£1.6m for 18 new BBC bosses as it 'cuts costs' - Daily Mail

£1.6m for 18 new BBC bosses as it 'cuts costs': "
One of the executives is being paid between £310,000 and £340,000 a year, and two between £190,000 and £220,000."

Yes, you heard right: BBC sends thousands of staff on course to teach them how to LISTEN - Daily Mail

Yes, you heard right: BBC sends thousands of staff on course to teach them how to LISTEN: "
The BBC has been criticised for using licence fee payers’ money to send staff on a course to teach them how to listen."

Unreliable Sources by John Simpson | Book review - Guardian

Unreliable Sources by John Simpson | Book review: "

Peter Beaumont finds partial truths in a BBC veteran's tale of his trade

Anyone who has been a journalist knows that whatever admiration one's efforts attract tends to be balanced by hatred and condemnation from another interested group. Ours is a Manichaean universe. This has always been the case, but what does seem to have changed recently is how visible those discontented with what is sneeringly known as the mainstream media (or 'MSM') have become.

For those on the further edges of both left and right, the MSM is usually defined as the problem. For tea partiers, we are too liberal and in hock to government, while for those who subscribe to Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's Manufacturing Consent, we are too right wing and equally subservient to power.

So when Nick Davies's attack on the state of British journalism, Flat Earth News, was published two years ago, it plugged into a widespread sense of discontent with the MSM, which had been exacerbated by the misreporting of the run-up to the war in Iraq. While I didn't agree with everything he wrote, Davies did diagnose many of the modern media's failings and his coining of the neologism 'churnalism' seemed especially accurate.

He argued that there had once been a better era for reporting, before hacks became chained to the wheel of 24-hour news. This is an idea that John Simpson, the BBC's veteran world affairs editor, examines in Unreliable Sources. His survey of 20th-century reporting seems to confirm most of what critics of the MSM claim. From the Boer war onwards, he depicts egotistical and often unscrupulous hacks, many of them servile before power or even secretly working for it, such as the Times colonial editor, Flora Shaw, who was a go-between in the planning of the Jameson Raid of 1895-96.

When he offers 'extraordinary' exceptions, two are American – Ed Murrow and Martha Gellhorn – although he seems to forget that the latter, a friend of his, was capable of a famous fabrication, falsely placing herself at the scene of a lynching.

There are a couple of problems with this weighty volume. The first isn't confined to Simpson's book but to the broader issue of media criticism from Chomsky onwards, which has argued that journalists tend to self-regulate what they report to please authority, an assertion that has only ever been at best partially true. For what it fails to distinguish between is the degree to which journalism sets out to influence the society it operates within and the degree to which it is an inherent reflection of cultural norms and values.

Simpson, for instance, describes the media representations of the sieges of Mafeking, Ladysmith and Kimberley in the Boer war. But his assertion that 'Mafeking ensured that the mass of newspaper readers regarded the war as part of the nation's imperial adventure, rather than something questionable and potentially disastrous', while reflecting how we might see it today, ignores how contemporary readers would have felt about empire. It is a mistake he makes more than once, compounding the book's peculiarly ahistorical feel. In his conclusion, he says the media at the beginning of the 21st century are recognisably the same as those which existed at the beginning of the 20th. Is this really the case?

The second problem is related. The scale of his book, which tries to span two world wars, the end of empire, Northern Ireland, the Falklands and Kosovo, means it is difficult to marshal a cogent argument save that a lot of rum things go on in the media. Hardly a startling revelation. The drawbacks of this approach are particularly noticeable in later sections, where he is selective in presenting his material. His depiction of the Blair government's attempts to control the media over the Kosovo war, for example, is crudely stripped of explanatory context and the war is turned into a simplistic tale of gung-ho misreporting and government misdeeds.

Isn't he guilty of what he lambasts others for – misrepresentation? For if his subtext is that honest, passionate reporters have to struggle against vested interest to tell what they see, he has written out of his history an awful lot of them. In the case of Kosovo, this means the likes of Tim Judah, Anthony Loyd, the late Kurt Schork and photographers Ron Haviv and Andrew Testa. All have been edited out of history to make a better story. But that's journalists for you.

• History
• War reporting
• BBC

Peter Beaumont

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Jeremy Hunt: Tories would scrap BBC Trust - Guardian

Jeremy Hunt: Tories would scrap BBC Trust: "

Shadow culture secretary reinforces Tory pledge to get rid of BBC Trust if his party wins the general election

The shadow culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has today reinforced the Tory pledge to look immediately at scrapping the BBC Trust if his party wins the general election.

Hunt, in an interview on The Media Show on BBC Radio 4, also gave a clear indication that under a Tory government the BBC should expect a freeze on its £3.4bn licence fee for the next period from April 2013.

In its election manifesto yesterday, the party promised to give the National Audit Office 'full access' to the BBC's accounts in order to make the corporation more accountable for the way it spends the licence fee.

Last year Hunt said that the BBC Trust, which replaced the corporation's board of governors in 2007, had to change and that the Tories were considering 'ripping up the charter' ahead of its expiration in 2016 to achieve its plan.

'We looked at that [ripping up the charter] and decided to stick with the current charter,' he said. '[However] we want to make a start on reforms that can be made now... like the name.'

He added that the BBC would benefit from a new system whereby director general Mark Thompson would have some form of non-executive chairman, or similar figure, to support his decision-making.

'I don't think the structure works at the moment,' he said, arguing that the BBC Trust is conflicted as cheerleader and champion of the corporation. 'What the viewers want, the people that pay the licence fee, is a body wholly independent they can complain to if they are not happy with something [the corporation] has done.'

When asked about freezing the licence fee Hunt gave a clear indication that the BBC could almost certainly rule out a rise from the Tories in the next settlement.

'We are not ruling out any options at all,' said Hunt. '[However] it is unlikely that the BBC would be able to argue for a rise in the current climate.'

Hunt also said that the Tories' long-overdue creative industries review, headed by former BBC director general Greg Dyke, was unlikely to emerge before the 6 May election. However, he added that some of the ideas that had 'arisen' from the review have, and would, emerge during the Conservative election campaign.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

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• BBC
• BBC Trust
• BBC licence fee
• Conservatives
• Television industry

Mark Sweney

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MOVE ALONG THERE, NOTHING TO SEE.... - Biased BBC

MOVE ALONG THERE, NOTHING TO SEE....: "The BBC is very keen to tell us in detail why Lord Oxburgh and his panel of cronies have exonerated in a rushed report the University of East Anglia climate change fabricators. Their reasons for the whitewash - which can be paraphrased as the need to perpetuate the lies - are trumpeted loudly, while the sceptic community gets, as usual, only a nodding mention, 74 words out of 760. Here, for the record and for starters, are some of the concerns of 'sceptics' that the BBC has chosen not to tell us. They are from Steve McIntyre, of Climate Audit, the man who for almost a decade has been painstakingly revealing the tricks and lies of those who have been so rapidly absolved:

The Oxburgh report ” is a flimsy and embarrassing 5-pages.

They did not interview me (nor, to my knowledge, any other CRU critics or targets). The committee was announced on March 22 and their “report” is dated April 12 – three weeks end to end – less time than even the Parliamentary Committee. They took no evidence. Their list of references is 11 CRU papers, five on tree rings, six on CRUTEM. Notably missing from the “sample” are their 1000-year reconstructions: Jones et al 1998, Mann and Jones 2003, Jones and Mann 2004, etc.)

They did not discuss specifically discuss or report on any of the incidents of arbitrary adjustment (“bodging”), cherry picking and deletion of adverse data, mentioned in my submissions to the Science and Technology Committee and the Muir Russell Committee.

Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

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Letters: Spoiling the joke about Down's syndrome - Guardian

Letters: Spoiling the joke about Down's syndrome: "

Comedian Frankie Boyle's favourite catchphrase appears to be 'Ah, but it's all true, isn't it?' He reportedly said as much to a woman in the audience at his Glasgow show who objected to his routine about Down's syndrome (Report, 9 April). Sharon Smith, the mother of a Down's syndrome daughter, had become upset that he thought it hilarious that Down's syndrome people die 'early'. (Still, it's all true, isn't it?)

It depends how you define 'dying early'. When I was growing up, I was told my sister, who has Down's syndrome, would not live much beyond 20. She's now approaching 50. Since the early 80s, the life expectancy of people with Down's syndrome has more than doubled and is now put by some estimates as high as 60. That's because they now receive decent medical and social care. Still, I don't want to spoil the joke. That would just be me being politically correct and we all know where that leads.

Colin Richardson

London

• The experience of Sharon Smith reminded me of a similar occasion some time ago when Julian Clary used people with learning disabilities as a target. When compering Have I got News for You, he referred to '… the village idiot who collects the trolleys at your local Tesco'. I wrote to the BBC to complain and said I had known a number of people who, having survived hospitalisation and other forms of exclusion, were holding down permanent jobs very successfully. The BBC replied that comedy was subjective and the question of which groups should be immune was a matter for personal judgment. I sympathise with Mrs Smith's view that Frankie Boyle's style was 'childish playground stuff'. But it is also a form of denigration which thinly disguises a hatred of difference. Compared with the controversial and irreverent humour of, say, Richard Pryor, it is – to use Elvis Presley's phrase – 'about as funny as a turd in a punch-bowl'.

Dr Alan Phipps

Manchester

• Down's syndrome
• Frankie Boyle
• Learning disability
• BBC
• Elvis Presley

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Radio 5 Live criticised over Rage Against The Machine swearing - Independent

Radio 5 Live criticised over Rage Against The Machine swearing: "

BBC station Radio 5 Live has been criticised by the broadcasting watchdog for letting the US band Rage Against The Machine swear four times on the breakfast show before they were faded out by a producer.

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