Nick Robinson’s Battle for the Airwaves

Deep within the BBC’s inquiry into the Newsnight and Jimmy Savile affair is a comment by Jeremy Paxman so inflammatory as to demand its own investigation (lasting months and costing squillions). The trouble, he said, with BBC News is that it has become dominated by ‘radio people’. This was not, it seems, intended as a compliment. It’s as if, in Paxman’s view, the whole dreadful, dreary, demeaning muddle was the fault of those ‘radio people’, because according to Paxman they ‘belong to a different kind of culture’.

You might think it’s of little importance that Paxman thinks himself cast from a different mould to, say, John Humphrys or Eddie Mair. That it’s all just a spat between journalist rivals, each claiming the superiority of their ‘culture’ of gathering, reporting and commenting on events. But it actually shows just how deep the crisis is within the BBC. If Paxman really believes that TV is not only different but also better than radio in its delivery of the news, he’s actually undermining his own organisation.