Category Archives: Uncategorized

Peter Sissons has had another excellent pop at the BBC.

Peter Sissons, the retired BBC news presenter, last night attacked the corporation for paying huge executive salaries while allowing BBC newsrooms to become “factories” run by “poor kids”. The presenter, who left the BBC during the summer, also said that there was far too much opinion on BBC news programmes, and not enough straight reporting of facts.

Sissons, 67, who is writing an autobiography covering his career first at ITN, where he was happiest, then from 1989 at the BBC, told a Media Society dinner last night that the huge gulf between the salaries paid to the top tier at the BBC and everyone else was a real problem, especially in the 24-hour newsroom at BBC Television Centre…

“And then there are these panjandrums on huge numbers. If you tried to devise a way of undermining morale, you couldn’t find a better way. They [top executives] are working in the public service, and all this is taking place after we’ve found MPs with their snouts in the trough. Public service is taking second place to their pecuniary interests.”

Sissons also criticised the growing tendency of BBC journalists to offer analysis and opinion on news stories. “I say go back to basics. Report on the news,” he said. “The term reporter is the noblest word in the language, not this term ‘correspondent’. Increasingly, reporters are being invited by presenters to give their opinion. Far too much opinion is creeping into news reporting, with pay-off lines, to steer the viewer into what to think. Let them make up their own minds on the facts.”

See also: The BBC became too PC for me, says veteran Sissons

Have you heard of Anna Coote or Aleski Knuutila? No? Well, neither had I until today. But these are the luminaries of a body called the New Economics Foundation. I hadn’t heard of that until this morning, either, but it turns out that they are self-appointed “experts” on economics and the welfare of our planet. And immediately, in the eyes of the BBC, that makes them very important gurus who can spout the most arrant nonsense but still be given endless, unbalanced publicity. In this case, this body of eco-loons has spent lots of time working out that planet earth has reached a point in the year where we have used more resources than are available. There’s no way of checking their methodology, but to those at the BBC, it’s an important pronouncement that doesn’t need qualification or challenge. All that matters is that their creed agrees with that of our Corporation friends. And it does, as the Foundation’s “about us” page clearly shows:

The international economic system creates damaging inequalities between rich and poor, and fuels climate change and environmental degradation.

It’s a mantra that’s probably on every BBC office wall and computer screen. They chant it every morning. The more guilt they instil in us about living at all, the better.

Re this earlier post – Hawksley says buy the book, already!

That’s fair enough, and a fine capitalist response.

When James Houliston was attacked and beaten to death in a London (UK) park, it wasn’t important enough to be reported at all on BBC news or on the website.

The delay in the execution of a murderer and rapist in Ohio (USA) is one of the leading items on this morning’s radio news.

I guess you have to have a sense of priorities.

Following on from David’s post earlier today, I am struck by the contrast between the BBC’s pursed lips at Joe Wilson’s saying the words “you lie” to the current US president when he is giving a speech and its indulgent chuckles when Muntadar al-Zaidi threw his shoes at the previous president when he was giving a speech. Mr Zaidi has claimed he was tortured in prison, so it is perhaps right that there should be a story. (I deplore the torture, if the claim is true. I do not know whether or not it is true.) But why, exactly, if the story is about the alleged torture, do we have this jolly piece: In pictures: how shoe throwing became fashionable. For most of this morning this and other shoe-throwing retrospectives held pride of place on the BBC front page, all in the tone of someone discussing the latest internet meme.

The BBC had a rather different series of pictures the other day showing reactions from various Americans to Obama’s address to Congress, but I’ve lost the link. This is what I think I remember about it: there were around six people interviewed, and all but one of them basically approved of the speech. I thought this ratio was odd, when about half of Americans oppose Obama’s proposals. About three of them remarked disapprovingly at the heckling. If anyone can give me the link we’ll see if my memory is off.

We also had Lawmaker sorry for heckling Obama, and Obama woos Congress on healthcare. The latter story included this:

At this, the Republican ranks grew restive – even mutinous. One Republican shouted out “It’s a lie!” while the president was in mid-flow.

Democrats looked thunderous – this was not the kind of polite hearing a president usually gets when he addresses both houses of congress.

In fact it does not even happen in the British House of Commons. And it may backfire on the Republican concerned.

I gather it didn’t.

The BBC’s Mark Mardell saw Representative Joe Wilson’s behaviour as part of a pattern of American political vituperativeness, discussed in this piece: Mark Mardell’s America: Unparliamentary or un-American. Mr Mardell writes:

Listening to the “tax-payers’ tea party” in Washington on the radio over the weekend, it struck me that if I were reading a transcript blind of context, I would assume I was listening to a demonstration of a growing resistance to a brutal and undemocratic regime.

Indeed, in the four or five speeches I heard on the radio, details of tax rises and healthcare were hardly mentioned: the theme was “recapturing America” from “tyranny” and regaining “freedom”. It sounded as though they were protesting against a coup, probably a violent one, rather than the natural consequence of losing an election less than a year ago.

But I am too new to this place to know if the debate is getting harsher, more strident, even uglier, or whether this is just the vigorous terms of debate that are normal. I’d like to know what you think. But it is why many see Congress as the last refuge of grown-up debate, and want to keep it that way.

He might be new to America, but given the internet and all it’s hard to see how he managed to miss the one-a-minute Bush = Hitler allusions over the last eight years. Even harder to see how he missed the Bush=Hitler poster in one of the BBC’s own newsrooms, as pointed out by commenter Duhbuh. He linked to a video clip where Robin Aitken, formerly of the BBC and author of Can We Trust the BBC?, discusses that poster.

For what it’s worth I too disapproved of Wilson making his outburst at that time and place. Too much unparliamentary behaviour coarsens debate. Physical attacks coarsen it rather more but so long as the victim is Bush rather than Obama do not elicit quite so much high-minded concern from the BBC. One last thing: I thought at the time that given the fairly high risk of assassination that Bush ran in speaking in Iraq, Zaidi would have had only himself to blame if he had been shot there and then. Throwing things at political leaders makes it more likely either that a thrower will end up dead – because someone thinks a shoe is a grenade and reacts too fast – or a politician will end up dead – because someone thinks a grenade is a shoe and reacts too slowly. If either happens the BBC will be the first to ask, “how could this happen?”

You’d think a self-styled news organisation might want to expose the mechanisms by which governments fund arms-length organisations to “pressure” them – and the public – into following some previously-decided agenda.

Not so.

Scottish households throw away a billion pounds worth of food a year, according to new report into eating habits. The Waste and Resources Programme ( WRAP) report revealed the most common discarded items were fruit and vegetables, milk and bread. Researchers examined waste from more than 1,000 homes and found that one in seven items was still in its packaging. Disposing of food waste costs councils an estimated £85m each year. The report found that Scottish households throw out 570,000 tonnes of food and drink each year. This translated to an annnual loss to the average household of £430.

I would love to see the methodologies and sampling techniques which produce these statistics. Is the average Scottish household really binning £8 worth of food every week ? Are one in seven items of packaged food really chucked ? I think not.

Commenting on the report, Environment Secretary Richard Lochhead said: “I’m sure most people would agree that it’s shocking to think that society needlessly wastes £1bn of food each year in Scotland.

“Food waste is one of the many issues currently being addressed in the government’s draft Zero Waste Plan, which I would urge people to have their say on.”

Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you – given that you paid them to say it ?

I would avoid clicking on this link (pdf – WRAPs “business plan”) unless you suffer from insomnia, but suffice it to say that every penny of the £62 million that WRAP, a not-for-profit limited company, get through each year in producing dodgy reports, comes out of the taxpayer’s pocket. Indeed the most interesting thing about them is the fact that retiring chairman Vic Cocker is the brother of rock singer Joe.

Dr Nicki Souter, Waste Aware Scotland campaign manager, added: “This report being so detailed truly shows the public how much food is currently being wasted in Scotland.”

The Waste and Resources Programme is 100% publicly funded, what of Waste Aware Scotland ? Again, this link is even more tedious (they have four workstreams and eight matrices, you’ll be pleased to know – if only they were producing something other than verbiage, strategies, reports and seminars), but I can tell you that they are a taxpayer-funded fake charity, if somewhat leery of telling us exactly how deep in our pockets their hands reach (they “will draw down funding on a monthly basis by submitting the Scottish Government’s application for payment schedule“). As the Fake Charities site tells us :

“These charities are usually brought to our attention through interviews in the mainstream media (MSM) in which they support the position of the government that funds them”

The bad news is that :

SWAG (Scotland Waste Awareness Group) will continue to develop Waste Aware Business in partnership with CoSLA, CRNS, Envirowise Scotland, EST, NISP, Remade Scotland, Scottish businesses and retailers, WRAP and other partners as appropriate.

So many acronyms, so little time. It looks as though we’ll see plenty more Government press releases on the BBC ‘news’ site in the future.

It’s rarely you’ll read a defence of the BBC on this blog, and you’re not going to read one now.

But James Murdoch’s McTaggart lecture should be read in the sure and certain knowledge that his objection is not so much to a leviathan ‘with more money than the rest of the sector put together and 50% of the market‘, but that said leviathan is not News Corporation.

Capitalism is a wonderful thing. To paraphrase Adam Smith, it is not from the benevolence of the Murdoch family that we expect our live Premiership action, but from their regard to their own self-interest.

But the ideal world of every individual capitalist is one of monopoly, and where that is impossible a dominant market position. Because then you can charge more, or in Mr Smith’s words ‘the price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got‘. To mangle the words of Mr Murdoch, the ‘only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of profit‘ is monopoly or oligopoly. The purchase of a hefty stake in ITV, or the recent London freesheet wars, look more like actions designed to hurt competitors than anything else.

The traditional news media, aka the ‘dead tree press’, are losing money hand over fist as consumers turn to the Internet for their news and comment. Only this week it was announced that the venerable Birmingham Post daily was to move to a weekly format. And it has to be said that the majority of bloggers who comment on news and current affairs are parasitic (as I am) on these free news feeds, provided among others by the BBC and News Corporation.

This is probably not a sustainable long term situation for the traditional news media. While wonderful for consumers of news , it cannot last. But outside of specialist providers like the Financial Times, attempts (like those of the Independent newspaper) to charge for Web access have so far proved ignominious failures.

News Corporation have announced their intention to switch their news websites to a charging model. This is going to be difficult to pull off. Could the Times, Sun, Guardian, Indie, Mail, Telegraph and Mirror execs meet together and decide to simultaneously charge for news, in a great ‘conspiracy against the public’, it might be possible, but there are laws against that sort of thing. The conventional wisdom is that the first to move will simply lose all their online readers to other sites – as happened to the Indie – without any corresponding increase in paper sales. So they have a problem – a real difficulty – to which I am not unsympathetic, and which would become somewhat simpler were there not a great free news leviathan called the BBC.

It is in the light of these issues that this year’s McTaggart lecture – which contains many cogent and accurate criticisms of the BBC, should be read. And you can read it, including “would we welcome a world in which The Times was told by the government how much religious coverage it had to carry? ” on no fewer than 12 pages of the Times website, where the editor has, doubtless exercising his independent editorial judgement, put up the entire lecture.

(As readers will know, B-BBC is an anarcho-syndicalist commune aka a broad church, and some of my fellow contributors – like David, above – are firmly of the opinion that the Corporation should be abolished and ‘the market decide’. I don’t attempt to judge these issues here. But I think some background to this particular story is in order)

The subject, that is. Susan and I listened with mounting incredulity as Evan Davies of the Today programme came out with these gems while interviewing an anaesthetist on the subject of the abuse of prescription drugs and painkillers :

“Do you – (pause) – if you were – (pause) – if you had a – (pause) – teenage – (pause) – son, and you were trying to advise this – (pause) – person what sort of drugs to take and what sort of drugs to avoid – are the illegal drugs safer ? – less safe ? than the painkiller type ?”

Followed later by :

“And among your colleagues, and even your friends, do they abuse the drugs that are commonplace in your profession ?”

Does he always come out with this kind of penetrating questioning, or is it just this subject ?

Thank heavens he didn’t get given the following ‘legal highs’ piece !