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Despite reports in our local newspaper, Scotland hasn’t yet become independent.

One of those who wish that we were independent is Mike Russell MSP. I’ve met Mr Russell once or twice and think that he’s one of the good guys: he doesn’t believe that everything should be done by the state, an opinion that’s far from universal in Scotland.

Earlier in the year Mike took part in a BBC programme about the Union. He wasn’t entirely happy with Britain’s “national” broadcaster:

Yet even so, the whole thing was undoubtedly skewed in favour of the status quo. The choice of non-speaking guests depended heavily on the Scottish establishment who are far from representative of Scottish opinion.

But Mike doesn’t come down too hard on the Beeb:

Those problems can be put down to ignorance , and moreover an ignorance that is excusable , even if one would expect that by now the BBC would be aware of such pitfalls and take steps to overcome them (for example by drafting in to any London based production in Scotland some Scottish broadcasting advisers.)

So, if the bias isn’t deliberate, what is really going on here? Here’s Mike’s answer:

Knowing many journalists and broadcasters as I do, however, I think that it is an institutional bias that is at fault. The BBC as a corporate body is part of the British establishment and its thinking is based on the continuation of that establishment as it is. The organisaton simply cannot envisage the validity of other choices, and consequently its actions are dictated by that intellectual blind spot.

Precisely. And that’s exactly why the state shouldn’t be involved in broadcasting any more than it should be running newspapers.

So will all be hunky-dory when Scotland is independent and that Icelandic building really is an embassy? Not necessarily. Here’s Mike again:

I have also made it clear that my own experience as a programme maker left me in no doubt that the BBC was – at one stage – the best and most creative broadcasting institution in the world. Taking its programme making values and enshrining them in a newly energised Scottish Broadcasting Company, which could access the best of British and world output but present it and add to it from our perspective has long been a cherished policy aim of the SNP and remains so

Now I agree entirely that the Scottish license fee payer gets a raw deal from the BBC. Scottish broadcasting output is way below our contribution to the “national” kitty. But that’s par for the course in centralised Britain. The question is, though, should we expect a Scottish state broadcaster to be any different? Indeed, a broadcaster with only 5 million home customers might well be even more in thrall to its own local establishment than is the Beeb. And an independent social democratic Scotland certainly would have its own establishment that wouldn’t be representative of Scottishopinion.

Mike writes this:

And the real jewel in the crown – the guaranteed impartial, honest and high quality broadcasting service on which we should rely, and for which we are each as citizens prepared to pay – becomes tarnished , brittle and then broken.

But the BBC’s not “impartial”, is it? There is no guarantee. Why should we expect a Scottish state broadcaster to be any different? I’m certainly not “prepared” to pay for one voluntarily. If Mike really wants Scotland to be an example to other countries why doesn’t he campaign for a totally free market in broadcasting? Let’s have a hundred Scottish Broadcasting Companies.

. He has discovered that:

Five senior BBC production staff were suspended yesterday as Britain’s most senior policeman raised the prospect of a criminal investigation into the corporation’s rigging of phone-in competitions.

The staff, all senior producers or editors, were the first casualties of the row over viewer deceptions involving a series of flagship charity and children’s shows.

A fraud inquiry now seems inevitable after Mark Pritchard, the Tory MP for The Wrekin, wrote to Scotland Yard to demand action.

“Please could you confirm that the Metropolitan Police will fully investigate allegations that a very serious fraud has taken place within the BBC,” he wrote. “These financial irregularities are a serious matter and should be treated as such – not least because the BBC is a public corporation, funded by taxpayers.”

However, it seems there is disquiet among the ranks:

But there was growing anger among some BBC employees that Peter Fincham, the controller of BBC1, who showed to journalists an incorrectly edited trailer of the Queen apparently walking out from a photo session, is still at work.

And of course we have the obligatory ‘senior BBC insider’ to spin things for Peter Fincham:

One senior BBC insider last night predicted Mr Fincham was safe. “Peter was given a trailer which he assumed was edited properly. His mistake was not being more vigilant.”

So that’s alright then – no harm done! Carry on Fincham!

Andrew Pierce also reports that the Commons culture committee has ordered Mark Byford, the deputy director-general of the BBC, Caroline Thomson, the chief operating officer of the BBC, and Michael Grade, the former chairman of the BBC to give evidence next Tuesday at a televised hearing into the crisis. Should be fun!

in today’s Daily Express.

Forsyth rails against the BBC’s recently noticed problems, their continued employment of Peter Fincham, “day after day of servile grovelling to Tony Blair, Cherie Ditto and Alastair Campbell” and the question of “whether Radio 4’s Today programme is passionately pro-EU. It is like starting a board of inquiry to ask if the sun rises in the East”, before getting in to his stride on the subject of Antony Jay’s new CPS pamphlet, Confessions of a Reformed BBC Producer (PDF download):

In his monograph he describes the trendy, witless, Left-wing, anti-Crown, anti-armed forces, anti-just-about-everything-British?comm­unity of young BBC recruits to the NCA division back then. I had no idea the termites had entered the woodwork that early.

Forty years later, as he explains, their conquest of the NCA sector of the BBC has become total and even more fanatical. He makes it perfectly clear that for this far-Left, Guardian-worshipping mindset, there is no place?for?hard-nosed?impartial news. The “agenda” comes first, middle and last. And the agenda is fundamentally describable in two words: loathe Britain.

In all of the recent focus on the BBC’s problems with integrity, there has been little attention paid to the integrity of the BBC’s News & Current Affairs divisions – not because of any lack of need – but because the news agenda in the UK is dominated by the BBC, and the BBC News & Current Affairs turkeys are hardly going to inform their tellytax-paying customers of the need for their own Christmas along with the rest of the BBC.

Do read the rest of Mr. Forsyth’s column, and also the PDF (link above) of Antony Jay’s excellent new CPS pamphlet.

Thank you to an anonymous commenter for the Daily Express link.

around 12.40pm:

BBC Suspensions

Number of editorial leaders suspended

Presenter Matthew Amroliwala also mentioned that Stewart Purvis said earlier that there is “a culture in the BBC that needs to be examined”. Well, you’re not wrong there Stewart, but can we trust the people who’re going to do the examining?

This story is also on BBC Views Online, BBC editorial leaders suspended – an article that cries out for a full length fisking. For now though, here are some highlights:

Sir Michael warned that the Trust, which oversees the BBC’s activities and represents licence fee payers, would be “watching very carefully” to ensure the correct sanctions were applied. “We will come back in a year’s time to make sure the BBC is a different place to the one it is today,” he added.

A year? How about monthly or quarterly reviews of progress?

In the House of Commons, Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman said the government were “strong supporters of the BBC”.

There’s a surprise Harriet. The feeling appears to be mutual.

Broadcasting union Bectu has warned that junior production staff should not become targets in the inquiry.

Thank you, junior production staff, for sharing that with us.

Mr Thompson has also ordered an independent inquiry into footage that wrongly implied the Queen walked out of a photo session.

I wonder how independent this inquiry will really be – who’s paying for it?, who’s selecting the panel? and so forth. And how likely is it, do you think, that RDF, the production company, staffed by ex-BBC people, dependent on the BBC for a great deal of its income, will confess to everything, and that the ‘independent inquiry’ will accept that confession? Anyone fancy a bet?

One thing that struck me about yesterday’s events was that Peter Fincham wasn’t mentioned at all. It was Fincham, Controller of BBC1, who showed the faked clip of the Queen to a load of journo-reptiles, exclaiming ‘it looks as though she stormed out’ as he did so. Has ‘the frightened man in a suit‘ gone to ground? I wonder why the BBC’s own pack of journo-hounds aren’t digging him out like they would if this was any other story of corporate deception and incompetence.

(now being rebranded as ‘climate change’ it seems), Gmail’s keyword advertising suggested this website, The Great Global Warming Swindle, promoting a DVD of:

…an expanded and improved version of the film [of the same name] broadcast in the UK on Channel 4. More interview material has been added, covering a broader range of subjects than was possible in the broadcast film.

The producers note:

It would be nice to claim that the explosion of interest was due to the film itself, but the fuss started even before the film was broadcast. The reason, we suspect, is that the coverage of ‘global warming’, on TV, radio and in the press, has been so one-sided and uncritical. In Britain, hours and hours of programmes have been broadcast by the BBC on the subject, much of it scientifically absurd. The very fact that a science documentary dared to challenge the orthodoxy was itself news.

Why? Why have journalists been so craven or biased? How has a theory which demonstrably lacks really solid supporting evidence become an indisputable fact? What of the impressive, much talked about scientific ‘consensus’ which is used to forestall any awkward questions about the evidence?

The film made a humble stab at suggesting some possible answers, but there was limited space for these bigger questions. The whole global warming alarm, we believe, raises serious issues about the way science functions in the real world, about the political bias of scientists, about censorship within the scientific community itself, about the routine practice of scientists drawing false or inflated conclusions from ambiguous or uncertain data, about the manifest failure of the peer review process, about the extraordinary unwillingness of scientists who have invested time and reputation in a particular theory to consider evidence which directly contradicts it, about the elevation of speculation (models) to the level of solid data, and much else besides.

(emphasis added).

The site is fairly minimalist just now, but contains some interesting material. The site, and the expanded version of the film, will be worth keeping an eye on – especially for all you Beeboids out there needing a demonstration of how to produce inquiring and challenging documentaries, rather than your current one-sided propaganda, described by Jeremy Paxman as having “abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago” (see side bar).

The BBC will admit today that it has uncovered irregularities in the operation of its Children in Need charity, The Times has learnt, after an appeal to staff to report instances where viewers were misled in the wake of controversies over Blue Peter and the editing of a programme about the Queen.

The revelation — which will be one of several errors that the BBC is expected to own up to this afternoon after a meeting of the BBC Trust — risks plunging the corporation into its greatest crisis since Mark Thompson took over as Director-General in the wake of the Hutton affair.

The anticipated cluster of admissions amounts to what appears to be a culture of lax compliance in certain parts of the corporation at a time when all the major broadcasters are in the dock amid a series of phone-in scandals.

And, more ominously still:

This morning details were sketchy about the exact nature of the problems surrounding Children in Need but BBC insiders are hinting that the Corporation is bracing itself for a major revelation, the impact of which was more serious that previously thought. There are also expected to be several other instances of phone-in and editing irregularities.

Oh dear. Mark Thompson statement due around 3pm according to Sky News. Would anyone care to bet on how many heads won’t roll today?

Please use this thread for BBC related comments and analysis. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not (and never has been) an invitation for general off-topic comments, rants or use as a chat forum. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

featured a panel labelled The Big Picture, with a button to ‘Reveal image’. Clicking on the button popped-up an enlarge image pop-up page, featuring singer Lily Allen, with the caption:

Singer Lily Allen signs autographs for school children in London’s Parliament Square as she launches the Make Space Youth Review. The report demonstrates worrying trends in teenagers lives such as antisocial behaviour. (my emphasis)

Would this be the same Lily Allen whose launch video, Smile, featured her:

• singing “but you were f***ing that girl next door”

• paying a friend to hire a gang to get revenge on her ex-boyfriend

• smiling as her ex-boyfriend is attacked and robbed of his cellphone

• receiving the stolen phone and going to a cafe with her ex

• hired thugs breaking in to and trashing her ex’s home and possessions

• slipping laxative drugs into her ex’s drink when he’s not looking

• gloating as the drugs take effect and he notices his scratched records

Strange then that BBC Views Online should omit this from their jolly pop-up report, keen as the BBC seem to be to promote Allen’s career. I wonder if either Allen or the BBC have figured out just where kids get anti-social ideas from…

former BBC producer Antony Jay remembers those brave anti-establishment days :

“For nine years (1955-1964) I was part of this media liberal consensus. For six of those nine years I was working on Tonight, a nightly BBC current affairs television programme. My stint coincided almost exactly with Macmillan’s premiership, and I do not think my ex-colleagues would quibble if I said we were not exactly diehard supporters. But we were not just anti-Macmillan; we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority.”

Thanks to commenter itsalltoomuch.

UPDATE – production company RDF attempt to put the ticking parcel back on Peter Fincham’s lap. Does this imply that BBC staff edited the tape ?

The independent production company at the heart of the row over the royal photoshoot accused the BBC last night of ignoring repeated requests to show it the controversial footage before it was made public. Sources at RDF, which filmed the monarch sitting for Annie Leibovitz as part of A Year with the Queen, say it asked to see the promotional tape “several times” before it was shown to journalists. The apparent failure of the BBC to respond will increase pressure on Peter Fincham, the controller of BBC1 … The BBC described RDF’s requests to see the footage as “low key” and “noninsistent”.

posted Putting things in order on BBC Views Online’s The Editors blog, where he said:

Maintaining standards of honesty, accuracy and fairness throw up various dilemmas which programme editors have to grapple with on a daily basis. For example we sometimes get politicians making complaints about an interview or a particular film.

Uh huh. Where’s this going?

We had a recent correspondence from the Treasury about an item made by the independent film maker Jamie Campbell which threw up precisely these kind of issues…

You mean you’ve had a complaint. I remember the film. It was the one that made it look as if Gordon Brown’s team (ab)used the police to obstruct a journalist rather heavy-handedly, under the pretence of security.

…although in this instance the film didn’t breach any of the BBC’s producer guidelines.

Well that’s alright then. So why are you telling us now?

They were unhappy with the film in general but directed their complaint at how the film portrayed a Treasury press officer claiming the chronology of two events were out of sequence and as such misrepresented the events.

Oh. You’re guilty as charged then.

However unlike the incident with the footage of the Queen, whichever order the events had been shown the meaning would remain the same. Check out the film for yourself here.

So, that would make editing ‘creativeness’ alright would it? Why not show events chronologically then? Or explain in the film about the re-ordering of events and the reason for doing so? Anything else would, at best, appear highly questionable wouldn’t you say?

The sequences to look out for are the incident where the then chancellor’s car arrives when the press officer and Jamie are talking and the incident at the CBI. Chronologically the CBI event happened first.

But what you still haven’t told us is why you re-ordered events. Why did you purposely change the order of events? Presumably there was a purpose. What was it?

Watch for yourself and let me know if you think the meaning is remotely affected by the order.

Okay, we will. So far one comment has made it onto Robbie’s post, from a Mike S., who wrote:

I enjoyed watching this film when it first aired on Newsnight and I remember being appalled by the police being used to obstruct Jamie at the CBI.

It seemed obvious to me that the press officer had remembered him from the car incident. Involving the police in this way (when she already knew who Jamie was) seemed an unethical escalation of tactics on her part.

However, viewed in the correct chronological order my impression is different. The CBI incident was Jamie’s first meeting with the treasury press officer. Suddenly it seems much more reasonable to have asked the police to check him out.

If the film had shown these events in the chronologically correct order my view of the press officer’s behaviour (and by association Gordon Brown) is significantly less negative.

To conclude, the order did make a difference to me.

Oh dear. I’m sure Mike S. won’t be the only person who views the film in a different light now. By the way, just why did you re-order the events? You still haven’t told us…

The Daily Mail has also picked up this story. Simon Walters writes BBC in row over doctored TV footage with Gordon Brown. Here are a couple of extracts from his report:

Mr Brown’s Treasury officials complained to the BBC, claiming that as well as doctoring the film, Newsnight wrongly accused the Press officer of abusing her position and used a hidden camera to trick Mr Brown’s head of security into making indiscreet comments.

In the film, Mr Campbell is first seen on friendly terms with Gordon Brown, shaking him warmly by the hand. But later, the journalist vents his frustration after Mr Brown’s ‘absurd’ Press officer, Balshen Izzet, blocks his way when he tries to question Mr Brown as he arrives at an event.

In the next scene, Mr Campbell mocks Mr Brown’s speech to a CBI dinner and conspiratorially suggests ‘the same Press officer catches sight’ of him and summons police.

In fact, the CBI dinner at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel took place first, on May 15, and sources say police had no choice but to confront Mr Campbell as he was not known to Mr Brown’s entourage. The handshake did not actually occur until the following day – while the incident with Ms Izzet occurred on June 4, nearly three weeks later, when Mr Brown met British Muslim leaders in London.

A source close to Mr Brown said: ‘Newsnight doctored the film to make it appear as though the Press officer called the police because Mr Campbell had clashed with her earlier that night. ‘It is totally untrue. The events happened two weeks apart and in a different order. Newsnight changed it to make it more damaging.

‘Ms Izzet did not call the police as Mr Campbell alleged. And to dupe one of Mr Brown’s policemen into giving a TV interview is not on. The BBC should not be employing “gonzo journalists” on serious programmes like Newsnight.’

Hmmm. The other side of the story is quite revealing. Here’s the BBC again:

A BBC spokeswoman said: ‘We have acknowledged that the sequences in the film were not shown in chronological order. There was no intention to deceive anybody. The commentary does not suggest that the two are chronological and that one led to the other. The sequences would have had the same meaning if we had run them in the reverse order.

Okay, but that still doesn’t explain why events were re-ordered does it?

‘It has been suggested that the film maker may have employed dishonest tactics in using a hidden camera. The camera was visible at all times and the film maker was completely open about his intentions.’ Another BBC source added: ‘The film was a bit unconventional, but we did not intend to be unfair to civil servants or show any disrespect to Mr Brown and we do not believe that we did.’

Well, it sounds, and appears from the film, as if the police officer was unaware he was being recorded, doesn’t it, so it would seem underhand to film the officer whilst holding the camera as if it wasn’t in use, wouldn’t it, unless there were strong reasons to justify tricking the officer.

This does all smack rather of being a good (Fri)day to bury bad news – get the confession in first, play it down a bit, deny it would have made any difference anyway, hope it will all blow over by Monday, etc.

But the thing I still don’t understand, even if the BBC view of events is correct, and they are innocent, is just why they re-ordered the sequence of events then. What was the point of it, if it wasn’t to change the impression given by the film? It wasn’t edited by the same butter-fingers at RDF that ‘made a mistake’ with the footage of the Queen was it?

I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this one.

Thanks to commenters pounce and jg for links.