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The enemies within at the BBC
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be the first to commentPosted by Tim Gopsill
The name of the operation is Rock the BBC. Bother them, get them on Prozac, looking over their shoulders all the time. MPs and government and rival media are at it all the time.
They tell us that the last year has been a nightmare for the BBC, with the Savile and payoff scandals, but we haven't seen anything yet. In two years' time the BBC Charter is due for its decennial renewal, and boots are being laced up, ready for putting in.
The Commons media select committee, chaired by Tory MP John Whittingdale, the national newspapers' mouthpiece in Parliament, has announced a “major review" of the governance of the corporation.
This governance, repeatedly shown to be a permanent state of confusion, was created by government to be just that. Supposedly the BBC Trust was set up in 2007 to eliminate a perceived dual role in the functions of the Board of Governors: that it had to lead, support and discipline the organisation at the same time. Well the Trust is just the same, a ready-made target.
There need be no confusion were the BBC left alone to get on with its job; the balance between governors and managers worked fine for 80 years, with only a handful of wobbles over the board's attempts to censor the journalism over security-related matters (in all of which it was defeated, by the way).
But mutual confidence was destroyed in 2004 in the wake of the Hutton Report into the mysterious death of a weapons scientist quoted by the BBC in coverage of the invasion of Iraq. After months of bitter struggle between government and corporation the governors caved in and their chairman, Gavin Davies, and Director-General Greg Dyke, who had both defended the corporation, were forced out.
Never again, government determined, would such defiance be allowed. Trusties were installed to run the board (Sir Michael Lyons, Lord Chris Patten) who in turn appointed trusties to do the managing.
This is the context for the public display of division between trustees and managers at the Commons Public Accounts Committee that the right-wing press was able to gloat over last week.
Lord Patten and the former D-G Mark Thompson were both busy washing their hands of responsibility for the massive pay-offs to departing executives. But the payments nodded through by Thompson weren't his worst crime.
The payoffs were obscene, yes, but they were panic measures to cut the payroll, to complete his sell-out to government. When the Tories took power in 2010, having pledged to cut the BBC licence fee, Thompson decided to get his capitulation in first.
He rushed to offer a six-year freeze in the fee, effectively a cut in income of 16 per cent. In addition the BBC would take over the cost of running the World Service and BBC Monitoring from the foreign office (£300 million a year) and of Welsh language broadcaster S4C (£102 million).
Another £150 million would be handed to government to pay for broadband internet roll-out and new local (non-BBC) TV stations. All these things have come into effect.
The government couldn't believe their luck. It was an act of cowardice unmatched even for BBC management, where the “quivering suits on the sixth floor", to quote one long-time staffer, are a byword in timidity.
It required the sacking of a bunch of managers, a cadre accumulated by Thompson himself, and they naturally had to be comfortably recompensed. Unfortunately, another 5,000 wage-earners had to be sacked as well. This process is still going on; this week another 75 redundancies of journalists -– possibly compulsory -- were announced.
As the effects began to bite and the heat from critics became intense, Thompson took himself off to New York to become CEO of the New York Times.
Then the Jimmy Savile scandal broke. Thompson has airily waved aside suggestions that he might have known about it, though the tribute programmes to the unlamented pervert had been produced under his management and other bosses have sworn they had warned him of the coming storm.
Now, in the spat with the BBC Trust over responsibility for the executive payoffs, the point at issue is whether Thompson told the Trust. He says he did, they say he didn't.
Whom do you believe? Perhaps it doesn't matter since the victim is the BBC itself, and public broadcasting with it.
The culprit is the BBC's own management. You can't really blame government for wanting to constrain it, nor the right-wing press for assaulting it with any weapon that comes to hand; it's in their natures.
But the BBC will not survive the next wave of attacks unless its bosses, trustees and managers both, accept the responsibility of standing up to them.
DATELINE: 22 September, 2013
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