BBC blasted by Culture Select Committee - new regulator?

THIS LONG POST CONTAINS:

• Analysis of the Culture Select Committee's largely scathing report on the BBC, which had many suggestions for reform of the BBC
• Details and analysis of media coverage of this, looking at how anti-BBC flak is formulated
• Specifically the issue of the BBC Trust: will it be scrapped in favour of a new regulator?
• Brief overview of some of the many other detailed posts on the Beeb

Wow - not a good day for Auntie Beeb; here's a flavour of what they face today, leading off from events yesterday; the Media Guardian's top 10 stories on the morning of 26th February, 2015:

The spectre of Sir Jimmy Saville raised once more, on of the low points in the BBC's entire history; a link made to tax avoidance, the political hot potato of this month given the furore over the HSBC tax avoidance revelations (and then the Telegraph ad revenue story); a clear growing consensus that the license fee must go (just not yet); and strong-worded condemnation of the BBC Trust, the current main regulator of the BBC. The Daily Mail will be loving this!

ANTI-BBC FLAK: THE MAIL'S GLEEFUL REPORT

Does DMI fiasco point to new BBC regulation?

With a hostile Tory govenment in place and the febrile atmosphere created by Leveson and the Saville scandal (unfair as it might be that the same media gleefully attacking the Beeb were guilty of lauding Saville themselves), the latest BBC crisis may just see the current shared BBC/OfCom regulatory system overhauled. Steve Hewlett argues that the DMI (Digital Media Initiative), which was axed as a failure after a £98.4m spend, and the misleading of Parliament on this, is squarely the fault of the BBC Trust.
(From another article:)

MPs on the Commons public accounts committee (PAC) said the BBC and its former director general, Mark Thompson, gave evidence to parliament in 2011 that "just wasn't true".

Here's an excerpt from Hewlett's piece:

The loss by the BBC of close to £100m of licence payers' cash on account of its ill-fated "Digital Media Initiative" (DMI) has so far been somewhat under-reported – as BBC scandals go, that is. But the loss of what roughly amounts to Radio 4's annual budget or 100 hours of top-end TV drama or 700,000 licence fees has implications that could extend well beyond the current embarrassment of the Trust and the Executive occasioned by the abandonment of the flagship project.
Of course the BBC is not the only big organisation to have lost a fortune – not to mention a decent topping of public credibility -because of a big failed IT project. But when you look back at the course of events surrounding DMI, lots of very serious – and, in the runup to a new Royal Charter, politically significant – questions arise.
The BBC has been in a long-running battle with the National Audit Office (NAO) fearing, rightly, a potential threat to the BBC's independence bordering on direct political interference via the back door. It's all very well for the NAO to scrutinise the BBC's books to ensure efficiency and good stewardship. But when financial and editorial matters become entwined – which in the BBC's case they do most of the time – the NAO's view of good public value, and more troubling still those of the body to which the NAO reports, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) of the House of Commons, brings that threat of political interference to life.
The problem with the collapse of DMI is that it looks for all the world like plain bad management compounded by a failure of oversight by the BBC Trust, and as such opens a flank to attack by some on the PAC who want nothing more than to muscle in on the BBC's decision-making processes.

Read the full article here.

BBC: editor-in-chief function examined

I'll maybe add notes to this later, but for now here's a short but very useful analysis of the role thats been much cited in news stories over the Newsnight/Lord MacAlpine scandal: whilst usually referred to the Director General, the BBC's top man on the operating side (and it is a very male-skewed team) is also editor-in-chief. The article below sets out clear arguments why this is important; is typical of large media organisations; looks at the devolved responsibility involved - spot on for exam prep + simply for general understanding!

BBC director general should not be stripped of editor-in-chief role

George Entwistle was not the first BBC chief to fall on his sword for mistakes he had nothing to do with. But the royal charter should not be rewritten in haste during a crisis

• 
• • Dan Sabbagh
  • The Guardian, Sunday 11 November 2012 18.39 GMT

A TV crew set up outside BBC headquarters in London following the resignation of George Entwistle as director general. Photograph: Alastair Grant/AP

It is one of the curiosities of the BBC that its director general is also its editor-in-chief. The secondary job title, only ever remembered in moments of crisis, does foster the unhelpful image of the DG spending half their time wandering around the newsroom wearing a green eyeshade, as well as being chief executive of one of the world's biggest broadcasters.
On that basis, it would be an impossible task. The BBC last week said it produced 425,320 hours of TV and radio output last year – or 1,165 hours a day. And then there's the BBC's considerable online output. No director general, however adept or floundering, can manage to watch more than a tiny fraction; Greg Dyke never heard Andrew Gilligan's report at a few minutes past 6am on the Today programme that sparked the "sexed-up" dossier row with Tony Blair's government in 2003. And apparently George Entwistle paid little attention to last Friday's Newsnight.
The BBC Trust chairman, Lord Patten, told Andrew Marr on Sunday morning there might be a case for looking at the editor-in-chief role and the "relationship between director general [and] editorial and creative". But as the dual job title is written into the BBC's royal charter – not due for renewal until 2017 – it is hard to see how it can be changed. Nor should it be.
The corporation's constitution is not to be rewritten by politicians in haste in the aftermath of a crisis; that would amount to interference. Those who want to argue that the BBC is ungovernable may say shedding the job title is only the beginning of a debate on cutting the size of the national broadcaster.
Those familiar with Patten's thinking are saying he does not want to strip out the secondary job title – his BBC Trust has already looked at that – but perhaps move the BBC closer to the model used at ITV, where there is a chief executive, former Royal Mail Group boss Adam Crozier, and a senior editorial figure, director of television, Peter Fincham.
Anyway, editorial responsibility at the BBC is devolved, not least to Helen Boaden, the BBC News director, and then to the editors of individual news programmes, the Six and Ten O'Clock News, Newsnight and Panorama.
It is those editors who have to take day-to-day responsibility for errors as well as running orders – although, as Dyke and Entwistle have found, when a piece of BBC journalism is as flawed as the Newsnight report, it then does become a problem for the person at the top. The devolution is realistic and necessary; no media organisation would function without it.
Rupert Murdoch likes to read and influence the newspapers at the company he part owns and runs. Some describe him, informally, as the editor-in-chief of newspapers such as the Sun. No doubt he too should have known what was going on at the News of the World. Yet even Murdoch would not describe himself as chief executive and editor-in-chief on his business cards, even though his day-to-day input is far greater than a BBC chief's.
But although the editor-in-chief title for the BBC's leader is flawed, it should not be tossed aside because of editorial failings across BBC News. Newsnight's mistakes were not the product of a job title; in the case of the McAlpine misidentification at least, they were the product of basic errors of journalism. Training and common sense are needed to deal with that.

More links?
Odds on who's going to succeed Entwistle - my money is on Ed Richards (if the Tory gov can stomach an ex-Labour man that is)