The media has lambasted what he says is a leftwing bias in the corporation’s journalism, accusing it of being a broadcast arm of the Guardian.
“Huge lack of balance in UK media with 8,000 BBC leftwing journalist far outnumbering all national print journalists,” he tweeted.
Ten hours later he returned to his theme. “BBC massive taxpayer funded mouthpiece for tiny circulation leftist Guardian. Meanwhile print media about to be gagged to protect toffs.”
The BBC of course ignored that and then for some reason also seems to have completely ignored this statement by Lord Lester on Leveson and Press regulation….which is odd, as he is a ‘celebrated human rights lawyer’ and the BBC are always more than ready to splash across their bulletins any statement by such ‘authorities’ normally….
Lord Lester warns against further state intervention into press regulation
Human rights lawyer says new legal system involving statutes and a royal charter threatens the freedom of newspapers
Lord Lester, one of the UK’s most celebrated human rights lawyers who led the fight for libel reforms this year, says there is no need for “further state intervention” into press regulation.
He says the country’s “plentiful criminal and civil laws” already regulate the press and the new legal system involving statutes and a royal charter threaten the freedom of British newspapers and could constitute a breach of Article 10 of the European convention on human rights.
The BBC is pretty keen on seeing Leveson implemented and the Press come under political control.
You have to wonder if this programme, Hugh Cudlipp, The Sinking of a Tabloid Dream, is in any way meant to influence public perception of the Tabloid Press and therefore their acceptance, or not, of more Press regulation.
The Sun’s recent poll would suggest the BBC may have reason to push their own view of the perfidious Tabloids as 75% think that Press regulation is a ploy by the politicians and the Left to silence critics.
‘The Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies is one the oldest established journalism schools in the UK, founded in 1970 by Sir Tom Hopkinson, the former editor of Picture Post.’
Cardiff University is the university of choice for the BBC when it comes to getting research done…..
We note that we have been commissioned on many occasions by public service broadcasters (the BBC, the BBC Trust and Channel 4) to do research with the broad objective of improving the quality of journalism. The British press are much less likely to commission such research, the one exception being our work on the quality and independence of British journalism, which was carried out in collaboration with The Guardian.
Ah…the good old Guardian…they just stick together and scratch each other’s backs….a perfect illustration….‘two examples of good ethical and professional guidelines – the recommendations of the Neil Review of the BBC’s Journalism After Hutton and the Guardian’s revised post-Hutton guidelines.’
What line does Hargreaves take on phone hacking?
‘The phone hacking scandal has done significant damage to the reputation of professional British journalism and needs to be met by a renewed emphasis on high ethical and professional standards as the only way to improve journalism’s standing, as well as its commercial sustainability.’
The programme tells us that the tabloids are perhaps ‘a spent force when it comes to serious journalism.’
Well hardly…..the Daily Mail in particular still carrying on long running investigations and campaigns…..the BBC itself has frequently been criticised by its own staff, Paxman in particular, for failing to do investigative journalism, becoming more too reliant on press releases for ‘news’.
Hargreaves tells us that Murdoch introduced a tabloid Dark Age with dirty tricks, sleaze and celebrity.
The BBC itself is no stranger to any of that….its partisan reporting of political issues, its anti-Israel stance and its failure to challenge the terrorist’s narrative have had far more serious consequences than the hacking of Hugh Grant’s phone or the pin-ups on page 3.
5 Live is the BBC’s very own version of the Daily Mail and Channel 4 isn’t exactly to a stranger to sleaze and sensationalist stories…Sex Box a case in point….and the Guardian isn’t exactly a paragon of virtue….CIF being the equivalent of the Daily Mail’s ‘sidebar of shame’….only far more dangerous than the Mail’s stories of celebrity boob jobs and marital break ups, with CIF’s diet of nasty anti-Semitism, pro-terrorist and very one sided view of the world.
Hargreaves is curiously blind to all this, which for a professor of journalism is a strange omission…..until you register the organisations he has worked for and his views on Leveson…..he clearly has a message to put out rather than the programme being a mere historical romp through the Media landscape.
The programme has a clear subtext….it starts with the premise that the Daily Mirror somehow represented a ‘golden age’ of tabloid journalism, an age which ‘the likes of Murdoch and Maxwell’ turned into a new ‘Dark Age’, it manages to smear and malign Murdoch at every turn whilst ostensibly just reporting the facts….Murdoch apparently being at the centre of the crisis in journalism.
Well….the BBC started by telling us that the Tabloids were a spent force in investigative journalism, as we know the BBC isn’t exactly doing its part….and is it just the tabloids? And is it a result of ‘sleaze’ and lack of journalistic ethics, whatever they are, that has seen the decreasing sales of newspapers?
It can’t be the Tabloid’s format…because the ‘high value’ newspapers are suffering far more..the Times and the Guardian making large losses.
Hargreaves is a professor of the ‘digital economy’…and therefore should know better than to blame Murdoch’s ‘Dark Age’ of Press standards for the reduction in news paper sales….as he runs the ‘respectable’ Times as well.
He knows full well that the internet is the real killer ‘app’ for the newspaper industry, the print version anyway.
And who is the most powerful and deadly rival to those papers?
The BBC itself, and especially its free news website which obliterates the competition.
You could make an argument that the BBC has actually forced the Press to adopt ’dirty tricks’ to get news and to adopt a more sensationalist approach…..the BBC is assured of its income from the license fee payer whilst the Press has to compete in the commercial market to generate income from advertisers and to win paying customers…all of which is made harder by a rival who doesn’t have to do any of that.
And as this programme shows the BBC deploys its own dirty tricks to attack its commercial and political rivals….producing a programme that is essentially an attack on the Tabloids, Murdoch in particular.
Who needs regulating? Is it the Press whose faults as looked at by Leveson could all have been dealt with by the current laws or the BBC which seems a law unto itself, unaccountable and quite prepared to use its enormous power to crush rivals both in the commercial market and politically?
Incidentally:-
“Rupert Murdoch makes peace with the BBC to talk about his father in WW1 film”
http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2013-10-16/rupert-murdoch-makes-peace-with-the-bbc-to-talk-about-his-father-in-ww1-film?
….so that British failings during Gallipoli can be pointed out, going by your link page.
It will be Churchill they will have having a go at, as First Lord of the Admiralty.
Yes, the execution of the ANZAC (and British and French) campaign was a total mess, but Churchill’s initial concept was potentially briliiant – break through the Dardanelles to take Constantinople, take the Ottomans out of the war, open up supply lines to Russia. The Royal Navy failed to run the Dardanelles, and the rest is history.
I expect the BBC to have parts of the programme praising the ground troops who went through hell, praise for Murdoch’s father who does deserve credit for forcing Ministers in London to face up to the failure – but heavy and unbalanced criticism of Churchill. (And no reference to Churchill going to serve on the Western Front after he resigned).
Churchill also wanted to return Constantinople to the Greeks, certainly a worthy aim, although not in the eyes of al-beeb obviously.
Turkish conquest of Constantinople is not permanent.
There are many Orthodox Christians in the world, for whom Constantinople is like Mecca to Muslims, or Jerusalem to Jews.
The Beeboids’ main political enemies in the media world seem to be Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre; conversely, the Beeboids’ key political friends are their ‘P.M’ Alan Rusbridger, and billionaire financier, George Soros.
What do the 8000 journalist at the Beeb do? Their news never seems to go far beyond the boundaries of London and greater Manchester or human interest stories like the Macanns or Austin Mitchell. Other news channels are far better and have a wider geographical interest.
It’s true, they very rarely create news stories. They generally report stories they read in the Newspapers. Mostly the Guardian and the Independent and very occasionally the Telegraph.
Despite the fact that by some estimates the BBC employs 20% of UK journalists.
Is anyone actually surprised that a bureaucratic state owned monolith has catastrophically low productivity?
I thought they only employed 7,000 journalists, or more accurately churnalists. Their productivity rate even when churning news must be amazingly low.
I listened to some of the Cudlipp / Tabloid Dream prog’ (Radio 4 from 11:00 on Wed’) and felt that it was quite interesting but, predictably, biased. For instance, The Daily Mail was classed as a tabloid, along with The Mirror and The Sun. While it is true that the Mail, like the 20p short version of The Independent, appears in a non-broadsheet tabloid format, it is hardly a ‘tabloid’ in the same way that some ‘red top’ newspapers are. With serious articles by Max Hastings, Simon Heffer, Melanie Phillips and others, alongside the celebrity and sports material which appears almost everywhere nowadays, it seems to me a ‘middle brow’ rather than ‘low brow’ paper. The BBC may hate its political views but the Mail pays its own way without public money, providing both a reasonable range of reading matter at a level far higher than that of the Sun and Mirror, and a welcome counter-balance to the Leftist and Statist output of the BBC.
The whole idea further regulation of the press is a plan devised by the liberal left elite to stop a free press from informing the British public of any point of view which goes against the liberal left view. The BBC will also be delighted if it sees some the rightist press further damaged and so increase their already overwhelming monopoly. That this would damage democracy is probably seen as a good thing by the BBC , after all, their new hero R Miliband, would certainly have thought so.
The press must refuse to sign up to anything which limits their freedom to print what they want. In a democracy we must have plurality of views and a free press is the only way of providing that.
Inevitably a free press will overstep the mark and offend both the great and the ordinary. Perhaps the way to handle that is to make it easier and less costly to sue for libel in the courts. But another powerful weapon that the ordinary person has if they don’t like the tone that their paper is taking on issues, is simply to stop buying it! If certain newspapers have offended millions why haven’t their sales fallen? Is it that actually people like to read what they print even though it offends some over sensitive celebs? Perhaps that is just the price of being a celeb in Britain today and all the fuss has been whipped up by the liberal left, using Hacked Off as useful idiots, in order to attack parts of the press they don’t like.
Democracy needs a free press despite all its imperfections. But Democracy most certainly doesn’t need a state funded broadcaster.
“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this .Let the lie come into the world. Let it even triumph. But not through me.”
Solzhenitsyn.
Not, I would guess, a quote that finds much favour with the liberal media.
The liberal elite needs to end press freedom. If not it will end up discredited and eventually destroyed.
“Let the lie come into the world through me.” BBC
It’s strange how many websites there are on this subject!
I don’t know if I will have to be back here, but it’s awesome to know
I found the one that provides a little practical info if this ever comes up for me
again.