The BBC, under Chris Patten’s leadership, in defiance of its promises and all expectations of it living up to its ideals, has developed a new strategy to defend its unique political and ‘commercial’ dominance….and in doing so has abandoned all pretence of working in the public interest and encouraging the public’s trust.

‘Kevin Marsh, Editor of the BBC College of journalism (not since 2011) stood before a class of around 40 students at the LSE Summer School and shared his experiences at the BBC – an organisation that stands as an inspiration for journalists around the world for the ethics and qualitative reporting it supports.

Finally, Marsh argued the case for the BBC, emphasizing the aspect of the public purpose of journalism.

“Truth and Accuracy, Impartiality, Independence, public interest and accountability” – stand as the founding principles of journalism at the BBC”.
He reinforced the fact that the BBC continues to religiously follow these principles of journalism. For me the most pertinent aspect of the talk revolved around the existence, the exploration and the persistent fight for the discipline of journalism.’

How times have changed at the BBC.

This morning listening to 5Live I heard the usual news and a balanced piece on the Newsnight fiasco by Torin Douglas…..the BBC then wheeled on a man named Tim Crook…..Senior Lecturer in Media Law & Ethics, Goldsmiths, University of London….who also happens to be a visiting lecturer on media law to BBC Training and College of Journalism since 1982.

His parting words were these:

‘They need to have a leadership that when mistakes happen they are managed not just on journalistic terms but on political and propaganda terms.’

It would seem the BBC have rapidly assimilated his ideas, put them into practise and are presently engaged in a highly political and commercial black propaganda campaign, if not ‘war’ with politicians and with, in particular, News Corporation.

Let’s see just how impartial Crook is…a man who actually lectures BBC staff at its own college, on media law and ethics……..

Tim Crook ?@libertarianspir
I have been trying to analyse and defend the BBC position on BBC Five Live Morning Report 9 mins 43 secs in http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0070hss …

 
Pretty clear where he stands.

The BBC Trust under the chairmanship of Chris Patten has announced that it will ‘get a grip’ of the BBC and work to rekindle public trust in the organisation.

What has it done to further that ambition?  It has admitted its journalism was seriously at fault, it has paid off George Entwistle, removed a few senior managers from the frontline and engaged in some inquiries.
That is the ‘mea culpa’ public face of the BBC which Patten is using to try and claim he is turning the organisation around.

Is that all that the BBC is doing?  Having heard Crook this morning a few other things started clicking into place and a pattern emerged from the smokescreen that was being laid by the BBC Trust.

That pattern indicated something that tells us that nothing has changed at the BBC and that far from accepting any ‘guilt’ they are playing the ‘victim card’ and claiming the BBC is the victim of political and commercial attacks……essentially a rerun of Hutton.

This was reinforced when I heard the Today programme where they wheeled on Phil Harding, the BBC’s former director of editorial policy, who said:

“Mistakes have been made in journalism everywhere, but we have to keep a sense of proportion…..There are some people in the press who love to give the BBC a good kicking because they don’t believe in its existence in the first place.”

This is from the BBC who engaged, in collusion with the Labour Party, in particular Tom Watson, and the Guardian, in an all out assault on one of their commercial and ideological rivals, News International, in an attempt to destroy it…. And which cost over 300 jobs and has seen 100 NI employees in the dock.

In response to The Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh saying, quite reasonably, that the BBC was an organisation that presented a left wing view of the world and that the Newsnight programme was an attempt to smear the Tories whilst it wouldn’t have done the same to a Labour Peer, the BBC’s Harding claimed that was an ‘outrageous slur’.

He had just said he wanted to engage in discussion about the BBC….but as usual the BBC want to fix the terms of any debate and limit what can be said.

Talking about Leveson and ‘Press freedom’ Kavanagh said that Newsnight showed that Broadcasters were as capable of getting it wrong as newspapers were….and should come therefore under the same scrutiny as newspapers.

Harding replied that:  ‘Yes the BBC had made mistakes but we must keep a sense of proportion.  If we keep giving the BBC a kicking it will undermine  confidence in the BBC’s journalism and in journalism as a whole.’

Jim Naughtie added that: ‘There’s a danger of us all being pulled down if there’s too much mud slinging.’

I don’t remember such a reaction when News International was in the dock.

Kavanagh went on to say that the BBC had an institutional bias towards the liberal left and the BBC was unable to recognise this in itself…it had an ‘inbuilt lip curl directed with contempt towards anyone it disagreed with.’ and that the BBC would not have broadcast Newsnight had it of been a Labour peer instead of a Tory one…it was ‘wishful thinking rather than bad journalism’ that led to this disaster for the BBC.

Harding jumped in and claimed that was an ‘outrageous slur’…and that we are ‘maybe getting to the real agenda…not what mistakes in its journalism the BBC makes but whether it is too big and bloated, whether the BBC has institutional bias and whether it is too left wing…..if we’re going to have that debate let’s have it but don’t dress it up as looking at BBC mistakes.’

Harding and Naughtie provided a united front defending the BBC and adopting the BBC’s new stance in its defence….that it has made one mistake and that this is being used by politicians and its Press rivals to attack it.

This approach has obviously been ‘agreed’ at the highest level.  The BBC has held an emergency summit in which a new strategy has been thrashed out and put into operation.  This must have been signed off by Patten.

Not only have various ‘talking heads’ been brought in by the BBC to bolster their defence but as we can see Patten himself has taken up the cudgel in the BBC’s defence adopting that very strategy…of blaming politicians and other media organisations…or rather just  Murdoch…..

‘I don’t think Lord Patten helped himself by repeatedly attacking Rupert Murdoch during his round of media interviews this morning (see Spectator report).‘

Chris Patten has just appeared on the Andrew Marr Show to discuss the resignation of George Entwistle and to evaluate its fallout. Patten conceded that the BBC is mired in a mess of its own making and that it was inevitably under pressure as a result. He opened a media war while defending the BBC’s independence, saying that the corporation was ‘bound to be under fire from Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers’ and sceptical (Tory) MPs, adding later in the interview that Murdoch’s papers would be happy to see the BBC diminished.
And he renewed his assault on the Murdoch press, saying: ‘I’m not going to take my marching orders from Mr Murdoch’s newspaper.’ ‘

The warm up to this has been going on a few days…on the Daily Politics the BBC held a debate between ex Murdoch man Neil Wallis and Lawyer Charlotte Harris who have been sparring over the future of press regulation.
‘They both made an authored film for the Daily Politics, and have appeared in two TV debates together, which can all be seen on this page.
Charlotte Harris represents victims of phone hacking and has called for more regulation, while Neil Wallis argues that illegal actions of journalists are already covered by existing rules.’
I would suggest that the BBC’s favoured position is that proposed by Neil Wallis….I believe that they had absolutely no interest in ‘press regulation’ and are just as worried about Leveson’s rulings as Murdoch might be.  I think the BBC have the fullest intention of sidelining the victims of the hacking scandal and used that purely as a means to attack Murdoch….which it succeeded in doing.

Murdoch himself of course does have an interest in seeing the BBC brought under control…as he has tweeted recently:

Rupert Murdoch ?@rupertmurdoch
BBC mess gives Cameron golden opportunity properly reorganize great public broadcaster. Fast inquiry to Include both critics and supporters.

Neil Wallis said this….which is pretty much what seems to be the new BBC line….no press regulation as it is the thin end of the wedge….
Neil Wallis ?@neilwallis1
My blog on press freedom, based on the script of my BBC2 Daily Politics film today, is on front page of the Huff Post!

‘Make no mistake,  statutory regulation means state regulation and is the thin end of the wedge. Ignore the apologists who protest the changes they seek are inconsequential. Who brings in, draws up, and enacts the statutes they seek? Politicians, of course.
And once in place, those self-same politicians will be free in years to come to amend, adjust, tweak, ratify, clarify, fix, CENSOR those press laws to silence all those questions and inquiries they don’t want to answer.
A free press does make mistakes, gets things – including its behaviour – wrong. That can hurt – but the alternative is worse. To paraphrase, democracy is the worst kind of government… until you consider all the others. It is the same with a free press and self-regulation.
Let them steal it at your peril. ‘

The above is a longer version of an authored TV film by Neil Wallis broadcast on the Daily Politics programme on BBC2 on Thursday 8 November 2012.

And:
8 November 2012 Last updated at 12:51 Help
Former newspaper editor Neil Wallis, said “an unsavoury alliance” of celebrities, lawyers and politicians were getting together to limit press regulation for their own interests.
But he said new press laws would give MPs a press they could control, and allow politicians to silence questions they did not want to answer.

But let’s remember who Neil Wallis is….apart from an ex Murdoch man what else has he done since?….he ran the PR spin campaign for the University of East Anglia’s CRU after ‘ClimateGate’…….suddenly stories of Prof Phil Jones getting death threats appeared in the papers and similar tales of woe intended to generate public sympathy were manufactured to support the CRU’s climate change ideology.

The BBC have even dragged in their old sparring partner Labour’s Alistair Campbell to support them…in news bulletins he is quoted saying:  ‘the BBC must be defended and not reduced in size or effectiveness….other media which are attacking the BBC have vested interests in doing so.’

So again we have that same posturing…a BBC under threat from ‘dark forces’….as Harding said : “Mistakes have been made in journalism everywhere, but we have to keep a sense of proportion….There are some people in the press who love to give the BBC a good kicking because they don’t believe in its existence in the first place.”

I think it might be wise to remember that Campbell is practically employed by the BBC which relentlessly plugged his book as well as using him to front many of their programmes.

This all comes together to point to a coherent and deliberate plan to spike any attempt to force the BBC to change other than on its own terms.  It has no intention of being held to account by anyone and believes in its own sanctity…it believes it is beyond the reach of the temporal world almost….practically a religion…indeed the journalists there I think, see themselves as the new priesthood issuing forth guidelines to the lesser mortals who otherwise wouldn’t be capable of living their lives in a moral and ethical manner, as defined by the BBC….and as such the BBC are themselves beyond reproach and unaccountable to anyone.

The BBC Trust is acting in a way that is directly in opposition to the rationale for its existence and the rules it is supposed to enforce.
It is, far from admitting any mistakes or innate, wilfully partial tendencies at the BBC,  reinforcing and defending such an attitude on behalf of the journalists and is failing utterly in its role as defender of the Public interest.

The Trust has deliberately engaged in a campaign of black propaganda not just against other media organisations but against politicians, government and the judiciary.

The BBC has tried to set itself up as untouchable and so precious to the nation that to attempt to control it or rein it in in any way will lead to the end of democracy as we know it.

What this demonstrates is that the BBC is betraying the trust placed in it by the Public and are solely concerned with defending their own political, commercial social, cultural and ideological positions.

The BBC is all about trust, openness and accountability, if it no longer operates to such standards and works in a way that is solely in its own interest, pushing a political message rather than acting to inform debate then it has lost its reason to be ‘special’ and uniquely funded….as it does nothing that a commercial station couldn’t do and probably do better and cheaper……

‘This existential crisis exists because there’s no longer any ideological reason to keep the BBC around, so every argument about its power has to focus on its practical ability to do good. If the BBC can’t keep to the extraordinarily high standards the British public has for it, it may be beginning a slow and painful journey to privatization like other nationalized British industries before it.’

It might also be worthwhile challenging the definition of what exactly  ‘for purposes of journalism, art or entertainment’ means exactly.…for everything the BBC does is aimed to those ends…and therefore subject to that qualification in the FOI Act.  How can it be open and transparent if it can so easily hide away its dirty secrets?

Back to BBC supporter Tim Crook (at 9 mins 45 secs in )….here is the full transcript of his broadcast on behalf of the BBC this morning…..one that ticks most boxes in the BBC box of tricks….Austerity, Hutton, Murdoch.

First some tweets to add some colour to the picture:

Tim Crook ?@libertarianspir
It would be awful if Helen Boaden turned out to be the best Director General the BBC never had

Tim Crook ?@libertarianspir
Seems to me politicians think they own the BBC & decide what happens next there & elsewhere in journalism. That’s not democracy surely?

Tim Crook ?@libertarianspir
I’d make Helen Boaden DG- and Kevin Marsh as Director of Journalism- Journalism needs ascendency, independence & investment at BBC

The transcript:

‘George Entwistle was pulled down by not being able to marshal the BBC to cope with this new aggressive political tactic which is to take one mistake made by a media organisation and expand it out as if it is a general issue and an extremely important problem.

It started in a big way with ‘HackGate’ and that’s how Leveson came about.  I think politicians in recent years have learned how to deflect, to throw up smoke screens and attack journalism and the media.
Particularly at a time when journalism and the media are particularly vulnerable.…vulnerable because of Austerity because multi media organisations are struggling to find an economic model for digitisation and there is an evacuation of key advertising to the Internet.

The BBC has been substantially vulnerable since Hutton when a New labour government employed classic propaganda techniques to humble it.
that was combined with judicial public enquiry where the terms of reference were politically and narrowly defined.
So I think we’re seeing an ongoing repetition of a growth of political power on the part of politicians against the Media.

Recently the BBC has been a casualty of that.
The problem for the BBC is that it is owned by the Public but is more harshly shackled to the political world than It has been in the past.  The Chairman is a Conservative politician at a time when we have a Conservative/Lib/Dem Coalition and I think that’s a key issue.

I think the BBC is in a process of necessity but it is learning a desperately hard lesson.  Not only the BBC but any newspaper organisation now has learned that they are under attack and are vulnerable to the Legislature, the Executive and Judiciary.
They need to be much more disciplined, they need to be more politically savvy.
They need to have a full understanding of the political ground as well as the journalistic infrastructure and culture of their own organisation.
They need to have a leadership that when mistakes happen they are managed not just on journalistic terms but on political and propaganda terms.’

The arrogance is stunning. The BBC Trust cannot be trusted!

Failed director general George Entwistle’s ‘obscene’ £450,000 pay-off was signed off by a BBC Trust boss as she watched Strictly Come Dancing, it has been revealed.

Lord Patten telephoned his deputy Diana Coyle during the hit show on Saturday evening and they agreed that Entwistle should get double what he was entitled to if he did the ‘honourable’ thing and quit. After the £1.3m deal was done, which also included a £877,000 pension pot, Ms Coyle went back to watching dancers like Denise Van Outen, Fern Britton, Kimberley Walsh, Michael Vaughan and Louis Smith, the BBC Trust confirmed to MailOnline.

Why has Patten not been sacked!!

Bad Timing or what!!!   The BBC’s Martin Plaut  opens up…..Guido has the low down

Who or what do you hate and why?
Tories. As Aneurin Bevan said: ‘No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.’

Ich Bin Kentishtowner: Martin Plaut, BBC Journalist & Author

Martin Plaut was born and raised in Cape Town. He left South Africa after the Soweto uprising of 1976, planning to return. But he met and married a British girl and has lived in the UK ever since. He has worked on Africa for the Labour Party and the BBC, writing widely on the subject. His latest book is ‘Who Rules South Africa?’ with Paul Holden. He is also the proud author of the Hamster of Hampstead Heath – available from Daunt books, Hampstead.

Oh Dear what can the matter be?  Was it all Tim Davie’s fault?

Kevin Marsh, ex Today Ed. explains……

Remember, George Entwistle told John Humphrys in the fatal Today interview that the Newsnight McAlpine film had been signed off “at management board level” – normally it would have been what’s known in the BBC as the News Board, usually chaired by the Head of News, Helen Boaden. The BBC Trust Chairman, Lord Patten, told Andrew Marr something similar.

Now, the line of command upwards from Newsnight prior to the Savile row was: Editor of Newsnight (Peter Rippon) – Head of News Programmes (Steve Mitchell) – Head of News (Helen Boaden) – Director General (George Entwistle)

Once Rippon had “stepped aside” and other News executives ‘recused’ themselves, that line of command on ‘recused’ matters became: acting Editor of Newsnight (??) – Head of Newsgathering (Fran Unsworth) – Director of World Service (Peter Horrocks … replaced during Horrocks’s annual leave by Adrian van Klaveren, the controller of R5Live) – Director of Audio and Music (Tim Davie). That meant Davie was effectively editor-in-chief on ‘recused’ matters.

It appears from what I learnt this morning that the Newsnight McAlpine film was judged to fall within the ‘recused’ area … and that, therefore, it was dealt with by the temporary management structure and not the regular one.

If that’s the case, then many of the questions over the McAlpine film that John Humphrys fired so effectively at George Entwistle – who declined to raise the complications of ‘recusation’ as any defence – might just as properly be put to the new acting Director General, Tim Davie.

Site traffic is at an all time high! So here is a new one of these before the Monday one explodes. Over to you..

Thanks to GCooper in the comments who points out this revelation  (science writer Maurizio Morabito has unearthed a list – once hosted on the IBT’s website and now stored in the Wayback Machine‘s cache of the internet.) that the BBC tried to hide…and it’s a funny thing…can’t see many of the ‘best scientific experts’ amongst that bunch….lot of environmental pressure groups, businessmen, academics, media and charities….just a shame we don’t have a transcript of what they said:

Full List of Participants to the BBC CMEP Seminar on 26 January 2006

January 26th 2006,

BBC Television Centre, London
Specialists:
Robert May, Oxford University and Imperial College London
Mike Hulme, Director, Tyndall Centre, UEA
Blake Lee-Harwood, Head of Campaigns, Greenpeace
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen
Michael Bravo, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
Andrew Dlugolecki, Insurance industry consultant
Trevor Evans, US Embassy
Colin Challen MP, Chair, All Party Group on Climate Change
Anuradha Vittachi, Director, Oneworld.net
Andrew Simms, Policy Director, New Economics Foundation
Claire Foster, Church of England
Saleemul Huq, IIED
Poshendra Satyal Pravat, Open University
Li Moxuan, Climate campaigner, Greenpeace China
Tadesse Dadi, Tearfund Ethiopia
Iain Wright, CO2 Project Manager, BP International
Ashok Sinha, Stop Climate Chaos
Andy Atkins, Advocacy Director, Tearfund
Matthew Farrow, CBI
Rafael Hidalgo, TV/multimedia producer
Cheryl Campbell, Executive Director, Television for the Environment
Kevin McCullough, Director, Npower Renewables
Richard D North, Institute of Economic Affairs
Steve Widdicombe, Plymouth Marine Labs
Joe Smith, The Open University
Mark Galloway, Director, IBT
Anita Neville, E3G
Eleni Andreadis, Harvard University
Jos Wheatley, Global Environment Assets Team, DFID
Tessa Tennant, Chair, AsRia
BBC attendees:
Jana Bennett, Director of Television
Sacha Baveystock, Executive Producer, Science
Helen Boaden, Director of News
Andrew Lane, Manager, Weather, TV News
Anne Gilchrist, Executive Editor Indies & Events, CBBC
Dominic Vallely, Executive Editor, Entertainment
Eleanor Moran, Development Executive, Drama Commissioning
Elizabeth McKay, Project Executive, Education
Emma Swain, Commissioning Editor, Specialist Factual
Fergal Keane, (Chair), Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Fran Unsworth, Head of Newsgathering
George Entwistle, Head of TV Current Affairs
Glenwyn Benson, Controller, Factual TV
John Lynch, Creative Director, Specialist Factual
Jon Plowman, Head of Comedy
Jon Williams, TV Editor Newsgathering
Karen O’Connor, Editor, This World, Current Affairs
Catriona McKenzie, Tightrope Pictures catriona@tightropepictures.com

BBC Television Centre, London (cont)
Liz Molyneux, Editorial Executive, Factual Commissioning
Matt Morris, Head of News, Radio Five Live
Neil Nightingale, Head of Natural History Unit
Paul Brannan, Deputy Head of News Interactive
Peter Horrocks, Head of Television News
Peter Rippon, Duty Editor, World at One/PM/The World this Weekend
Phil Harding, Director, English Networks & Nations
Steve Mitchell, Head Of Radio News
Sue Inglish, Head Of Political Programmes
Frances Weil, Editor of News Special Events

Saw this on Guido originally and thought exactly the same as the Telegraph fella….but thought nah!…must be more to this bloke Davie than that…….

A rude, swaggering barrow boy. Meet the Beeb’s new (acting) DG – worse than the old one

Seems not.

Only blessing is there’s only one of him…Not Davies!

Why hasn’t Lord Patten resigned yet? He is clinging on to his quanocracy but he needs to go. The BBC Trust is now the BBC DISTRUST. Go, in god’s name, Patten, and go now.

Here’s the first attempt at thinking through a solution to  the BBC’s problems that I’ve seen.

Of course it depends what you think those problems are…and this is Labour’s Tessa Jowell:

BBC crisis: let the public run our national broadcaster

The BBC can weather this storm if we eradicate its culture of moral smugness

The problems it faces are serious and need swift resolution, but they should not be allowed to undermine the case for the BBC, or its continuing success.

Trust is an overused term, but a guarantee of impartiality and accuracy in news and reporting is what the corporation is for.

So is the BBC not impartial and accurate?

This crisis must not be allowed to herald the slow death of the uniqueness of the BBC.

To assume that it operates in a normal commercial market is to miss the fact that the BBC is an institution that is sorely needed to counter-balance failures in the market. It is truly a public good…..keeping journalistic and production values higher in the commercial sector than if it didn’t exist.

That’s just an article of faith….where’s the proof?

The culture of moralistic smugness which pervades the BBC has to end. There has been a sense that it has sought the benefits of the private sector while enjoying the certainties of the public sector.

Is that really all that’s wrong with the BBC’s ‘moralistic smugness’?  How does it manifest that smugness?  By ‘managing’ what viewers are allowed to see and hear because the BBC knows best?

The BBC Trust was created in 2006, as part of a new form of governance. This was in response to the largest-ever deliberative consultation with the public in the course of developing a new charter and negotiating the new licence fee. But the Trust has not yet been a strong enough or assertive enough voice on behalf of the licence-fee payer.

So that’ll be the ‘largest-ever deliberative consultation with the public’ to develop the Trust…..and yet it failed….so how is ‘mutualising’ going to be better?

Once the dust settles, the progressive long-term solution to restoring trust in the BBC would be to make it the country’s biggest mutual, with 26.8 million licence-fee payers as its shareholders. As one of our most treasured and important public institutions, the principles of mutualism – democratic ownership, solidarity and equity – would fit perfectly with the BBC’s editorial remit of impartiality, transparency and accountability.

Clearly this is a woman who has never listened to the BBC and never had to make a complaint.

By co-opting the public’s voice, a more democratically accountable Trust would have more legitimacy in managing what has become an overly strong BBC executive. Second, the public need to feel after Savile that they have a stake in rebuilding trust in the BBC, rather than a top-down solution based on the appointment of a few new senior women or men.

Shame old Tessa didn’t feel the same way when Labour were in government…not much interested in what the voters, or was that ‘Bigots’, wanted!

One of the reasons the Trust has lost confidence is because it is out of touch with the public.

You don’t say…..

A mutual BBC would insist on this and remind trustees that their first loyalty is to the licence-fee payers, not the institution itself.

Does it really need to be reminded?  Does it not read its own charter?

The third reason for introducing a mutual BBC is that it would give the public more of a say over programmes and direction. It is a simple principle that if we pay for the BBC, the institution should be more accountable to us.

So that’ll be very unbiased, non partisan ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ then six times a night?  Followed by Eastenders and Top Gear.

Can Justin Webb dance?  Guess he might have some time on his hands….if I have a vote.

What would I like to see?….

• a separate, independent complaints body.
• a new recruitment policy pulling a wider range of views and experience.
• a rotation of journalists so that they don’t get complacent, arrogant and condescending stuck on one programme for years.
• an effective flow of information up and down the management structure.
• more willingness to tackle subjects in depth and with admission of all types of views that the BBC now thinks too sensitive to touch….Islam, immigration….and bias on the BBC itself.
•  News that examines subjects far more in the round….more context and depth rather than an extremely narrow view of things that means we only get a very one sided, partisan view….say of Europe or the economy.

I don’t want a vote, I just want them to do what they’re paid to do…and the Trust to do what it’s paid to do…make sure the BBC does what it’s paid to do.