It once again looks like the BBC is reluctant to shine a light upon its own dark corners. We know of the puzzling expenditure of £300,000 to cover up the Balen Report and what is presumably its excoriating criticism of the BBC’s anti-Israel reporting but what else lies hidden in the shadows at Aunty Beeb?
The Mail reports that the BBC has shelved a interview critical of the BBC Trust’s Chair, Rona Fairhead…
Anger after BBC scraps interview that called for its chief to quit over her £513,000 second job with scandal-hit HSBC
The BBC was last night accused of suppressing an interview that called for corporation boss Rona Fairhead to resign over her £10,000-a-day second job at scandal-hit HSBC bank.
It’s a new blow to Mrs Fairhead, chairman of the BBC Trust and a non-executive director of HSBC, who is facing growing calls to quit one of her high-profile jobs over claims of a conflict of interest.
She is due to be questioned by MPs tomorrow after The Mail on Sunday revealed that she was paid £513,000 for just 50 days work at the troubled bank last year, vastly exceeding her £110,000 salary for what is supposed to be her main job overseeing the BBC.
You may also remember that the BBC tried to cover up the Savile affair and the fallout from that and the subsequent exposure is apparently that the open and accountable BBC is demoting or effectively sacking its own journalists who dared to rock the boat as Nick Cohen in the Guardian reports (H/T Guest Who)
The sinister treatment of dissent at the BBC
Nobody from John Humphrys in the morning to Evan Davis at night dares mention a scandal at the BBC. It undermines their reporting of every abuse whistleblowers reveal. It reinforces the dirty common sense of British life that you must keep your head down if you want to keep your job.
The scandal is simply this: the BBC is forcing out or demoting the journalists who exposed Jimmy Savile as a voracious abuser of girls. As Meirion Jones put it to me: “There is a small group of powerful people at the BBC who think it would have been better if the truth about Savile had never come out. And they aim to punish the reporters who revealed it.”
The best aspect of modern culture is that it revolts against such hierarchical control. The computer revolution makes information sharing and cooperative ways of working easy to achieve. But hierarchies have men and women at their summits who will fight as ferociously as BBC executives to protect their position, and prevent democratic change.
The power of hierarchies is hard to break. But if you want to fight fraud in the City or the rape of children, it has to be broken. A start can be made by insisting that everyone from John Humphrys in the morning to Evan Davis at night tells the truth about the purge of the BBC’s truth tellers.
How the BBC can report with any integrity about ‘whistleblowers’ and their treatment in the NHS or other Public institution is beyond me. The BBC is so compromised by its own politics that the ‘news’ is entirely unreliable from the one news source that is supposed to be the ‘gold standard’ that rises above politics and vested interests.
A good example of such a compromised position is its reporting on the vital subject of Islamic radicalisation and terrorism which is wholly undermined by its collaboration with Islamist organisations like Cage which peddle a similar narrative to the BBC which has consistently opposed the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. The BBC in its desire to denounce these events has jumped into bed with Islamist extremists who work to undermine and discredit the ‘War on Terror’ and whose long term aim is to Islamise Britain and do away with the liberal, secular democracy that the BBC is supposed to encourage and nurture.
“Has Rona Fairhead’s Multi-Tasking At BBC, HSBC And PepsiCo Gone Too Far?
“There are questions of a conflict of interest with Fairhead working at the BBC and HSB”
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2015/03/02/has-rona-fairheads-multi-tasking-at-bbc-hsbc-and-pepsico-gone-too-far/
“Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee said it will question HSBC Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver, former group general manager of its global private banking arm Chris Meares, and independent non-executive director Rona Fairhead at 1515 GMT on March 9.”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/reuters/article-2977416/HSBC-faces-second-grilling-UK-lawmakers-Swiss-tax-scandal.html#ixzz3TpuaAeau
HSBC have already been up before the Parliamentary Committee for Banking Standards…and the Treasury Committee a week or so ago.
Presumably Hodge the Dodge needs to get in on the act to do a bit more showboating.
I wonder if anyone will ask her about her family fortunes (Anyone? BBC?), or why labour took no action on a story that became public knowledge in 2008? Perhaps Hodge the Dodge will invite Ed Balls and Ed Miliband along to answer a few questions.
Omertà = conspiracy or code of silence.