term) – it’s that there are far too many lefty-liberal arts types who’ve never had proper real world jobs and who’ve never had to worry about where their next wedge of tellytax salary and pension were coming from.
Someone at BBC Views Online does have a sense of humour though:
In March, Jonathan Ross said during his live Radio 2 show that too many black people at the BBC were in low-paid jobs.
To which one can only respond that there are too many Jonathan Ross’s at the BBC in extremely highly paid jobs (£18m over three years). No one’s forcing you to take that much Jonathan. If you want to share it with the BBC’s poorer employees, black or white, there’s nothing stopping you.
Thank you to j0nz for the link.
Greg Dyke stated on Hardtalk a few weeks back that the BBC should reflect a metropolitan demographic or something to that effect.
I think his point was that since the BBC is based in London and soon to be in Manchester then it should reflect the local population and not the demography of the nation as a whole.
I’d be happy with a “low paid” BBC job, but being fron an inner city area full of urban yoof I’m only too aware how the young ethnic minorities can go from their GNVQ media courses straight into places at the BBC (I’ve seen it happen) while better educated and qualified whites are just too “horribly white” for the job.
The BBC can certainly be accused of having too narrow a cross-section of people running the BBC it’s not so much that there are too few “black faces” (to use McGovern’s loaded term) – it’s that there are far too many lefty-liberal arts types who’ve never had proper real world jobs …
Who can you mean?
The BBC is run by its Executive Board. Let’s meet some of them:
Mark Thompson, Chief Executive, Channel 4 2001-4.
Jana Bennett joined the BBC as Director of Television in April 2002 from Discovery Communications in the USA, where she had been Executive Vice President and General Manager.
Tim Davie became Director of the BBC’s Marketing, Communications and Audiences division in April 2005 having previously been Vice President, Marketing and Franchise, PepsiCo Europe.
Stephen Kelly ….joined the BBC from BT, where he was Chief HR Officer at BT Global Services…
Prior to joining the BBC, Ashley Highfield worked at Flextech TV, the pay-TV channel provider that later merged with Telewest. Whilst there, he created the new media organisation Flextech Interactive and became its Managing Director.
After graduating in economics from the London School of Economics in 1982, Zarin Patel trained as a chartered accountant with KPMG, where she gained 15 years’ experience at a senior level with multi-national corporations across the industrial and commercial sectors.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/running/executive/
Hi JR. Did your rebuttal list get truncated accidentally after just four examples?
The BBC employs (or rather, pays), ooh, how many thousands? Twenty-five thousand I recall. If we assume that, say, 5% of these constitute the upper echelons of the BBC, that’s 1,250 people. If we assume it’s as little as 1% then it’s still a list of 250 people before your method of rebuttal even becomes credible.
And that’s before we go through the examples you give, replete with other meedja jobs, KPMG (professional leeches on the government and other large organisations) and BT (a former state monopoly that still abuses its market dominance – if only BT had been sold off on the Railtrack model of a network provider and multiple unbundled service providers telecoms in this country would be a generation ahead and we’d have had ADSL years before we did and at sensible prices).
Getting back to the point, it’s no secret that the monolithic structure of the BBC is stuffed full of too many empire building, ass-covering Chiefs and not enough programme making Indians (of all colours) – a point that you are, as usual, evading.
Any of them ever moved up the ranks to powerful positions instead of inserted in from university? Or been self employed ?
Is the BBC horribly gay? I wonder if straight people get promoted in the same way gay ones do?
How about some presenters that clearly support other political parties and not just Nu Labour fodder?
Nice to see BBBC is so equalitarian. Its not just Muslims and homosexuals it has a problem with but blacks too!
Delightful people!
Baz, why do you post so many times without actually saying anything?
I’ve just read about four or five of your efforts only to be left wondering what exactly you are getting at and the point of posting at all. Why don’t you try actually saying something
You wouldn’t be SillyHunt would you?
Getting back to the point, it’s no secret that the monolithic structure of the BBC is stuffed full of too many empire building, ass-covering Chiefs and not enough programme making Indians (of all colours) – a point that you are, as usual, evading.
Andrew | Homepage | 02.09.07 – 3:18 pm | #
I don’t think that’s a controversial statement from a BBC perspective. In fact it is routinely expressed on this side of the fence.
(And I would hardly count Channel 4 as the real world either, although Andy Duncan has a good track record in ‘real job’ terms.)
Glad to see you have picked up on Balafuckingmory :~# Andrew – my bete noir – although I can’t decide between that or the equally loathsome ‘Me Too’ which seems to be preparing our yoof for a lifetime of flipcharts and HR awaydays.
What is wrong with mime, slapstick and pratfall?
What’s pratfall? A distant cousin of pitfall?
Hey Baz, ‘we’ (if I may presume to speak for ‘us’) don’t have a problem with muslims, homosexuals or black people. Far from it. The main thing that winds us up are leftie Baztards proselytising their views at the tellytaxpayers expense.
Bryan, a pratfall is the art of comedy performed by the likes of Norman Wisdom. Google or Wikipedia can sate your need for any further detail I’m sure.
Sarah-Jane, nice to hear from you again. I hope your move went well. I don’t mind Balamory – though I suppose it’s very PC with its quota of minorities all apparently living in Tobermory on Mull! Except for Archie, whose pink castle is actually near North Berwick.
While I’m on, one of those real-life cop shows recently was following Strathclyde Police around one of the rougher areas of Glasgow. One of the PCs on duty was the spitting image of PC Plum on Balamory – something that won’t be lost on the neds who comprise most of the PC’s customers 🙂
Bryan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_comedy I would also like to add my good friend Justin to Andrew’s list, particularly if someone has left the odd banana skin lying around Higgledy House.
(I did read your post about Medialens by the way, the example you picked on was a bit crap I admit.
It was a while back, but the general point I was trying to make was that they put a bit more effort into fewer things and go for more direct engagement with editorial powers.
No doubt you will argue that that is because they have rather less to choose from, but just a thought.)
Andrew it went well thank you, except for the bit that involves BT so posts will remain intermittent. It is interesting to be back in the country, it’s only ten years since I left, but one easily forgets how different it is. I shall shut up now before this becomes a confession 😉
Andrew, one of my favourite comedians is Jackie Mason. Speaking as if an anti-Semite, he quipped, “I don’t hate all Jews, only those still living.”
Sarah-Jane, I was wondering if you’d noticed my Medialens comment. Their website doesn’t seem that active anymore – if it ever was – with aspects of it lying dormant. Anyway, as you noticed I was distinctly underwhelmed by it. Anyone from the left or the Muslim world who genuinely thinks the BBC is biased against them has to be seriously unhinged.
Now I don’t know whether this is really your position, but people often claim that the BBC must be balanced since it is criticised from both the right and the left. But I have yet to find any genuine criticism of the BBC from the left that is not of the lunatic variety.
Conversely, I don’t believe anyone on this site wants the BBC to slavishly follow a right wing, pro-Israel and America point of view – as if that were likely. All we are asking the BBC to do is give us the facts, free of its own agenda, stop the propaganda and indoctrination, stop telling us what and how to think and stop force-feeding us its gross bias through distortion and omission of inconvenient facts.
I don’t think that’s a helluvah lot to ask.
http://ussneverdock.blogspot.com/2006/07/uk-bbc-covers-up-for-hezbollah.html
Friday, July 28, 2006
UK – BBC covers up for Hezbollah terrorists
In an initial BBC report on Hezbollah terrorist, Samir Qantar, the BBC report the horrendous details of his terror attack.
Note: This is from the Google cache of the report and is subject to change. I’ll post the screen grabs at the end.
Chief among those is Samir Qantar, serving five life sentences for murder after attacking a civilian apartment block in Nahariya in 1979. Danny Haran was killed in front of his four-year-old daughter; the girl’s skull was then crushed with a rifle butt. Cowering inside, Smadar Haran accidentally smothered her two-year-old daughter to death as she hid in a cupboard trying to stay silent.
The BBC have now stealth edited out the true horror of his terror attack.
Chief among those is Samir Qantar, serving several life sentences for murder after attacking a civilian apartment block in Nahariya in 1979. A policeman, another man and his four-year-old daughter were killed. A baby girl was accidentally smothered by her mother as she hid in a cupboard.
Kind of puts it in a different light, doesn’t it?
Here are the screen grabs in case the BBC stealth edit the cache copy.