NOT THE TIMES NEWSPAPER

THE BBC, A ONCE GREAT INSTITUTION

THAT HAS LOST ITS WAY

Tony Hall, the newly-appointed BBC Director General,
can think what he likes but a gagging order will prevent
him criticising the vaguely Orwellian way in which the
corporation is funded and how it operates. 

In the past year alone, some three thousand people a
week are reported to have come before the courts for
the non-payment of the TV licence fee. The penalty can 
be a fine of £1,000 and possibly imprisonment. Some
will, of course, refuse to pay because they feel that the
BBC is merely the propaganda arm of the Labour Party
and some will simply not have the money. Then there
will be those who look at the TV schedules - eighteen
repeats today alone - and come to the conclusion that
the £3.56bn the BBC receives annually from the licence
fee represents increasingly poor value for money.

We need only look at the still unfolding Savile scandal
to realise that the corporation's travails are a powerful
metaphor for incompetence, profligacy, corruption and
worse. It is a great institution that has lost its way. The
BBC appears to have all but abandoned its role, as Lord
Reith intended :an impartial public-service broadcaster,
educating and enriching the fabric of our changing
society. Instead, it has become a number of
disfunctional and unaccountable fiefdoms,
contemptuous of any criticism with regard to how it
spends public money in competing with the commercial
media in a pointless ratings' war.

The recent appointment from a shortlist of one of 
former Labour cabinet minister, James Purnell, as
head of digital and strategy, underlines the BBC's
admitted left-wing bias. Westminster watchers will
remember that he was responsible for Labour's last
election campaign. His undoubted talents will, no
doubt, be used in attempting to secure victory for Ed
Miliband in 2015.

Mr Purnell's annual salary of £295,000 will come
from the BBC's compulsory levy on over two
thousand licence-fee payers. This does not take into a
ccount a generous, two-year salary pay-off, should he
decide to leave for whatever reason.

As we have seen from other examples, this is only the
tip of the iceberg with the upper echelons of a
self-serving senior management safeguarding its own
interests, not those of the licence-fee paying public, a t
ime of real austerity.