Last week I posted about the submission that Andrew Montford of Bishop Hill and I sent to the BBC’s Review of the Impartiality and Accuracy of Science Coverage. In passing, I mentioned that initially we had written to Professor Richard Tait, Chairman of the BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee (ESC), who was fronting the project, but had failed to get any kind of response from him. I also said that I would post more about this later.
In fact I mentioned what happened in another post on 3rd August 2010, but as putting our submission in the public domain last week created so much interest – Harmless Sky had by far its heaviest traffic to date, although some of that was due to the Ofcom story – it seems worthwhile making the whole correspondence available now, if for no other reason than that it shows what a very strange organisation the BBC is.
This is the original letter that Andrew and I sent to Professor Tait:
Dear Professor Tait
BBC Trust Review of Accuracy and Impartiality of Science Coverage
We understand that during 2010 the BBC Trust intends to carry out a review of the Corporation’s science coverage. This is welcome and encouraging news.
We both run blogs, at Bishop Hill and Harmless Sky respectively, and we have both been extremely critical the BBC’s output relating to climate change. As I am sure you are aware, such comment often becomes the subject of mainstream media stories now, a trend that is likely to accelerate as the public’s scepticism about anthropogenic global warming grows and the media adjust its editorial policies accordingly.
We realise that pubic criticisms of the BBC’s impartiality is very harmful to the Corporation’s reputation, but experience has taught us that, where this subject is concerned at least, going through the official complaints procedures is slow, time-consuming, frustrating, and usually ineffective. The BBC has also failed to respond positively to enquiries that we have made.
It would seem reasonable to assume that the BBC Trust has instituted this review as a result of concern within the organisation as well as criticisms that have appeared in the media and elsewhere. Of the three topics specifically mentioned in the BBC Trust’s press release announcing the review – GM crops, the MMR vaccine and climate change – there can be no doubt that the latter has had by far the greatest impact on public policy and the everyday lives of BBC viewers, listeners, and website visitors. The BBC is a major opinion former in the UK.
We feel that, if the BBC Trust’s review is to be credible and lead to a genuine reappraisal of BBC editorial policy on this crucial subject, then it is essential that the voices of informed critics should be heard. Indeed it is difficult to see how even the terms of reference for the review can be established without some input from sceptical bloggers.
The unexpected and dramatic events of the last few months concerning the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, the failure of the Copenhagen summit, and revelations about the conduct of the IPCC have changed attitudes in the media dramatically, and this transformation has been largely led by the blogosphere. Evidence from opinion polls shows a steady increase in scepticism among the public over the last three years which is now accelerating. This does not suggest that editors will revise their newly adopted policies of publishing sceptical material about climate change any time soon.
As the BBC’s report on impartiality in the 21st century, published in 2007, made clear, impartiality is the cornerstone of the BBC brand. Our concern is that the BBC’s reputation for impartiality should be preserved. We have substantial archives relating to the way that the BBC has reported climate change in recent years and we will be happy to assist the review process in any way that we can.
Yours sincerely
I think that most people would agree that this was constructive, moderate in tone, and fairly conciliatory considering the problems that we have both encountered when dealing with the BBC in the past.
Not having an email address for Professor Tait, I sent the letter to Bruce Vander, the secretary of the ESC with the following covering note:
Date sent: Wed, 07 Apr 2010 11:13:43 +0100
Dear Mr Vander
I attach a letter addressed to Professor Richard Tait and I would be most grateful if you will ensure that he receives this and confirm that you have done so.
Yours sincerely
Tony Newbery
http://www.harmlesssky.org
Which really could not be very much clearer or more straightforward.
I expected swift confirmation that the letter had been passed to the great man and that, in due course, a more or less non-committal, but diplomatic, reply would be forthcoming. Perhaps something along the lines of, ‘Thank you for offering to make a submission to the our review. This should be sent my colleague ….. Do not hesitate to contact me again if … etc, etc’. But that’s not what happened at all.
Just an hour-and-a -quarter after I had hit send, this arrived:
Dear Mr Newbery, Mr Montford,
Thank you for your letter to the BBC Trust, the contents of which I note. [sic]
I will, of course, share you [sic] letter with Richard Tait and with Professor Steve Jones who is authoring the review, but let me take this opportunity to respond to a number of the points you raise.
Your letter states that: ‘It would seem reasonable to assume that the BBC Trust has instituted the review as a result of concern within the organisation as well as criticisms that have appeared in the media and elsewhere’. This is not the case, as the press release and published terms of reference make clear. This is the latest in a series of reviews that assess impartiality in specific areas of BBC output. Previous topics covered were BBC coverage of business (2007) and the devolved nations (2008).
It is a key priority for the Trust that the BBC covers potentially controversial subjects with due impartiality, as required by the Royal Charter and Agreement. The review is a ‘health check’ of current coverage, looking to identify both good and bad practice. It makes no presumption of significant failings – or, for that matter, successes – at the outset.
The published terms of reference make clear what is in the review’s scope and what is out, and the means by which Professor Jones will go about assessing the BBC’s coverage, including detailed content analysis, engagement with key stakeholders and audience research if deemed appropriate.
I hope this letter goes some way to clarifying some of the points you raise.
Yours sincerely,
Jacquie Hughes
Editorial projects [sic] Leader
I have not the slightest idea what an Editorial projects [sic] Leader at the BBC might be, and nor do I very much care. If a letter is addressed to a particular person, however exalted, I do expect to receive a reply from them, even if it only says that the matter is being delegated to someone else. That is a very basic matter of courtesy as well as being sensible public relations.
I’m not going to discuss the content of Ms Hughes’ letter, although there is at least one claim in it that may raise a few eyebrows, but let’s just focus on the careful choice of words in the second paragraph: ‘I will, of course, share you letter with Richard Tait and with Professor Steve Jones who is authoring the review’. There is a world of difference between ‘sharing’ a letter that was not addressed to you with the intended recipient and actually giving it to them, and anyway I hadn’t sent the letter to Ms Hughes but to the secretary of the committee that Professor Tait chairs, with a specific request to deliver it to him. Quite honestly, I wasn’t in the least bit interested in what the Editorial Projects Leader had to say, and in any case her letter didn’t address the main point of our letter, which was to find out whether the BBC’s review would consider a submission from a couple of bloggers who had taken a particular interest in the impartiality of their coverage of climate science. Make no mistake, we were in no doubt that, for some people at the BBC such a submission would be about as welcome as a pile of dog poo on the living room carpet, but that’s not the point. In such circumstances grown-up organisations, however large and exalted, usually go through the motions of being polite and pragmatic when dealing with critics.
I had no intention of getting involved in correspondence with a member of the BBC Trust’s staff who had apparently intercepted the letter, or had it diverted to them by the very person who had been asked to pass it to his boss. So I wrote to Bruce Vander again.
Date sent: Thu, 08 Apr 201010:14:21 +0100
Dear Mr Vander
I look forward to receiving your confirmation that Professor Tait has received the letter that I attached to an email that I sent to you yesterday.
Yours sincerely,
Tony Newbery
http://www.harmlesssky.org
And again:
Date sent: Tue, 13 Apr 2010 11 :26 :02 +0100
Dear Mr Vander
On 7th April 2010 I emailed you asking that a letter to Professor Tait, which I attached, should be forwarded to him and also for confirmation that this had been done.
I look forward to receiving your response.
Yours sincerely,
Tony Newbery
http://www.harmlesssky.org
And yet again:
Date sent: Tue, 04 May 2010 08:31 :07 +0100
Dear Mr Vander
I emailed you on 7th April 2010 in your capacity as secretary to the ESC enclosing a letter addressed to Professor Tait, the chairman of the committee. You have not responded to my request for confirmation that Professor Tait has received this letter in spite of my sending you two reminders.
Unless you provide me with either the confirmation that I requested — or a reason why you have chosen not to pass the letter to Professor Tait — by the end of this week, I will seek an explanation from the BBC Trust for your failure to act appropriately. Ignoring my correspondence will not, I am afraid, make this matter go away.
Yours sincerely
Tony Newbery
http://www.harmlesssky.org
The irony of this situation will not be lost on those who have noticed that Mr Vander is the BBC Trust’s Complaints Manager as well as secretary to the ESC.
Be that as it may, this fourth message did provoked a response, nearly a month after I had asked for confirmation that Professor Tait had received our letter.
Date sent: Tue, 4 May 2010 09:08:02 +0100
Dear Mr Newberry [sic]
I am confused by your requests that you require confirmation that Richard Tait has seen your letter of 7 April 2010. As my colleague, Jacquie Hughes, Editorial Project Manager, wrote to you on the same day (7 April) confirming that she would share your letter with both Richard Tait and Professor Steve Jones, author of the Science Review, which I believe she has done.
You may also remember that she clarified that the review was the latest in a series of reviews that asses impartiality and is a ‘health check’ of current coverage which makes no presumption of significant failings and will identify good and bad practice. The review is not as you suggested “as a result of concern within the organisation”.
Yours sincerely,
Bruce Vander
Complaints Manager and Secretary to the ESC
Up to this point, I had clung on to the hope that the BBC weren’t playing silly word games by referring to the letter being shared. After all, even critics of the BBC would expect our national broadcaster to behave in a grown-up way over such a trivial matter of office procedure. The first paragraph of Mr Vander’s letter dispelled this hope when instead of answering my question he echoed the term ‘share’. And why? Oh why? would Mr Vander say that he believes that the letter has been shared with Professor Tait? Wouldn’t it be so much easier just to say that the letter has been passed to the person it was addressed to if that was the case.
By now Mr Vander was not only wasting his employer’s time, but mine too, so I was fairly blunt when I replied.
Date sent: Thu, 06 May 201010:17:17 +0100
Dear Mr Vander
Thank you for your email and I regret that you find my request confusing.
I would be grateful if you would now answer the question which I asked: have you given the letter to Professor Tait, and if not why not? Your email does not answer this question, although it implies that you have not done so.
Passing the letter to another BBC Trust employee who proposes to ‘share’ the letter with the intended recipient is not an adequate response, and nor is saying that you ‘believe’ that this has been done.
I wish to know whether Professor Tait has received the letter, which was addressed to him.
Yours sincerely,
Tony Newbery
http://www.harmlesssky.org
Unfortunately Mr Vander had still not got the message that I really did want a sensible answer, or perhaps I just wasn’t tugging my forelock humbly enough. After another ten days has slipped by, I had another try.
Date sent: Mon, 17 May 2010 08:58:59 +0100
Dear Mr Vander
I look forward to receiving a reply to my email of 6th May which I have copied below for your convenience.
Your sincerely
Tony Newbery
http://www.harmlesssky.org
Which triggered this auto-reply:
Date sent: Mon, 17 May 2010 08:59:57 +0100
Out of Office AutoReply: Re BBC Review of Science Reporting
Thank you for your email. I am out of the office until 1 June, if your matter requires urgent attention please email XXXXXXX XXXXX at: xxxxxx.xxxxx@bbc.co.uk or XXXX XXXXXXX at xxxx.xxxxxx@bbc.co.uk
As it was now the holiday season, and I was going to be away myself, there was no choice but to be patient. Eventually this turned up in my inbox:
Date sent: Thu, 3 Jun 2010 13:46:48 +0100
Dear Mr Newbery
Thank you for your email dated 17 May.
Please accept my apologies for the delay to my reply but I have been away from the office on leave and only returned this week.
I am writing to confirm that your letter has been shared with Richard Tait.
Yours sincerely,
Bruce Vander
Complaints Manager and Secretary to the ESC
By this time I was about ready to start screaming.
Up until this point I had refrained from blogging about this, although the BBC Trust’s obtuseness – or worse – had made it very tempting. As I’ve said before on this blog, I don’t particularly enjoy Auntie bashing; all I want is a BBC that one can rely on to behave correctly, and be proud of as one of the great British institutions. However this episode had now become so bizarre that there was good reason to make it public, so I wrote what I think was a fairly restrained post about it and, observing the usual courtesy of offering the right of reply to someone who is being criticised, let Mr Vander know that I had done so.
Date sent: Tue, 03 Aug 2010 16:45:14 +0100
Dear Mr Vander
I have now posted a copy of the joint letter sent by Andrew Montford and myself to Professor Tait on 7th April at my blog, together with some comments on the problems we have had obtaining confirmation that this has been delivered to him:
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blogl?p=319#more-319
It seems only fair to let you know about this, and I will of course be willing to post any response that the BBC Trust may choose to make.
Yours sincerely
Tony Newbery
http://www.harmlesssky.org
The reply was:
Date sent: Tue, 3 Aug 2010 17:08:37 +0100
Dear Mr Newbery
Thank you for email dated 3 August 2010.
Yours sincerely,
Bruce Vander
Complaints Manager and Secretary to the ESC
And at that stage I decided that it really wasn’t worth spending any more time trying to find out whether Professor Tait had seen our letter: or whether it had been diverted to Ms Hughes so that he would not have to reply to it: and if so why? Or whether Professor Tait had in fact seen the letter and connived at the prevarication that followed. Or why any of this should happen when a courteous acknowledgement and emollient invitation to make a submission to the review would have been the sensible response. Such behaviour breeds mistrust.
Eventually, in September, Andrew Montford discovered that the public – but evidently not critical bloggers who might be alarmingly well informed about the issues – had been invited to make representations to the BBC Trust’s review. He wrote to Professor Steve Jones to ask if he would accept a submission from us. The correspondence was brief, but courteous, businesslike, and prompt. Professor Jones gave no indication that he had heard anything of our letter to Professor Tait, although he was not specifically asked about this.
This story has a moral. Last week we went public with our submission to the review, and it immediately began to cause embarrassment to the BBC. If I am interpreting whispers reaching me now correctly, that may be just the start.
Had we received an appropriate response to our original approach to the BBC Trust we might have been content to wait until their review was published before saying anything.
TonyN
Keep up the good fight.
We are (hopefully) living in a more enlightened time (early 21st century England versus early 20th century Bohemia?), so maybe you and Andrew Montford will have more success than Kafka’s fateful “K”.
Max
Tony,
Send a DPA (Data Protection Act) request for all emails that mention you by name. Ask specifically for all people you think might have received the submission. You are entitled to see all emails (well nearly all) that mention you by name.
Yes, it is annoying when known science is blatantly misrepresented.
These two lectures should help anyone, including the BBC, improve their understanding, and help them get their programming right.
Prof John Seinfeld: Global Climate Change
http://www.lecturefox.com/results/?q=climate&x=0&y=0
Uncertainties in Climate Forecasting. Prof Steven Schneider. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/461/
It is over 20 years ago now since I came across this peculiar use of the word “share” or “sharing” – as in conveying information which is not entirely accepted.
It was a favourite phrase with “progressive” or “right-on” Church of England vicars when you told them something they did not want to know and would not accept.
They would say
“Thank you for sharing that with me”
There is nothing new under the sun
TerryS,
‘….You are entitled to see all emails (well nearly all) that mention you by name’.
How many variations in the spelling might there be?
[TonyN; Three in common usage that I know of, the correct one in my case being the least used by correspondents.]
Max: “We are (hopefully) living in a more enlightened time (early 21st century England versus early 20th century Bohemia?), so maybe you and Andrew Montford will have more success than Kafka’s fateful “K”.”
But here’s the scary thing, Max – Ofcom’s and the BBC Trust’s people are behaving exactly as Kafka’s bureaucrats might be expected to behave, if they were transplanted straight from the pages of The Castle into real life. The evasions, the endless petty delays and little misdirections, the consistent and maddening refusal to give a straight answer to a straight question – they reveal the shabby truth behind the UK public bodies’ facade of openness and accountability that many of us (myself included, until fairly recently) naively assumed was real. It was never real.
TonyN, hasn’t your head exploded yet?
Mine is making boom-boom noises already, just from reading your summary of events.
This comment appeared on Bishop Hill’s thread mentioning my post here:
In fact Tait would be quite familiar with my name from the Watts / Obama business, but apart from that the point is very well made.
Jim, #7:
I’m prepared to admit that there are times when I just can’t believe my eyes.
TonyN what can I say? any better than these four words you use “Such behaviour breeds mistrust”
It would have been so blindingly obvious and easy to have satisfied your request, but ten times the required effort was put into trying to avoid being direct and precise.
Just like you and Andrew I have not taken any pleasure in bashing the BBC, however this behaviour forces reasonable people to reconsider their views.
Over the past few years I have had a number of email conversations with Roger Harrabin, and I had warned him of the consequences to the BBC if they didn’t get back to representing the mainstream and their core job as a public service broadcaster. What I spelt out is beginning to happen and a lot of the BBC staff must be feeling very uncomfortable.
This is manifest currently with the way they are reporting two important news items. They report the UK Government cuts as if they are the target and I almost get the impression they are trying to inflame public feelings rather than report why we are where we are, and why the cuts, that are not really cuts but a slowdown in the accumulation of government debt, are having to be made. They are treating the public with contempt and we will not step up to protect them anymore because they have not kept us informed.
The other area being misreported, mostly by omission, but also by a lack of investigative journalism is what is happening to the euro and in Ireland. How is this related to climate change science and global warming I hear you ask? Well everything actually, because it has been the creation of money, via the world’s central banks, that has been at route of our prosperity in the last 15 years, and contributed to the growth in government and the growth in the environmental movement. We have seen the growth in voter apathy bought on by this prosperity, leading to an erosion of our democratic rights. Ireland has just lost its sovereignty and is now controlled by unelected bureaucrats. Some say that this has been deliberately engineered because everyone knows that monetary union is impossible without political union. But the peoples of Europe have been reluctant to endorse political union, so the opportunity presented by the current banking crisis has allowed it to happen by stealth.
Now roll forward and what chance has our scepticism have when the politicians we rely on to represent our views are not the final arbiter’s of our law or of our finances. OK it hasn’t happened in the UK yet, but we know that at the very time when each and every European country is cutting back on their domestic finances and our own government is unveiling its own cuts to public expenditure, we have the EU looking to increase its own budget!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Where was our public service broadcaster calling this piece of grotesque politicking to account? We have long since given up on relying on our MP’s to act in our interests. The US has demonstrated that a popular movement, again at first ignored and then belittled by the BBC who completely misread the mood in the US, can result in a seismic shift in power.
We are living at the beginning of a huge shift in Politics and our financial system. The role of government in creating wealth is at an end and for the west to survive, we will have to move back to a modern version of government as it was prior to the first world war, lean and mean. This means if we are to retain a public service broadcaster they will have to get back to being just that, a broadcaster, and not some sort of pseudo NGO.
While I was working for a chemical company I was sent on media training. I was there in case we accidentally blew up a chunk of the city and needed to avoid saying things like ‘OMG the blood, the blood’, but the others were true public relations types. They used a lot of vague words so that they could be reinterpreted at a later date if necessary.
‘Share’ could mean that the letter was given to Professor Tait or it could mean he was made aware of its existence. He could have been given a summary of the contents or it could be part of a huge stack of submissions that will sit on his desk until he files them in a box marked ‘compost’. If he’s ever asked to account for the letter he can interpret what ‘share’ means in a way that suits him and/or the circumstances.
PeterM
Aw. C’mon, Peter (#3). (The late) Stephen Schneider?
Is this the same guy who warned us of alarming global cooling in the 1970s and who wrote:
Right balance “between being effective and being honest”?
What balance “between being effective and being honest” do you think he chose in the 2007 MIT lecture you cited “Uncertainties in Climate Forecasts: Causes, Magnitudes and Policy Implications”?
In discussing the “uncertainties”, did he “make little mention of any doubts”?
I certainly hope that BBC does NOT use Schneider’s lecture “to help them get their programming right”, as you suggest.
Besides, Peter, this is all off topic.
This thread has to do with the Kafkaesque bureaucratic maze in the BBC Trust’s Editorial Standards Committee, through which TonyN and Andrew Montford are trying to cut, in order to ensure that BBC reports impartially and objectively on climate science, rather than just parroting the so-called “mainstream” (IPCC) view.
Max
Alex (#6)
I really hope, not only for Andrew and Tony’s sake, but for all of us, that the Kafkaesque behavior shown by the BBC Trust (and Ofcom) bureaucrats is atypical and not endemic to your unelected public bureaucracy across the board.
I must admit, however, that (in light of what I read on the “what the hell…” thread here) it appears to be more widespread.
My question: do these so-called “public servants” realize that they are in the employ of the taxpaying public, not the other way around? (It appears to me that they are blissfully and arrogantly oblivious of this fact, and it’s time that they receive a “wake-up” call.)
Max
Yes Tony – be very careful of the word ‘shared’. It is used with intent to deceive. Does Vander mean knowledge of the existence of your letter has been shared with Tait? – in which case Tait may not know of the actual content – and its meaning – of your letter. Tait and Vander may share knowledge of the existence of your letter without Tait having ever actually seen it, let alone read it. I would press on and seek the specific answer you need.
It puzzles me why you hold on to such a romanticised view of the BBC. They are one of the most dangerous and powerful organisations in Britain and the country would be far better off (and better informed) without them… or at the very least with a severely reduced public service broadcaster – of around the size they were in the 70’s.
Max,
Just what don’t you like about my suggestion of using these lectures from prestigious universities to help the BBC get their programming right. And, I’m sure I can find some more if you need more evidence that the BBC are not as out of step with expert scientific opinion as you accuse them of being.
And that is the crux of the matter , isn’t it. Have the BBC got it right, at least as far as is possible or haven’t they?
What about this sort of coverage? Is this too sided for you? Maybe it should be more ‘balanced’ or ‘impartial’ along the lines you suggest?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7540427.stm
PeterM
You ask:
For one, Peter (as I explained), the fact that one of the “prestigious” lecturers (Stephen Schneider) has openly confessed that he is not overly concerned with “being honest”, but more so with “being effective”.
This is a poor basis for BBC to use for being “impartial” (and “honest”) in its reporting, as I’m sure you will agree.
Max
“Impartiality” means showing BOTH sides of an open scientific argument, not just the one side of someone, who has conceded that being “honest” is less important than being “effective” in selling his personal viewpoint.
Max,
What Steven Schneider actually said was “Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”
What Steven Schneider was cautioning against was this sort of Q&A by Phil Jones and Roger Harrabin at the BBC.
RH: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?
Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
Of course deniers just claim this as a comment by Phil Jones to indicate that he thinks warming stopped in 1995. Scientists do need to anticipate just how their comments may be misrepresented.
But just to return to my main point, no matter whatever you feel about the BBC, your quarrel isn’t with them, its with mainstream science.
I think I might have replied to the project(s) person along the lines “The letter I attached was addressed to Richard Tait. It was never yours to ‘share’. Had it been on paper, in an envelope, your interception of it would be illegal.”
Pocket OED 1925, definition of share:- Apportion among others, give away part thereof. So your “shared” letter may well not have reach the good professor in whole! Now which bits would you edit out if you were Mr Vander?
Geoff C
Agreed. I would send a paper copy directly to Professor Tait, marked ‘private’.
Peter S
“a romanticised view of the BBC”
A lot of it is still good, though, and it has some powerful enemies like Rupert Murdoch, which (pace Dennis Potter) is enough to keep me on side. I listen to Radio 4 all the time and even the TV output is watchable sometimes (the lack of ads has to be worth something).
The bureaucracy, especially post-Birt, is the fly in the ointment.
good grief – you got blown away by a minion and you think you should be treated any different to the general public just because you author a blog?
Talk about an inflated sense of your own importance…
Very depressing, and surprising after the Watts/Obama story. I’ve been trying to look at it from their point of view – from the other side of the Castle wall, as it were.
They get dozens of letter from the public, but this one was longer, and from two bloggers. They did what Phil Jones did with Climate Audit; spent half an hour browsing on the net, and decided that Harmless Sky and Bishop Hill were a bunch of grumpy old men arguing about obscure subjects in great detail, and could be ignored.
Now compare HS and BH with the three green websites which AlexCull tracked down in his comment #333 on the “What are we doing to our children?” thread. Capefarewell, the Mighty Creatives, and Speakgreen have serious websites, properly designed, outlining their programmes and activities. They are working with, or are financed by, the Arts Council, Musagetes, Southbank Centre, Bigheart Media, Creative Partnerships, Find Your Talent, Ignition, the Museum Library and Archives Project, and the 2009-12 Journals Project. Their websites aren’t cluttered with messy discussions with readers. They’re written in serious managerspeak. These are people who know what they’re doing. While BH and HS pose questions, Speakgreen and co already have the answers, and are only too willing to share them, given an Arts Council Grant or two.
I bet their letters to the BBC get answered.
[TonyN: At least one of us isn’t old! And both of us have had extensive dealings with Auntie in the past, so they know just who we are and where we are coming from. The BBC’s problem seems to be that they have not learned from Climategate that ignoring bloggers is risky.]
Peter S, #14:
My view of the BBC is compatible with that set out in their report on impartiality in the 21st Century, which was published in 2006:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_06_07impartialitybbc.pdf
There seems to be no harm in expecting the BBC to live up to its own aspirations, and those set out for it in the Communications Act 2003, the Charter, and the Agreement with the SoS for Culture Media and Sport 2006.
Louise Perhaps you are having a bad day so we will forgive you your very uncharitable comment.
You will forgive me if I am one of those “General Public” that believe that no matter who you are you are entitled to feel that you get treated with politeness and respect by the BBC. I wrote to the Australian ABC recently and got a polite and timely reply from them, something I have never received from the BBC. So I hope that you will forgive me if I am happy that there are people around such as Tony and Andrew who are prepared to give freely of their own time to ensure the BBC is held to account for its tardy behaviour.
I hope you will further forgive me if I feel slightly aggrieved that a foreign broadcaster has behaved more or less as I expected despite my having contributed not a single penny to their coffers, and yet having contributed to the BBC for 30 years I get nothing. Louise you may need to be reminded that the BBC works for us; we pay their wages and we agree their funding. They should reflect this important fact.
I could go on, but I’ll leave you with this one thought. The BBC has such little respect in the country now, that if we were able to opt out of the licence fee, it would cease to exist. This is why it is currently being protected by Politicians who know that if we the people had our way there would be sweeping changes. The more the BBC pushes the boat out, the fewer of them will survive.
Just as an aside further to my post above the EU MEP’s have just been awarded a pay rise. Democracy in action all the way, and just as well they live on Mars.