Interesting item from Katya Alder in Gaza here. The UN in Gaza is very worriedthat thousands of schoolchildren are living in homes and studying in schools in varying states of disrepair. Naturally Israel is to blame for this and Katja was able to provide those lovable inhabitants of Hamastan with plenty of opportunities to damn Israel. With this Israeli-induced cash crisis causing so much misery, I was a bit surprised that the intrepid Katja did not enquire what the locals thought of the decision from Hamas to impose Islamic dress codefor girls in these deprived schools, presumably that's one imposition that nobody minds? Had the misfortune to listen to Thought for the Day this morning. The Right Reverend James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool. gave a little three minute sermon on the wisdom of those who accept that it is right and proper to accept terrorists in government here in Northern Ireland. I do not deny the BBC the right to provide a bully pulpit for clerics who urge appeasement but in the interest of balance they should also allow those morally opposed to gangsters and killers in power to have their say too. Naturally, this does not happen. Ben Jacobs hits back:
GAZA SCHOOLDAYS
>> TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2009
BLESSED ARE THE APPEASERS
F-Bombgate News
BBC freelance sports broadcaster Ben Jacobs, the alleged prime suspect in a high-level BBC inquiry into the sabotaged early Saturday morning precording for a 5 Live sports news bulletin that contained inserted obscene material from the Beeb’s bloopers file, will take legal action if necessary to clear his name.
(Listen to the sabotaged broadcast.)
Jacobs says in an email to BBC colleagues: ‘I now face being barred from potentially all BBC outlets for something I fervently, vociferously can swear I did not do, nor could ever conceive of doing.
'I will take the matter to a law-court if I have to, because I have worked hard and honestly for the past five years and some idiot has ruined my reputation and career overnight.’"Institutional Terror"
>> MONDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2009
Bennett is Head of Vision, which is another way of saying she oversees the other executives who oversee television and the BBC's internet output, for which she is rewarded with a salary package of £536,000.
She is one of the 47 BBC executives who is paid more than the £197,000 earned a year by the British Prime Minister.
"She was standing surrounded by a bunch of her acolytes as she held forth. They weren't quite bowing in her presence but they were certainly fawning over her. It was ridiculous. And I thought, what does she actually do for the BBC? What is the point of her?"...
There is an institutional terror of talking publicly about the fears that have dominated the conscious hours of everyone who works there...
"Where on earth are these dozens of executives on more that £200,000 supposed to be going?," asks one BBC reporter. "They are literally unemployable outside the BBC."...
Vine and Jeremy Paxman are said by BBC colleagues to be locked into an ultra-competitive contest about their respective salaries...
One veteran BBC presenter, a household name who does not want to be identified, says the central problem with the corporation now is its size. "We have become so big, so dominant, that there's nothing institutional left for us to aim at," he says...
One of the oddest things about talking to BBC people is that they will spend half an hour sounding off about the horrors of the institution, of its bureaucratic culture, of the shameful way its senior executives reward themselves ludicrous amounts of public money.
And then those journalists will say: "I hope you're not writing a Right-wing newspaper attack on the BBC."...
An on-air reporter says it is the second-rate programme-making staff who get shunted up the management ladder.
"It's insane," he says. "We have one of the largest media organisations in the world run by jobbing journalists who couldn't hack it.
"In any private organisation they would eventually be fired, but in the BBC they just keep on climbing up the ladder."...
"The warning here is Gorbachev. Once you start trying to reform an organisation such as the BBC, it collapses, just like the old Soviet Union," says one well-known presenter. "Who, as director-general, is going to say, let's make this place smaller, let's reduce all the salaries, including mine?"
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
Lengthy article by Stephen Robinson in the Evening Standard: Fear and loathing inside the BBC. Some snippets:
"just like the old Soviet Union". Heh.
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