Today's newspapers have a fair bit about the BBC in them, especially The Sunday Times (£).
They tell us, for example, that James Naughtie has been told off by an internal BBC inquiry for allowing a friend to plug a commercial company and give inaccurate information during an interview. Fraser Steel, head of editorial complaints, criticised the Today presenter's...
...failure to dispel the idea that BritainsDNA was not a business and his allowing Moffat to read out its website address, giving “undue prominence [to] a commercial organisation”.
Naughty, naughty Jim!
We then hear about plans emanating from a BBC-established panel of the 'great and the good' to "scrap the licence fee and switch to a subscription service from 2020"... which calls for a 'Wow!' of some sort:
The radical plan has been recommended by some of the country’s most influential economists, consultants and academics and comes as the corporation faces swingeing cuts ahead of its charter renewal at the end of 2016.
If introduced, it would be the greatest change to the BBC since its creation in 1922.
Will they really recommend that? Will it ever happen even if they do?
The BBC's world does seem to be spinning a bit at the moment. At long last.
For comment, of course, Rod Liddle is usually great value for money. This week he's having a go at Danny Cohen, the BBC's Director of Television:
Danny last week took to Twitter to take questions from some of these grateful licence-fee payers — and yet very few people took this generous attempt at genuflecting before hoi polloi terribly seriously. Among the tweets posted to Danny were: “Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck?” This sort of flippancy must have discombobulated Danny.
Cohen is, in a sense, what’s wrong with the BBC. A public school, liberal, white middle-class male with an unending sense of entitlement to your money and a deluded impression of his own abilities — not quite a unique creature within the corporation.
Usually great value for money, indeed, and well worth subscribing too. (No, Jim, I'm not a friend of his!)
