Let’s strip the BBC of its automatic right to the license fee and its status as ‘State Public Broadcaster’…let’s put that out to tender…’privatise’ the BBC….if it won’t change let’s change it!

The BBC is no longer the upright pillar of the community that it is supposed to be, and indeed still thinks it is.

It is rotten and corrupt to the core…and that rottenness starts at the very top.

Ironically  the BBC is in a similar position to Jimmy Savile, once highly regarded, respected and celebrated for good works but now brought low by the unexpected and swift unearthing of their misdemeanours which have finally caught up with them both.

The BBC is though, fighting a bitter rearguard action still trying to keep under wraps its dirty little secrets but at least for now the magic has gone and the veil lifted from the Public’s eyes and they can see ‘Auntie’ is perhaps not the lovable old girl she pretends to be.

As she hands out sweets to the kids she is throwing stones at their cat and kicking the dog….only now she has been caught doing it.  Whether that translates into demands for more openness, transparency and accountability and those demands result in concrete action by the BBC is the question.

The Mail reports that trust in the BBC has fallen below 50%…from a BBC report…

‘Public trust in BBC falls below 50% after Savile
Almost half of licence fee payers no longer trust the BBC in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal, according to a poll for one of its own networks.
A survey commissioned by Radio Five Live revealed the public’s faith in the broadcaster has plunged, with 47 per cent admitting they did not believe it was ‘trustworthy’.
Just 45 per cent said they felt it was trustworthy, while the remaining eight per cent did not give an opinion.’

Even those across the Pond have noticed and are questioning the truth of claims of ignorance made by Mark Thompson:

‘Soon after his death, a BBC current affairs program called “Newsnight” began an investigation into Savile’s sexual proclivities. Yet despite getting at least one woman on tape who said she had been molested by Savile, the piece was killed. Then, earlier this month, a BBC competitor, ITV, ran a devastating exposé of Savile. The ITV investigation raised subsequent questions about whether the BBC had covered up Savile’s wrongdoing.
Plainly, the answer is yes. What is far less certain is how high the cover-up went.’

It certainly does look like an attempt at a cover up was put into operation….when that failed it seemed as if the top management then passed the buck….because the ‘buck’ always flows downhill…and those below, such as Peter Rippon, were set up to take the blame.

The thing is that cover ups seem to be what the BBC does…far from being open and transparent and accountable it does everything it can to prevent its inner workings and thoughts being revealed.

We probably all know that they have spent a great deal of time and £300,000 preventing the Balen Report being made available to the Public.  Why?  It can only be to ‘protect’ the reputation of the BBC…or rather the reputations, jobs, careers and pensions of journalists and management involved in reporting from the Middle East…reporting which is relentlessly anti-Israeli and thereby creating the legitimacy for terrorism and attempts to de-legitimise Israel as a nation state.

Just how much damage would such revelations do to the BBC’s image and its ability to report world wide?  Its journalists would always be regarded as no longer impartial or neutral and their ability to report would be severely limited.

So the BBC attempted to cover up Savile‘s behaviour, they have covered up anti-Israeli reports that lead to increased violence against Jews, and now they carry on in that vein by hiding the identity of people who influenced the BBC’s decision to accept man made global warming as the  ‘settled science’  and consequently to silence the sceptical critics of that theory.

It must surely be of critical importance  to know the identity of those people….who were they, where did they work and what was their interest in the subject…and what did they have to gain by having global warming presented as man made?  The pro-AGW advocates scored a huge victory in their propaganda drive in capturing the BBC whose authority, credibility and the power to influence and change people’s perceptions and actions regarding climate change is immense….that is why it is important to know who benefits , who persuaded the BBC to change its policy and what they broadcast.

All those questions go to the very heart of the matter…. the BBC cannot be allowed to make ‘game-changing’ decisions about what information they broadcast to the world without revealing exactly why they did that…it is not good enough to say that they listened to ‘expert scientists’…….that ‘advice’ should be there for everyone to see and judge as to its veracity and credibility.

We know that in fact many of those present were not scientists but from business, NGOs and environmental pressure groups……all with vested interests in getting the BBC to accept their version of ‘Truth’….Just how many sceptics were there, how many putting an alternative view?

The BBC are right now engaged in a legal battle to keep those identities hidden:

The BBC’s Helen Boaden was on the witness stand today as Tony Newbery makes a last-ditch attempt to force the BBC to disclose who attended its mysterious seminar on climate change in 2006 (background here). If the Information Tribunal throws his case out, it’s probably the end of the line.

A squad of Beeb legal staff,  including two barristers, crammed into a small court room to support the £354,000-a-year news chief against her opponent, a North Wales pensioner who was accompanied only by his wife. The case is a six-year freedom of information battle in which the BBC is refusing to disclose who attended a seminar it held in 2006.
This seminar is historically significant. The BBC’s global reputation for news reporting stems from its unshakable impartiality; even in wartime its commitment to maintaining evenhandedness has occasionally enraged British politicians (and sometimes servicemen). Following that 2006 seminar, however, the corporation made a decision to abandon impartiality when covering climate change – and that’s according to the BBC Trust. This was an unprecedented decision for the BBC in peacetime.
On what basis was this made? In June 2007, the Trust, which governs the gigantic publicly-funded broadcaster, published a report with the gnomic title From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel [PDF]. That document gives us this clue:
The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change].
Blogger Tony Newbery was curious as to the identity of these “scientific experts”, and filed a Freedom of Information Act request, as he outlines here in an introduction to the saga.‘

A decision as momentous as this must surely be accounted for and cannot be made  behind closed doors.

To do so and then to keep those doors closed, not only with this but with Balen and initially with Savile,  illustrates how far the BBC has descended into the world of deceit and politics. It is rotten to the core and that rottenness starts at the very top, with the BBC Trust who we can see to be not just a toothless tiger but a tiger which has no interest in performing its natural function……the ranks of management, from Mark Thompson down are no less wanting and are all too ready to hide significant wrongdoing at the BBC in order to protect the BBC’s reputation and of course their own skins.

Unless there is complete openness at the BBC its proclaimed values of impartiality, accountability and transparency are worthless.  If the BBC cannot be trusted, and it is patently obvious that it cannot be, then what is the point of it?

It has shown itself to be politically corrupt, working hand in hand with Labour, it has allowed its senior journalists to champion causes that promote a left wing agenda such as Occupy and the climate change lobby, it has worked to marginalize Right Wing commentators and politicians and policies by labelling them racist or just plain ‘nasty’, it has worked to censure and demonise those who argue against mass immigration, it has sought to silence anyone who has anything critical to say about Islam, it even now defends the European Union and quietly supports those who agitate for Britain to join.

The BBC is corrupt and rotten to the core.  It may produce some great programmes about animals or art but that doesn’t by any measure mean it should be allowed to pervert the democratic process by attempting to ‘manufacture’ the  Public’s social, cultural and political  perceptions, views and responses.

The BBC needs new rules on disclosure and it needs a completely separate body that looks to regulate and control it….the BBC Trust is a body that does not engender the slightest confidence in its ability or desire to hold the BBC to account.

Or strip it of its license fee and put that out to tender.

Let’s see if there is a real alternative to the left wing propaganda that passes for news and current affairs on the State Broadcaster and its complacent and arrogant presenters and journalists.

Evan Davis was speaking today to the amiable old fellow Michael Heseltine….the Coalition must have a  death wish asking him to review their economic policies….

Davis has his own views on those policies….believing there are no policies at all, the Treasury, George Osborne that is, has given up governing and has surrendered the initiative by collapsing into a ‘defeatist apathetic’ huddle that has lost all hope of finding a way to stimulate growth.

This is the same Davis who tells us frequently that the ‘medicine is killing the patient’….the medicine being Plan A  for  Austerity.

Impartiality in their DNA?    Pull the other one.

Another Davis word of wisdom came when his tongue slipped and the truth came out about Vince Cable’s letter to Cameron concerning growth and policy…Davis was telling us about this letter that  Vince Cable leaked….er no, quick retraction by Davis…that Cable wrote and was then leaked (not stolen or hacked…not a political crime?).

We all know Cable is a scheming, devious, untrustworthy politician who would dig up his grand mother and sell her if it got him higher up the greasy pole of government.

Just a shame the BBC continue to put him on a plinth and hero worship him….. on the basis of his duplicitous behaviour in accepting a major position in government and then working continuosly to undermine that government.

Wonder if the BBC will ever get round to investigating this from Guido:

‘Sources close to Linklaters whisper to Guido that while Leveson only asked for specific evidence from 2008 onwards, they collected testimony from Fred Michel dating back to the crucial election-that-never-was period in 2007 that was not heard at the inquiry. This includes embarrassing details of failed attempts by Brown’s aides to lobby Murdoch for support and more significantly evidence that sources at the law firm believe show Brown lied under oath when he denied the truth of the infamous ‘declare war’ phone call.’

You may not know who Gordon Brown was…he was Chancellor and then PM over the course of 13 years of Labour’s runious rule.

But I understand why you wouldn’t know who he was…because the BBC rarely if ever mention him…..Maggie gets more mentions and she was out of office 20 years ago.

Still, a PM who lied at Leveson and crawled at the feet of the BBC’s arch rival must surely merit some attention from the BBC?

Don’t hold your breath.

Stephanie Flanders is caught on the horns of a dilemma…no,  not which labour senior politician to date next but how to report seemingly all round political support for the self evidently daft idea of a ‘living wage’.

In her recent programme about Keynes  Flanders pretty much used every one of Miliband’s latest ‘lines’ in her eulogy to the benefits of borrowing and spending more…but here, in this report, you might note something is missing. Only recently Labour’s leader came up with another wheeze…. ‘Predistribution’…in other words a minimum wage…or a living wage….central to his Plan B or C or D or whatever it is now.

Strange that in this report about the ‘Living wage’ Flanders makes no mention of that brainwave…normally she would be suggesting that Miliband was leading the political narrative with the Tories dancing to his tune.

Here though she keeps quiet.

Wonder why. Could it be that the default position is that any policy adopted by the Coalition will inevitably fail as of course all Tory policies are wrong.…..therefore she refrains from reminding people that it was in fact prospective new PM’s next Grand Idea…could it be that even she recognises that this is a duff idea that’ll never fly.

Here is Flander’s final conclusion….essentially admitting that the ‘living wage’ is probably unworkable but seductive for vote catching politicians as a short term, high profile policy.….   ‘What does all this mean for the living wage? It means that politicians are going to carry on liking this campaign – but carefully. They are going to be nervous of anything that sounds like pressure on companies, and living wage employers will continue to be a self selecting group.

Around 3% of adult workers currently earn the minimum wage. If today’s study is correct, far more – around 20% – earn somewhere between the minimum and a living wage.

Some, possibly many of those 4.89 million people could probably be paid more, saving the government money without hurting jobs or bankrupting their employers. But a free pay rise – for the government and for workers – is unlikely to be available for all of them. Is there such a thing as a free pay rise?‘

It seems she is doing Miliband a favour by keeping his name out of this despite it being a central plank to his big new plan for economic recovery. …higher wages mean higher consumer spending, therefore higher GDP….supposedly…..

‘That is why today’s conference is so important.  Because it is a meeting of economists, business people and politicians who believe the old answers won’t work….And who believe in the need for new ideas to rise to the challenges facing Britain today.

Events over the summer have simply reinforced how urgent this new thinking is.   Britain’s economy has now been shrinking for three quarters in a row.  So the immediate priority for our new agenda is measures that will restore both demand and confidence.

That is what Labour is aiming to do with its Five Point Plan for growth and jobs.

So we need new ideas if we are to tackle the problems the economy faces.

The new agenda is that we need to care about the model of the economy we have and the distribution of income it creates.

We need to care about predistribution as well as redistribution.

Predistribution is about saying:
We cannot allow ourselves to be stuck with permanently being a low-wage economy.

Predistribution seeks to offer them more:
Higher skills.
With higher wages.
An economy that works for working people.’

Not worth mentioning though for Flanders?

Let’s have a quick look at a living wage in practise…..Right now a small or medium sized business may not pay a ‘living wage’.…that shortfall is made up by national government by redistributing taxes from big business and high earners in the form of tax allowances and tax credits. Introduce a ‘living wage’ to replace those tax credits and who pays it?  The small or medium sized businesses will have to find the money themselves.…..no longer subsidised by big business they will either have a drop in profits, or have to raise prices and risk losing business…or as is more likely, they will eventually go out of business.…..and all those on a living wage are now on the dole.

‘It is great that KPMG and many other companies are doing well enough that they can afford to pay their employees well. But some companies are barely surviving. In industries such as electronics manufacturing there are huge success stories, but there are also plenty of tiny family run factories that have struggled to survive offshoring –for companies like this paying their staff more simply isn’t an option.‘

Far from equalising pay this policy impoverishes those least able to afford to make the payments…hardly ‘responsible capitalism’ to put the small business out of business whilst making the fatcats even richer.

The minimum wage only really works in a closed economy.…if at all…in an open, global economy put wages and costs up and jobs go to China where the wages are lower…..which is the cause of the supposed great increase in pay inequality….the businessmen get ever richer as they ‘mine’ labour around the world and keep making profits whilst the jobs in the UK are farmed out abroad and we either go on the dole or cut our wages to compete….therefore the only answer is tax and redistribution….not a ‘living wage’….Capitalism is working just fine….It’s Socialism that is failing to keep up and get hold of a share of the profits to spread them around.

Flanders gives careful support for the idea of a minimum wage…..‘There is not much evidence that this rise in the minimum has cost jobs.’ …..and ‘Starting in the 1990s, academic evidence started to build up about the minimum wage, in the US and the UK, suggesting that, at the very bottom of the labour market, telling companies to pay people a little more did not actually cost jobs.’

Flanders doesn’t delve into that too far,  but she has done her homework…..what was she reading under the covers at night? A report by the Resolution Foundation……..

‘This was brought out in recent research by economists at the Resolution Foundation (you see I have been doing my homework….) It found that higher unemployment was now having a much greater “chilling effect” on wages than in the past.’

The Resolution Foundation has close ties with the Labour Party as mentioned before by Biased BBC.…

‘So ‘Newsnight’ mentions a report from the Resolution Foundation think tank about the plight of ‘The Squeezed Middle’, the Ed Miliband phrase used by reporter David Grossman. The guy who appeared from the Resolution Foundation was Gavin Kelly. What Grossman didn’t mention is that ..…He joined the Foundation from No 10 Downing Street where he worked as Gordon Brown’s Deputy Chief of Staff.  He spent over a decade in Whitehall and was a member of the Council of Economic Advisors at HMT, the Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State at the Department for Education and the Department for Communities and Local Government, Deputy Head of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, and a member of Tony Blair’s Policy Unit. Before working in government Gavin was Director of Research at the IPPR and the Fabian Society.  That Resolution Foundation is the sort of think tank the BBC likes to call “independent”.   How ‘independent’ is it? Digging a bit more into that Resolution Foundation think tank, which ‘Newsnight’ was touting last night without letting on that their expert ‘talking head’ was a former advisor to Gordon Brown and that the BBC News website repeatedly presents as ‘independent’, reveals that they receive a fair amount of coverage from the BBC.‘

Let’s have a look at where the Resolution Foundation places it’s material…….

Strategy will meet our needs
Editorial, The Observer

The economy: hurting, yes. Working, maybe – but for whom?
Rafael Behr, New Statesman

The Today Programme
Vidhya Alakeson discusses Resolution Foundation report on The Today Programme

The Observer, i.e the Guardian, the New Statesman and Today?.……You can see where they’re coming from.

Flanders  might not mention Miliband but she does get his ideas in there.

The  ‘living wage’ is a massive stealth rise in  tax….taxes on big business and high earners won’t go down, their taxes will go on schemes designed to buy more Labour votes…..but the living wage is then  paid for by smaller businesses who have to find the money from somewhere….and then go out of business.

It does look like Flanders is floundering a bit here…her political leading man has come up with an idea that is unworkable and she knows it….but other politicians of all persuasions have jumped on board and run off with the idea……she needs to discredit the idea without discrediting Miliband.

So she doesn’t mention him.

Still good to see the BBC  goes to impartial sources of advice like ‘The Resolution Foundation’, or the Marxist ‘New Economic Foundation’, or Stiglitz or to Miliband’s guru, Prof Sandel.

The BBC’s most powerful weapon is its ability to rewrite history….to maintain its own narrative over an extended, indeed infinite, time….it owns the ‘right’ and numerous platforms to broadcast what it pleases to back up its own beliefs, and that is what it does.

A historical fact, such as the BBC were found guilty of lying about the Iraq War Dossier has now been morphed into ‘the BBC was right all along’ and that is the line they spin now regardless of truth.

This ability to spin and erase facts from the history books is now being turned to good use in the BBC’s fight against climate change sceptics.

On Wednesday they are broadcasting ‘Climategate Revisited’ on R4 at 21:00.

This is some of the blurb that goes with it:

‘Climategate certainly inflamed the debate over climate change, in the UK, the US and elsewhere.
In 2012 the Norfolk Police announced they were abandoning their investigation into who hacked into the university’s computer and then distributed what they found.
But what have been the longer-term consequences of this incident, for public opinion, media reporting and international policy-making on climate change? Chris Vallance investigates, asking if this was  a political crime, and, if so, how effective has it been?’

Interesting the use of the phrase ‘political crime’ for hacking some emails……that is the BBC attempting to ‘create’ a new truth and working from that as a basis for all other pronouncements….just as when Labour make a claim the BBC uses that as the ‘given truth’ and if a government minister fails to disprove it whilst under the usual aggressive and antagonistic interview then that Labour claim becomes the ‘Truth’.

You can be one hundred percent certain that this programme has been set up to ‘prove’ rather than investigate that this was, as they call it, a ‘political crime’ with appalling consequences for the World and polar bears.

Will there be a similar question about the climate scientists who were proved to be manipulating data and hiding inconvenient facts to bolster their own research and keep the grants flowing?  Are they really political criminals with enormous financial, social and political consequences for the world resulting from their deceptions?

No, of course not.…the science is settled and the CRU have nothing to be ashamed of in their behaviour…and therefore ‘hacking’ the emails was immoral and criminal.….unlike say ‘Wikileaks’ or any other ‘leak’ that embarrasses the Tories.

Undoubtedly the BBC will inform us that there was nothing partisan or corrupt about the ‘inquiries’ into the CRU by various bodies that backed the CRU….despite large amounts of evidence to the contrary and that the inquiries were in fact pretty much a travesty of justice packed as they were with pro AGW advocates and refusing to look at evidence provided by sceptics.

Here are two conclusions you can lay odds on…first that this was an ‘agenda’ driven crime by people with vested interests in discrediting climate change theory,  and second that the consequences for the world are extremely harmful……as a result of the public being conned by right wing sceptics the planet will keep being poisoned by CO2, governments will not take the necessary action,  unemployment will fester as green jobs are not created and of course people in the third world will be the victims of the developed world’s selfishness as they suffer from rising seas and ever more extreme weather events …caused by global warming.…caused by you driving your car and going to work to produce things, getting paid and spending that money on other products…such as food and clothing and a roof over your head…and generally, criminally, irresponsibly, improving your living standards and enjoying yourself.

You’re such a bad person….either innately a nasty rightwinger, or someone gulled by the right wing press and those with that ‘agenda’ into believing their rubbish.

Don’t worry.  The BBC is here to re-educate you.    However they won’t  be around to pay your ever rising, green taxed, fuel bills, or the egregious car taxes, or unemployment pay you now receive as your employer is forced out of business by green tax and legislation.

Still, there’s always daytime TV to keep you connected to the world.

Following David’s indepth and  well-founded post about the BBC’s very own ‘Stepford Wife’, Justin Webb,  I looked at Webb’s article and noted  his loud praise for the melting pot, the common unity of a nation that can be forged by the media helping to create common references and bonds:

‘And of course a media market brings with it a sense of fellow-feeling: folks watch the same TV and advertisements and talk about them on social networks and on the phone. E pluribus Unum.’

All of which makes you wonder why the BBC has the ghetto radio of the ‘Asian Network’.

Must be hard to feel the need to ‘integrate’ when the host country makes you feel right at home….home being ‘Pakistan’.

This Government (Labour) thinks Britain would be alright if only we had a different people.

I think Britain would be alright, if only we had a different Government.  A Conservative Government that speaks with the voice of the British people.  A Conservative Government never embarrassed or ashamed of the British people.

Foreign Secretary Robin Cook has accused William Hague of exploiting fear and prejudice against foreigners in the Tory leader’s controversial ‘foreign lands’ speech.

Mr Cook launched his attack at Labour’s Scottish conference in Inverness where he also accused the Tory leader of ignoring traditional British values of tolerance.

‘I have an appeal to William Hague in the forthcoming election,’ said Mr Cook. ‘Don’t try and fight that election by exploiting the worst instincts of fear and prejudice.

Peter Oborne in the Telegraph  spells out exactly what is wrong with the BBC:

 ‘….an institution that stands for everything that is best about Britain – integrity, fairness, and generosity. Above all, the BBC represents a common sphere of British public life which is not part of the marketplace, and yet not controlled by the state. Alongside Parliament, the NHS, the Army, the monarchy and the rule of law, it is one of our great national institutions.

It is deeply unfortunate that, over the past few decades, the corporation has been colonised and captured by a narrow, greedy, self-interested and self-perpetuating liberal elite, ignorant of ordinary people and contemptuous of ordinary morality – hence, in part, the Savile affair. The unprincipled and arrogant conduct of that elite has provided a great deal of ammunition to the broadcaster’s enemies, such as the Murdoch press, and thus placed the BBC’s future in jeopardy.’

You might remember the Guardian attempting to interfere in a US election and being rudely rebuffed and told to mind its own business…it looks like the BBC hasn’t learnt that lesson……..

A just-out BBC World Service poll surveying 22,000 people in 21 countries found a wide preference for President Obama in the presidential race, who scored 50 percent favorable among all respondents to Mitt Romney’s 9 percent. Almost a quarter, 24 percent, gave some variation of an answer that it made no difference. Only 16 percent said they didn’t know, a reminder of how closely the world follows American politics.

The poll surveyed many of the world’s most populous countries. It emphasized famously Obama-friendly Western Europe but skipped Russia and the Arab Middle East. Here are the results from Globescan’s report:

BBC poll: Rest of world favours Obama

The BBC, just before the US elections runs a poll to see which presidential candidate is more ‘popular’ world wide….well nearly world wide…avoiding all those countries in which Obama’s foreign policy has led to disaster (the one exception being Pakistan…the result of which illustrates why the BBC avoids all other such countries).

You have to ask…has anyone in those countries heard of Mitt Romney…and if so what exactly have they heard and who told them…if they rely on the likes of the BBC World Service would there have been any doubt about the outcome….QED the actual result.

Not saying the BBC are in anyway trying to influence the result in the US election but , well, they are aren’t they…the quote above being from the US Washington Post…you can be sure the message has been plugged relentlessly by Obama friendly media.

Gordon Brown’s secret army could defeat the Coalition’s welfare and education reforms

Britain’s charities and quangos are now stuffed to the gunwales with Labour placemen

I think anyone listening to the BBC will know that this is true….the government announces a new policy and the Today programme and 5Live are awash with the sound of charities and interest groups wailing that children are being ‘punished’, disabled people will become prisoners in their own homes and the old will die an early death.

The BBC rarely challenges such assertions.

Of course the BBC itself is the biggest culprit being chock-a-block with labour supporters…champagne swilling ones at that.

Cameron is unfortunately a soft touch…too weak to really be ‘political’ in the way that Labour is…..look at the appointment of Tory wet, Patten, to the BBC Trust……he was never going to be ‘impartial’…he was always going to be ‘Left’ of centre in his thinking…he was in fact the man the BBC would have chosen themselves.

Andrew Gilligan let’s rip at BBC ‘management’….possibly though a little bitter about Hutton, and himself being blamed  for the sexing up of his report…..he was though to blame wasn’t he?  It was him speaking not Greg Dykes.

However back to today………

The standard rule in a media storm is to put one person in charge and to establish the facts quickly. The standard BBC rule is to put nobody in charge and to find someone other than senior management to take all the blame. An internal inquiry into the Hutton fiasco concluded that I, the most junior person involved, was wholly responsible. I did wonder why, if that was genuinely the case, the BBC’s management had ever come to my defence in the first place. The fact was, we were all responsible.

And now everyone, from the director-general, George Entwistle, on down is dumping on the editor of Newsnight, Peter Rippon, for what, we’re told, was his sole decision to drop the Savile report. He’s already become a BBC unperson, his name removed from the Newsnight credits.

But blaming it all on Rippon is simply not plausible. His team’s film was strong. They had been working on it for weeks; there were no legal risks. Yet within days, Rippon performed a 180-degree turn – from eager enthusiasm to curt dismissal – for reasons that seemed flimsy, even before they were shown to be untrue. It is hard to imagine that his superiors played no part in this process – but proving it will be another matter.

The thing about Rippon is that he almost certainly wasn’t in charge. At ITN, or Sky, or any newspaper, there’s a clear chain of command. The buck really does stop with the editor. But the editor of any BBC programme has the stale breath of at least five different bosses over his shoulder. That helps all those bosses, of course, avoid the blame when there’s a crisis. But it also makes for the kind of terrible, unfocused decision-making that causes crises in the first place.

In Savilegate, there probably wasn’t a smoking email with some top boss ordering the story off air – instead, there will have been conversations in corridors between Peter and Helen, or Helen and Steve, or George and Mark.

[There are] serious questions about George Entwistle’s suitability to run anything. As the Panorama special on Savile showed, some of the BBC’s reporters are lions. But they really are led by donkeys.

Johnny L Lee (whoever he is) seems to agree that management leaned on Rippon in the quietest way on Twitter to Derbyshire:

Johnny L Lee ‏@JohnnyLee14  @vicderbyshire we all know how invisible leaning works in television