Perhaps this post should have been titled ‘Stones and Glasshouses’.
A “staggering” number of staff members have contacted private consultants brought in by the BBC in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal. Their feedback has been shared with Dinah Rose, QC, the barrister brought in to investigate the internal culture of the BBC.
In an email to staff, the BBC’s director of human resources Lucy Adams told colleagues that some of the testimony is “uncomfortable to hear”.
One member of the BBC’s staff described the scale of the response as “staggering”. They told The Independent: “These are people with real stories and details of harassment and bullying who are living with the scars of an abusive management culture.”
I have absolutely no doubt the BBC will carry on chastising and berating other organisations for their failures whilst burying the bad news about their own.
Perhaps we should have a little competition….who can write the best ‘If the BBC were running the XXXX’ essay.
….running the Afghan War perhaps, or the Police…or the economy…..you would be forgiven for imagining the BBC already has an overly powerful control and influence over such things.
Clearly it’s gone too far, too fast. I blame the Tory budget cuts.
How many billions have they spent on new buildings? Still, if it hadn’t been for the cuts – or slow-down in the rise of the license fee – they wouldn’t have had to sack all those native hacks around the world.
More than 850 BBC employees have come forward to raise their concerns about bullying and sexual harassment at the corporation, fueling fears about the broadcaster’s culture.
Ah, but… it was a different time.
And what’s with this ‘over 850’ lark? I want the BBC version, down to the nearest decimal place (I think they do have fractions of staff if CECUTT’s output is any measure) and percentage once they sort out total staff on the books vs…. well.. elsewhere.
Whatever… release…. the Compo lawyers!
So do I, Thatchers’ Tory cuts……
I’m sure Jeremy Hardy agrees and will continue to say so on the views quiz.
“If the BBC was running Britain’s social policy then the last legal bar to a pair of adult men being able to adopt a little boy to whom neither was related by blood, and thus to enjoy permanent, unconditional unsupervised care of him would be removed.
If married couples alone might be considered as fit adoptive parents, then perhaps ‘married couple’ might be redefined somehow.”
Nah.
BBC would never stand for such a redefinition – they’d surely campaign against it, wouldn’t they?
Adoption, divorce, harassment rules. New playing field.
What a delicious story.
If you set out to produce an orgainization riddled with cronyism and bullying you couldn,t do better than come up with something like the BBC which answers to nobody but its incestuous self.
There’s a great take on the contemptuous and haughty distain of the BBC in contrast to the people they are supposed to serve in: “Don’t Push It!” at:
http://john-moloney.blogspot.com/
Maybe BBC management treat their employees really badly. Harasses them, abuses them and bullys them.
Or maybe the BBC simply employs too many of the kind of people who very easily take offence and see harassment abuse and bullying daily in every conceivable situation.
Either way BBC management is now exposed to be rubbish.
When a formerly respectable old broadcasting organisation is turned into a catch-all grievence mongering left-wing protest march – what do you expect?
Of course many of the fellow travellers start to jostle one another and become unruly.
2nd para – an excellent way of looking at the situation in a potentially different light.
It’s both. The thing is, all those managers who are now harrassing and bullying are regular Beeboids who have climbed up the greasy pole. Nearly all the top slime are lifers, or have worked at the BBC for quite some time. The culture itself is corrupt, yes, and in so many ways. But the fundamental problem is the people who work there.
As with the biased reporting, putting a few new rules into place and adding a couple compliance forms to fill out won’t change a thing. There are already plenty of rules in place about this stuff. That’s why Carol Thatcher was thrown off the air after two middle-aged white people complained that, in a private conversation, she referred to a black tennis player who was in another country at the time and had never heard of any of these people as a golliwog. The two middle-aged white people took offense, and made a formal complaint because she wouldn’t apologize for being a racist to them. Thatcher, a freelancer, was no longer to be hired by the show even after apologizing for causing offense because the white woman in charge of the channel demanded that she also confess to being a racist, which she didn’t want to do.
So we know that the BBC has very strict rules about preventing a hostile workplace environment. If these rules are not being enforced by now, what’s adding few more rules and forcing everyone to sit through yet another training course going to do?
“Maybe BBC management treat their employees really badly. Harasses them, abuses them and bullies them.
Or maybe the BBC simply employs too many of the kind of people who very easily take offence and see harassment abuse and bullying daily in every conceivable situation.”
Third scenario. People smell the whiff of compensation.
We should be wary of these BBC bullying claims.
Public sector organisations are full of people who think they are owed a living along with perks like lots of ‘sick’ leave, short working weeks, unsupervised flexitime, early retirement or retirement on dubious health grounds and generous holiday entitlements.
The bullying could simply be a boss asking someone to work diligently.
I was going to say the same thing Phil. In my time in the public sector commenting on a colleagues (I wasn’t even a manager) endless sick days and totally non existent work ethic which meant other people had to do his job. Brought me a “bullying” allegation along with a talking to from HR to leave him alone.
I would be willing to bet that a lot of these bullying allegations were followed by a nice period of long term sick leave due to stress.
Years ago, after a couple of years as a bank teller, busy, multi-tasking etc….i took a temp job in the Civil Service, clerical officer [officer!] as a stop gap for further study, and walked into a different world…….15 staff, enough work for 5, told off for saying that, i’d finished my pile by 1/2 10, the others just made it last all day inbetween coffee, chat, visit breaks, aplenty….think they were glad to see me go, trouble-maker, they actually had a sick rota for pete’s sake. I’ve no reason to believe anything has changed.
‘A sick rota….’ new one on me – not that I’m too surprised….. but a sick ROTA ?
The public sector organisations I’ve worked with over many years, in the main (there were exceptions), couldn’t organise the proverbial pee-up in a brewery – but they can manage a sick rota… says a lot, really.
Advocates of public services are not interested in what the public want, what they are interested in is forcing users to pay for a service that suits the provider.
Every service by the public sector which could be better provided by the market is a scam, and its advocates are thieves, liars, and Labour politicians – which are three different ways of saying the same thing.
The function of the BBC is to defend this scam – the very worst thing you can be in the eyes of the BBC is to be an advocate of free choice., and the very best thing that you can be is an advocate of higher taxes and a bigger State.
Robert a good few years ago my brother in law when living up north took a job for that most pointless of Civil Service depts the DWP. There were several things about the job that really wore him down.
The worst was the utter pointlessness of the work. Even as lowest clerical grade he could see what they were doing was futile. As the workload was low and he was bored (and like you got told off for doing to much work) he used to sneak off to read a book.
Nearly as bad he said was the pettiness and class division of the Civil Service. Certain grades wouldn’t drink with lower grades and wouldn’t do work they saw was below them. To go higher than a certain grade you had to be a graduate even though the work was still utterly pointless and could be done by retarded monkey.
He was also frustrated about the lack of training. So new software would be rolled out but no one was trained how to use it. So they spent weeks trying to work it out but then it didn’t really matter anyway due to the futility of the work. He discovered that his building actually had a training officer with assistants and a training room. But no one was ever trained in anything and he wasn’t sure what they actually did all day.
The left-wing cess pit at the BBC seems to be coming apart in this BBC civil war set off by the Jimmy Savile investigation. Neo-Communist Purpose Socialist Workers, and now a Militant Tendency revival.
The evidence that the BBC is more left-wing than Labour is mounting.
It looks as if more and more Labour politicians are seeing the BBC as a problem akin to a loony left militant tendency infiltration.
Frank Field is worried that Migration Observatory is linking up with the BBC.
Migration Observatory and the BBC both push the same left-wing views on immigration as the Guardian, but both insist they are impartial.
Indications are that Migration Observatory was set up with the purpose of pushing out the voice of Migration Watch from the BBC, and replacing it with waffle.
A fundamental tenent of a liberal democracy is a free press. That means its part of their role to hold those in power to account, and give a platform to critics.
Suggesting they can’t do that until they are perfect in every way and beyond criticism themselves seems to me to be a fundamental misunderstanding of their role.
If only the BBC didn’t see themselves as being beyond real criticism and didn’t have such a fundamental misunderstanding of their role.
hold those in power to account, and give a platform to critics?
LOL were you out from the 1997 champagne bottles to the Brown bulling cover up ?
Am I supposed to start filling up for their staff? Normally yes, but this was as a result of Saville.
I do not care about their staff, I care about the kids that they let him abuse.
I don’t know why I was thinking about the BBC after reading this:-
“Don’t blame me. I’m only the boss.”
By Paul Vellely.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/dont-blame-me-im-only-the-boss-8488352.html
Cream is not the only thing that bobs at the top these days