Imagine if the BBC didn
OK, I could have got up earlier, but checking out today’s press, you’d think that Mark Thompson gave two different MacTaggarts. Mind you, given the nature of his speech – let’s have a go at the papers and the Murdoch empire in particular, is not very surprising. Or in the words of an unnamed journalist cited by Thommo…
“It doesn’t matter about the facts, they just want to trash you.”
So, in no particular order what do the papers that matter say?
BBC to cut pay for top presenters says Neil Midgley at the Daily Telegraph, next to Celebrity Sightings in Pics further down the page. The paper goes for the most populist angle, focusing on a promise to “reduce top talent pay a good deal further” with the criticisms of Sky down the bottom of the story. No BBC-Murdoch war here, more of a light skirmish.
Fifty reader comments to this at the time of writing, mostly critical of the Beeb, showing that Telegraph readers know what they think about the Corporation. Here’s Aldman: “Compare BBC £3.6 Billion to CBC $600 million Canadian. This is a ridiculous ammount of money to remove from the real economy. The license fee needs to be reduced by 90%.”
The Telegraph’s leader is particularly interesting, though. The paper notes that the BBC’s ‘eccentric’ funding model “continues to defy gravity” (very true) but that the licence fee will “one day…be swept away by the explosion of choice in the digital marketplace”. Which is a version of the oh lord make me chaste (but not yet) type of argument – or to put it another way, the BBC is sufficiently popular and successful that it is impossible to imagine scrapping it as an institution – however annoying the idea of a telly tax is.
It’s pay cuts or the sack says the Mail Online (no byline here, Paul Revoir only gets a credit in the print edition, p19). The piece follows the same formula as the Telegraph news story, emphasising that Thompson expects further star names to leave with large pix of Jonathan Ross and Christine Bleakley naturally. Again, the piece leaves the Murdoch digs to the end, but the article does note that Thommo jokingly described the Murdochs (who rarely get mentioned in the Mail) as “villans”.
But given the choice between Murdochs and the BBC, the Mail has no hestiation: a Daily Mail leader says the £3.6 billion a year licence fee funded BBC is far, far too big – “In this multi-media age this lavish funding is, quite simply, unsustainable.” No surprise with that verdict though – simple, to the point, and no chance of it being delivered by any politician.
Over at The Guardian, it’s war though, and the liberal newspaper takes the Thompson line. James Robinson does not touch the question of stars pay, and wades in with Thommo’s view that Sky will soon “dwarf” the BBC and its other competitors. This was the key message of the speech, but not one that would necessarily resonate with a mass audience. But its reporting demonstrates now how utterly polarised journalism about the BBC is becoming – and you have to ask if the emerging left-right split is good for the Corporation.
You can see from the reader comments (350 at the last count) that most people sympathise (although Guardian readers are more racuous than the Telegraph types, and a handful comment again and again). Two hundred people recomend the bloke who wrote “When will the British public wake up to the fact that the difference between an ugly gangster and Murdoch is not nearly as much as it should be”. Let the flame wars begin.
Think I’m going to have to do page two on this, because this is already getting quite long, and if you are really keen you’ll boost my traffic count. If there’s no link here, though, that means I haven’t written it yet.
