Bbc

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 11 April 2013

It is strange how we are never ready for events which are, in principle, certain. The media have prepared for Margaret Thatcher’s death for years, and yet there was a rushed, improvised quality to much of the coverage when she actually did die. We have a curious habit of all saying the same thing, and feeling comforted by that, when really it is our job to say as many different things as possible. The BBC, which Mrs Thatcher, and even more Denis, detested, has been straining itself to be fair, but fairly bursting with frustration in the attempt. The way for it to express its subliminal opposition to her is

Thursday

Steerpike

Mark Thompson’s BBC past haunts

Steerpike is back in this week’s magazine. As ever, here is your preview: ‘One of Lord Hall’s predecessors, Mark Thompson, is toiling away as chief executive of the New York Times. But he’s devised a brilliant wheeze to give his old chums at Broadcasting House a bit of extra work. Later this month his newspaper will co-host a Social Media Summit at the Times Center in New York. Thompson promises an ‘exciting line-up’ including world-class media luminaries like Matthew Eltringham, ‘Head of Web Site and Events at the BBC Academy College of Journalism’, and Dmitry Shishkin, ‘Digital Development Editor at BBC Global News’. These sages will discuss ‘journalism’s current use

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The workers united will never be defeated…

There’s a BBC website where you can find out what class you are, according to new criteria drawn up by some bloke at the LSE and a babe from Manchester University. There are apparently seven new classes – which I suppose is designed to replace the old registrar General’s Scale – ranging from ‘Elite’ to something called ‘Precariat’, this latter comprising people with pit bull terriers but no money to feed them. It is a chimera, in my opinion. There are two classes in this country. There is the ruling class, which is privately educated and has inherited wealth and agreeable contacts and which comprises between 60 to 80 per

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Why the confusion between debt and deficit?

Polls show that, depending on how you ask the question, just between 8pc and 12pc of us realize that debt is rising. It’s not hard to work out why: first, politicians – even the Prime Minister – says that debt is falling. They say they get it confused with ‘deficit’. But this morning, I tweeted that blame lies with the BBC and its failure to mention this basic point when reporting on the public finance. Its narrative tends to be one of fast, deep cuts. It tends to use language that no one understands, and not just conflating ‘debt/gdp ratio’ with ‘debt’. Most normal people don’t know what ‘deficit’ means,

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

The BBC and religion

It is to David Lammy’s credit that he hasn’t deleted what my Spectator colleague, Hugo Rifkind, describes as his new all-time favourite tweet. For those who haven’t come across it yet, this is how the Tottenham MP responded to the BBC’s coverage of the papal election where it mentioned “white smoke”: This tweet from the BBC is crass and unnecessary. Do we really need silly innuendo about the race of the next Pope? twitter.com/DavidLammy/sta… — David Lammy (@DavidLammy) March 12, 2013 There were more solid grounds for criticising the BBC that day: the corporation again showed its problems understanding religion. It managed to find a translator for the Vatican election

Thursday

James Delingpole

Bluestone 42: Dad’s Army it isn’t

The thing that always used to bother me about M*A*S*H as a child was the lack of combat. You’d see the realistic film of choppers at the beginning and, obviously, the plotline would quite often include casualties coming in from recent scenes of action. But the exciting stuff always seemed to happen offstage, a bit like in Shakespeare where some character strides on and tells you what a terrible battle there’s just been and you’re going, ‘Wait a second. Did we just skip past the most exciting bit?’ This clearly isn’t going to be a problem, though, with BBC3’s new sitcom about a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan, Bluestone 42

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 28 February 2013

Healing the world Sir: We most warmly commend the courage of Professor Meirion Thomas (‘The next NHS scandal’, 23 February) in lifting the lid on the appalling abuse of the NHS by foreign visitors. It has been going on for years but has been covered up by the culture of fear that has pervaded that organisation. We stand ready to support the professor in parliament if that should prove necessary. Regrettably, the present position is even worse than he described. The relevant quango (the Primary Care Commissioning group) issued instructions last July that GPs must accept an application for registration from any foreign visitor who is here for more than

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Spending isn’t the answer. But how do we explain that?

One of the things I love about being a classical liberal is that I’m always on the right side of every argument. I’m pro: freedom, jobs, self-determination, cheap energy, higher living standards, academic excellence, property rights, an even better future, Michael Gove MP, wine, women, song. (So long as the song is not by Maroon 5 or Bruno Mars.) And I’m anti: arbitrary authority, nanny-statism, money-printing, tyranny, despair, almost all war, poverty, prohibition, disease, squalor, uncleaned-up dog poo, meddling busybodies, crap capital projects based on massive lies (that means you HS2!), corrupt officials, civil war, totalitarianism, hyperinflation, injustice, Tim Yeo MP. Yet you’d scarcely guess this to read some of

Kate Chisholm

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.

Friday

Isabel Hardman

Censor’s black pencil hovers over BBC’s Jimmy Savile review transcripts

The BBC has released its (redacted) transcripts and other evidence from the Pollard Review, which examined the decision to drop Newsnight’s Jimmy Savile investigation. There are thousands of pages of evidence, which you can read here, some with large sections which have fallen foul to the censor’s black pencil, even though Jeremy Paxman in particular had made clear that he wanted his interview transcript published in full. We’ll bring you further details of the key transcripts throughout the afternoon, but one of the interesting observations from Paxman’s transcript is this on the effect of pared-down resources on Newsnight: ‘Newsnight, particularly in view of the – of the huge resource cuts

Monday

Douglas Murray

The BBC’s great public service: Cancelling the Today programme

Is it true that the Today programme did not go out this morning?  If so the strikers have done a great public service. Giving the country a day off the Today programme is one of the kindest things anybody could do, in any economic climate.  I hope the generosity continues. I stopped listening years ago after I acknowledged that the programme only succeeded in getting every day off to the worst possible start.  Since I stopped listening my life has improved immeasurably It is not just the inevitable left-wing bias of the programme or the left establishment view of what is or is not news.  It is the fact that

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

Writing of walking

At 3pm this afternoon Radio 4’s Ramblings with Clare Balding will broadcast a programme about The Walking Book Club, to which Emily Rhodes belongs. ‘I love walking in London,’ said Mrs Dalloway. ‘Really it’s better than walking in the country.’ As a keen reader, writer and walker, I am always intrigued when an author writes a walk into their work of fiction. Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Bond Street at the beginning of Mrs Dalloway is one of Virginia Woolf’s most astonishing authorial feats. Woolf notes the outside world – ‘shop-keepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds … June had drawn out every leaf on

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Shapps aide delivers next blow in BBC cuts row

Eric Pickles has been at war with the BBC over the way it reports council cuts for a while now. But today the battle took on a new front following the corporation’s reporting of a report on council tax benefit cuts. This morning the Beeb picked up on a report from the Resolution Foundation which warned council tax bills for the poorest families could rise by as much as £600. The way the story, which you can read online here, was reported has angered Jake Berry, PPS to Grant Shapps, sufficiently to fire off an angry letter to BBC director of News Helen Boaden. The letter, which I’ve seen this

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Will Self, writer in residence at BBC Radio 4

I see that Will Self is being lined up as a “writer in residence” at BBC Radio Four. I think this is very good news. Self is an excellent writer and while obviously of the left, is not doctrinaire or predictable in his views. He has wit, he is well-read and very clever. Good luck to him. I commissioned Will to do an essay every week for the Today programme back when I was editor (1998-2003). They were invariably funny, provocative and beautifully expressed; he takes such a pleasure in using our language. But I alternated Will with Freddy Forsyth, who I fancied was a similarly iconoclastic voice, but from

Saturday

Rod Liddle

Syria exposé shows the BBC at its best

Superb piece of journalism on the BBC News from Lyse Doucet. A horrible story, of some appalling mass murder in Syria – told calmly and bravely; unpartisan, questioning and undoubtedly exposing the team to danger, for our benefit. The very best of journalism. You can see it here. Actually, the piece which followed Doucet’s wasn’t bad either – a fine report from Damian Grammaticus on the Chinese economic slowdown as seen from the ghastly city of Wuhan. I mention this because the corporation isn’t simply a handy base for collective noncing, overpaid middle managers and political bias. I write about that stuff often enough, probably too often, because if the

Monday

Rod Liddle

Mary Fitzpatrick made the BBC less ‘hideously white’

Anyone remember Mary Fitzpatrick? She was the BBC’s ‘Diversity Czar’ back in the middle of the last decade, paid £90,000 p.a by the licence payer to spout egregious pc bollocks. From a quick Google she now appears to be coining it for doing precisely the same job for the UK Film Council. Nice work, etc. Her most infamous pronouncement, when she was at the Beeb, was that the BBC had too many white foreign correspondents. People reporting from Muslim countries should be Muslim, from Chinese countries Chinese and so on. The audience, this berserk woman suggested, needed ‘valid and culturally accurate’ reportage, which meant far fewer honkeys. Everybody, at the

Friday

Douglas Murray

Any suggestions for ‘Any Questions’?

I’m doing Radio 4’s ‘Any Questions?’ tonight with Harriet Harman and Simon Hughes. It’s a strange news week, in which almost anything could come up.  But I wondered if Spectator readers had any ideas, points or questions they think should be put to my fellow guests?

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Andrew Marr recovering following a stroke

Andrew Marr is recovering from a stroke in hospital, the BBC has said this evening. We at Coffee House wish him well in his recovery. The BBC’s statement on Andrew Marr’s condition: “Andrew Marr was taken ill yesterday and taken to hospital. The hospital confirmed he has had a stroke. His doctors say he is responding to treatment. His family have asked for their privacy to be respected as he recovers. “We will continue to broadcast The Andrew Marr Show and Radio 4’s Start The Week with guest presenters in his absence. His colleagues and the whole BBC wish him a speedy recovery.” Acting Director-General, Tim Davie, said: “I am

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

BBC begins to see that the Arab Spring has not sprung

Hugely exciting Ten O Clock News last night on the Arab Spring – or ‘Arab Uprising’ as the BBC now prefers to call it, the word Spring usually being associated with nice things like lambs and daffodils. They had George Alligator in Egypt and Lyse Doucet in Tunisia and some other bloke somewhere else. I like Lyse Doucet, she’s less credulous than most. George Alligator, in a piece which was largely a string of clichés, said that Egypt’s democracy was ‘a work in progress’, at which point I fell off the sofa in hysteria. Still at least they have now all come around to the view that the Arab Spring

Tuesday

Steerpike

Time ticking away for Mark Thompson?

Is the net beginning to tighten on Mark Thompson? The Sunday Times have run a story on either the ex-BBC chief, Savile or Newsnight every week since 28 October, and a picture is emerging that Thompson may have known more than we had previously thought about Newsnight’s now infamous axed investigation of Savile. I hear that Thompson, now the $4 million chief executive of the New York Times, has been forced to postpone two long-standing open meetings with his new colleagues. He was originally going to chair the ‘Town Hall’ meetings on December 17 and 18. These were supposed to have been ‘a chance for as many people as possible to see me