It is open season on the BBC; all those who have a strong dislike, even hate, of the corporation and its resounding success as a news organisation, are pressuring the government to break it up, or at the very least, clip its claws.
It is a very British thing: any organisation, especially one owned by the taxpayer, which shows any semblance of success, must by its very nature be up to no good. For BBC read NHS, our top universities, the civil service.
The BBC is one of the great British success stories. No matter where you go in the world, from the darkest patches of Africa to the huts of Tierra del Fuego in South America, the one thing the natives know and trust about Britain is the BBC.
Yet, mainly because of short-term greed, an unworthy coalition of bitter politicians and business people want to bring the BBC down to the mediocre standards of many of its rivals.
Its world-class website must be destroyed, say these people, because it is too successful and, what is more, it is paid for by the licence fee payers.
Even the dysfunctional local papers, whose business models are straight out of the age of the dinosaur, now claim that the BBC is undermining them; not their failure to move with the times, but the overall competence and comprehensive nature of BBC online news coverage is the culprit.
But this is what used to be called the market, competition, an opportunity to raise one’s game, not cry foul and go off asking for the opposition to be curtailed.
Others with their failed websites and pay walls claim the BBC is also hurting them; yet, rather than look at their offerings, they prefer to get rid of the BBC, the standard setter.
Of courser, mailonline and the guardianonline provide enough general news and entertainment to their readers in Britain, the US and even as far as Australia.
The assault on the BBC is part of the modern malaise: ban ‘cheap’ imports rather than reduce cost of homemade products; the echo of we are top doctors, why should we work at weekends?
Let the unwell get sick on weekdays, these senior consultants believe, rather than disrupt their weekend golf. Remind me, who paid for the doctors’ education?
But we have been here before. When Granada took over London Weekend Television, making a number of senior executives millionaires, then the LWT lot moved lock, stock and barrel to the BBC, we then had a vision of what a commercialised, John Birt-led BBC would look like. Many of us did not like it.
There are lots of things wrong with the BBC: reporters (they are now called correspondents, whatever that is) lacking the grace to address interviewees properly (I once heard one called the Archbishop of Canterbury ‘Justin’, and on the finance slot on the Today programme guests are daily called by their first names).
We also had one well-known reporter, recently reporting from Athens in a pair of jeans that looked like he was gardening before coming on camera; and a growing army of tieless grunge-like reporters that come in to our homes uninvited everyday.
Another awful BBC failure, as far as journalism is concerned, is the BBC’s staff tendency to interview each other: a studio presenter interviewing a reporter about an event that s/he is there to report on and, further, a subject the reporter has no possible expertise about.
The worst, however, is the new-look PM; don’t get me talking about the dumbing down, the sheer nonsense of Eddie Mair, who some tabloids are prepared to call a ‘big hitter’. Heavens help us.
Let us be critical of the BBC, but let us get it right.
