Friday 20 September 2013

Double-take


Here's a comment about the BBC, and BBC bias, which may have many of you shaking your heads - perhaps because you're nodding along in agreement but also perhaps because you can't quite believe you're agreeing with the man who said it:
“The pay of senior executives is a scandal. They are all of a type too, Oxbridge, glorified civil servants. They go in after university and they stay there for life. It’s incestuous, it’s cushy, it’s well-paid and it’s unchallenging. And they replicate themselves, the Clives and Samanthas. The argument used to be advanced that they had to pay these huge salaries so they wouldn’t go to ITV or abroad. Well, if so, let them. I think the quality of BBC programming is at an all-time low, or at least an all-time low in my experience. And the recent farce involving Mark Thompson and the BBC Trust exemplifies the incompetence. The Trust should be sacked tomorrow but don’t turn it all over to Ofcom, which is degrees worse.”
“And it’s undeniable there is bias, and it’s that smug, condescending kind. Now I don’t mind if someone is overtly biased, I can deal with that, the viewer can discern it, but what I can’t stand is this pretence of impartiality. Bias, of whatever kind, starts with the decision to choose a subject and how to handle it. I am all for varied opinion, controversy, but I can’t stand the pretence that it is even-handed and must be so because it is sanctified by the BBC.”

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